to their own computer from another user who had the desired songs. Then another user could copy it to their computer, and so on. By the time the recording industry sued to shut down Napster and similar services, the genie – and much of the music – were out of the bottle. Without the widespread adoption of the MP3 digital file format and the development of successful peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing technology, music piracy would not have been as simple and easy to accomplish.
The legal system and related government legislation are almost universally reactive to technological innovation. Digital technology industries are developing innovations at speeds linked to Moore’s law, and the legal system struggles unsuccessfully to keep pace. Despite court decisions that shut down Napster (until it adopted a fee-for-music model) and similar P2P services, global music industry sales declined to $10 billion by 2008, from a peak of $14.5 billion in 1999.18
However, what technology taketh away, it can restore. By 2018, the global music industry revenue had recovered to an all-time high of $19.1 billion. The savior was digital streaming technology, the source of $11.2 billion of that revenue, up 21 percent from 2017.19 The advent of smart speakers operating from internet cloud-based services such as Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home services (along with their AI-driven virtual servants Alexa and Google Assistant) made it possible to simply verbally request the music you would like to hear. Why buy CDs if you can listen to thousands of diverse artists and genres in the home or workplace as a bonus with an annual fee-based service such as Amazon Prime? As Friedman noted above, capabilities create intentions.
The Social Construction of Technology
A key theoretical focus in the field of technology and science studies is the Social Construction of Technology (with the obligatory technology acronym of SCOT). Despite the technology-driven patterns in IC manufacturing and music distribution cited earlier, there are problems with the perspective that technology itself determines adoption. SCOT proponents are concerned with adopting a reductionist worldview that a society’s technology determines its cultural values, social structure, or history. Many social scientists and SCOT theorists would argue that the determinism arrow should flow in the opposite direction – that cultural values, social structures, economics, and history determine which technologies are created and adopted in a society.
In the SCOT-focused perspective, social constructivists such as Pinch and Bijker argue that technology adoption in a society is affected by a Principle of Symmetry where explanations for an innovation’s failure or success should equally weigh influential factors such as economics, cultural values, and government regulation.20 Despite its technological advantages over AM radio, FM was slow to diffuse in the United States in the 1940s due to efforts by some AM broadcasters and radio manufacturers with economic incentives to promote government regulation that inhibited it. A related area of study is Actor-Network Theory (ANT) that seeks to understand how the roles played by multiple individuals or agencies (the “actors”) influence technology adoption or rejection in a discrete environment or network.21
Technologies are not created in a social vacuum – television pioneers Philo T. Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin did much of their research prior to 1940, but television’s widespread diffusion was delayed until after World War II, as electronics research between 1938 and 1945 focused on radar and sonar technologies used for military applications. A related complication in analysis arises from the unintended consequences of the use of the new tool, product, or service. Few engineers could foresee in the 1980s that putting mobile phones in the hands of drivers would lead to thousands of related auto accidents and deaths in the future. The irony is that, short of the unlikely near-term development of time travel, we cannot know what these unforeseen consequences might be. Nanotechnology, one of the key innovations that are facilitating the creation of ever more powerful CPUs on a chip, has raised questions about its safety when combined with dramatic advances in genetic engineering and biotechnology.22 We will analyze these concerns in Chapter 15 on the future of the digital universe.
The Future of Moore’s Law
What is the future of Moore’s law? How much longer can it be sustained in the face of the fundamental laws of physics? Many computer engineers and scientists have predicted the imminent death of Moore’s law over the past 20 years, stating that there are fundamental physical limitations to how many circuits can be compressed on a chip before current leakage (and related heat build-up) cause it to fail to function as designed. The number of articles claiming that Moore’s law is “dead” increased to a crescendo after Intel encountered problems making its 10 nm chips work in 2018. Mike Muller, the CTO for competing chip maker Arm in Japan, said that same year, “Moore’s law is dead, Moore’s law is over.”23 Even Intel revised its take on the law in 2019, stating that the doubling interval had been extended from two years to two and a half years.24 Gordon Moore acknowledged these limitations in 2005:
In terms of size [of transistor] you can see that we’re approaching the size of atoms which is a fundamental barrier, but it’ll be two or three generations before we get that far – but that’s as far out as we’ve ever been able to see. We have another 10 to 20 years (from 2015 to 2025) before we reach a fundamental limit. By then they’ll be able to make bigger chips and have transistor budgets in the billions.25
The development of nanotechnology has extended the life of Moore’s law by developing methods for the creation of ever-smaller circuits. Nanotechnology is the design and production of devices (and systems) at a scale that strains human comprehension. Dimensions are measured in nanometers (nm) – five atoms of silicon equal one nanometer. At this scale, a human hair is about 70,000 to 80,000 nanometers in width. The National Nanotechnology Initiative in the United States defines it as follows: “Nanotechnology is the understanding and control of matter at dimensions of roughly 1 to 100 nanometers, where unique phenomena enable novel applications.”26
Manufacturers at TSMC in Taiwan, Intel and Apple in the United States, Arm in Japan, and Samsung in Korea have extended Moore’s law by developing new CPU and GPU (graphics) chips with 5 nm and even 3 nm architectures.27 These are circuit tolerances that nay-sayers said in the 2010s could never be achieved due to heat build-up. They are using new chip manufacturing technologies such as using 3D chip stacking and extreme ultraviolet light (EUV) to etch the extremely narrow circuits that make these new designs feasible.
These innovative manufacturing methods are part of a triad of technologies that may extend the life of Moore’s law past 2030 in terms of processing power and functionality. An expert said these new approaches to multifunction chip design will be “more than Moore.”28 The three areas that may prolong the doubling of chip processing power and storage capacity are:
Devices will move beyond silicon. Traditional CMOS (Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor) chips will be augmented with specialized processors that utilize elements such as Germanium and Gallium that are adjacent to Copper and Nickel on the periodic table. Designers are also creating new types of processors that could use evolving technologies such as photonic integrated circuits (PICs) that utilize wavelengths of visible and infrared light – and spintronics (spin transport electronics) chips that function at the subatomic electron level in processing and storing information.
The development of 3D chips that have multi-layers of processors and storage. Global chip makers are taking advantage of new materials outlined above and new manufacturing processes to stack layers of specialized circuits (much like a very complex club sandwich) to increase processing and storage capabilities, while simultaneously reducing power demands and related heat loads.
Computer users (and our mobile devices) will use a variety of specialized chips. Intel and other manufacturers are creating new designs with interconnected “chiplets” packaged on a larger device that include distinct multicore
