Falling Research Productivity Revisited

Last year, in Falling Research Productivity, I commented on Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? by Nicholas Bloom et al. Now, The Economist's current issue has a Free Exchange column entitled How to get more innovation bang for the research buck that takes off from the same paper:

In a paper by Nicholas Bloom, Charles Jones and Michael Webb of Stanford University, and John Van Reenen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the authors note that even as discovery has disappointed, real investment in new ideas has grown by more than 4% per year since the 1930s. Digging into particular targets of research—to increase computer processing power, crop yields and life expectancy—they find that in each case maintaining the pace of innovation takes ever more money and people.

Follow me below the fold for some commentary on a number of the other papers they cite.

It Isn't Just Cryptocurrency Mining

Izabella Kaminska's Just because it's digital doesn't mean it's green reports on:

A new report by the carbon emission think-tank The Shift Project out this week highlights that not much has changed since [2014]. ICT still contributes to about 4 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, which is still twice that of civil aviation. What is worse, its contribution is growing more quickly than that of civil aviation.

Cryptocurrency mining is definitely a problem, but how big a part of the problem isn't clear. It could be quite big. Follow me below the fold for some surprising details.

Longer talk at MSST2018

I was invited to give both a longer and a shorter talk at the 34^th International Conference on Massive Storage Systems and Technology at Santa Clara University. Below the fold is the text with links to the sources of the longer talk, which was updated from and entitled The Medium-Term Prospects for Long-Term Storage Systems.

End of Moore's Law

Richard Chirgwin at The Register reports that the Semiconductor Industry Association has issued their roadmap for chip technology, the ITRS:

The group suggests that the industry is approaching a point where economics, rather than physics, becomes the Moore's Law roadblock. The further below 10 nanometres transistors go, the harder it is to make them economically. That will put a post-2020 premium on stacking transistors in three dimensions without gathering too much heat for them to survive.

This is about logic, such as CPUs, but it is related to the issues that have forced flash memories to use 3D.

Energy demand of computing

There are other problems than the difficulty of making transistors smaller:

The biggest is electricity. The world's computing infrastructure already uses a significant slice of the world's power, and the ITRS says the current trajectory is self-limiting: by 2040, ... computing will need more electricity than the world can produce.

So we're looking at limits both on the affordability of the amounts of data that can be stored and the computations that can be performed on it.

The ITRS points to the wide range of different applications that the computations will be needed for, and the resulting:

research areas a confab of industry, government and academia see as critical: cyber-physical systems; intelligent storage; realtime communication; multi-level and scalable security; manufacturing; “insight” computing; and the Internet of Things.

We can see the end of the era of data and computation abundance. Dealing with an era of constrained resources will be very different.In particular, enthusiasm for blockchain technology as A Solution To Everything will need to be tempered by its voracious demand for energy. An estimate of the 2020 energy demand of the bitcoin blockchain alone ranges from optimistically the output of a major power station to pessimistically the output of Denmark. Deploying technologies that, like blockchains, deliberately waste vast amounts of computation will no longer be economically feasible.