Tech Progress Is Slowing Down - WSJ - The Wall Street Journal

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Feb. 16, 2023 9:58 am ET

Nothing has affected, and warped, modern thinking about the pace of technological invention more than the rapid exponential advances of solid-state electronics. The conviction that we have left the age of gradual growth behind began with our ability to crowd ever more components onto a silicon wafer, a process captured by Gordon Moore’s now-famous law that initially ordained a doubling every 18 months, later adjusted to about two years. By 2020, microchips had more than 10 million times as many components as the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004, released in 1971.

Moore’s law was the foundation for the rapid rise of businesses based on electronic data processing, from PayPal to Amazon to Facebook. It made it possible to go in a lifetime from bulky landline phones to palm-size smartphones. These gains are widely seen today as harbingers of similarly impressive gains in other realms, such as solar cells, batteries, electric cars and even urban farming.

“Exponential growth has not taken place in the fundamental economic activities on which modern civilization depends for its survival.”

Bestselling tech prophets like Ray Kurzweil and Yuval Noah Harari argue that exponential growth will allow us to disrupt our way into a future devoid of disease and misery and abounding in material riches. In the words of investor Azeem Azhar, creator of the popular newsletter Exponential View, “We are entering an age of abundance. The first period in human history in which energy, food, computation and much else will be trivially cheap to produce.”

The problem is that the post-1970 ascent of electronic architecture and performance has no counterpart in other aspects of our lives. Exponential growth has not taken place in the fundamental economic activities on which modern civilization depends for its survival—agriculture, energy production, transportation and large engineering projects. Nor do we see rapid improvements in areas that directly affect health and quality of life, such as new drug discoveries and gains in longevity.

To satisfy Moore’s law, microchip capacity has increased about 35% annually since 1970, with higher rates in the early years. In contrast, during the first two decades of the 21st century, Asian rice harvests increased by 1% a year, and yields of sorghum, sub-Saharan Africa’s staple grain, went up by only about 0.8% a year. Since 1960, the average per capita GDP of sub-Saharan Africa has grown no more than 0.7% annually.

Growth rates in productive capacity have been similarly restrained. Most of the world’s electricity is generated by large steam turbines whose efficiency improved by about 1.5% a year over the past 100 years. We keep making steel more efficiently, but the annual decline in energy use in the metal’s production averaged less than 2% during the past 70 years. In 1900 the best battery had an energy density of 25 watt-hours per kilogram; in 2022 the best lithium-ion batteries deployed on a large commercial scale had an energy density 12 times higher, corresponding to growth of just 2% a year.

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The impressively declining cost of solar photovoltaic cells (PVs) has raised expectations that we are approaching a breakthrough in solar electricity generation. If the cost of PVs were the only determinant of the actual cost of power generation, solar generation would soon be too cheap to meter. In reality, detailed U.S. data for residential PV systems show that the cost of the solar panels is now only about 15% of the total investment. The rest is needed to cover structural and electrical components, labor, permitting and inspection, and taxes.

None of those components is tending to zero, and hence the overall cost of solar power—measured in dollars per watt of direct current delivered—shows a distinctly declining rate of improvement. Between 2010 and 2015 it fell by 55%, between 2015 and 2020 by just 20%. Even as the costs of renewable electricity generation have been plummeting, the three EU countries with the highest share of energy from wind and solar—Denmark, Ireland and Germany—have the continent’s highest electricity prices.

The conclusion that progress is not accelerating in the most fundamental human activities is supported by a paper published in 2020 by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The authors, four American economists led by Bryan Kelly of the Yale School of Management, studied innovation across American industries from 1840 to 2010, using textual analysis of patent documents to construct indexes of long-term change. They found that the wave of breakthrough patents in furniture, textiles, apparel, transportation, metal, wood, paper, printing and construction all peaked before 1900. Mining, coal, petroleum, electrical equipment, rubber and plastics had their innovative peaks before 1950. The only industrial sectors with post-1970 peaks have been agriculture (dominated by genetically modified organisms), medical equipment and, of course, computers and electronics.

Even the rapid exponential growth of many microprocessor-enabled activities has already entered a more moderate expansion stage. Printing with ever-shorter wavelengths of light made it possible to crowd in larger numbers of thinner transistors on a microchip. The process began with transistors 80 micrometers wide; in 2021 IBM announced the world’s first 2-nanometer chip, to be produced as early as 2024. Because the size of a silicon atom is about 0.2 nanometers, a 2-nanometer connection would be just 10 atoms wide, so the physical limit of this 50-year-old reduction process is in sight.

Between 1993 (Pentium) and 2013 (the AMD 608), the highest single-processor transistor count went from 3.1 million to 105.9 million, a bit higher than prescribed by Moore’s law. But since then, progress has slowed. In 2008 the Xeon had 1.9 billion transistors, and a decade later the GC2 packed in 23.6 billion, whereas a doubling every two years should have brought the total to about 60 billion. As a result, the growth of the best processor performance has slowed from 52% a year between 1986 and 2003, to 23% a year between 2003 and 2011, to less than 4% between 2015 and 2018. For computers, as for every other technology before, the period of rapid exponential growth will soon become history.

—Dr. Smil is a professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Manitoba. This essay is adapted from his new book, “Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure,” published this week by MIT Press.

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