Contrapunctus: connect the dots

coun·ter·point

• A contrasting but parallel element, item, or theme, as in music.

I picked up the latest Economist and the cover story is titled, ‘After Moore’s Law’. A self-fulfilling prophecy more than a law, Moore’s Law has sustained for 44 years before being declared dead. Computing power in a chip did more than double every two years since it was expounded back in 1971. After having fitted silicon chips with a few billion transistors, new ‘fabs’ or chip fabrication facilities have stopped making economic sense to manufacturers. What’s important now is to use the available computing power more efficiently instead of attempting to increase the computing power in a chip, as has been done until now. A comment by a lead technologist in the context struck a powerful note. In that the aspiration for chipmakers is to get closer to biology, in terms of design and efficiency. That’s powerful I thought, coming at the back of two completely unrelated events.

The first was the recent LIGO experiment vindicating Einstein’s theory of relativity by proving the existence of gravitational waves in space time after more than a hundred years. Interstellar doesn’t seem like a far removed possibility woven in a ‘science fiction’ after all.

The second was Google’s DeepMind AlphaGo’s recent decisive third game win over the best player of ‘Go’, a game with more than a billion permutations. Artificial Intelligence was not supposed to crack this game until 2030 according to most predictions until this happened. Lee-Sedol, the human champion had won the second, making AlphaGo learn his trade and strike back?

What am I getting at?

Only that we are sitting at a very profound inflection point, the full import of which will only reveal itself over the next decade or two. I’d love to be around to travel in hyperloop and be driven around by a car as I am sure most of us will.

The keynote speaker at the recently concluded Mercer Global Investment Forum, Professor Sarah Harper from the Oxford Institute of Ageing said something very interesting in yet another serendipitously connected dot. She said that the current cohort of children born in Europe (or places with similar quality of living, I’d imagine…like Singapore) are likely to live well above a hundred years.

So does that imply that retirement age will push upwards of 80 at some point in my lifetime?

And that formal education would imply receiving the necessary upload or transmission digitally rather than physically acquiring knowledge through tenacious efforts at reading?

And that my skills will be digitally transferable whether I wish to transfer them or not?

As one of my all-time favorite taglines from Emirates goes, ‘Keep Discovering!’, even if they are more questions than answers at this point. ‘Tis time for a coffee.

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