It may not be an actual law of nature, but a bold statement made decades ago has predicted the dizzying advance of technology. Now it is about to falter. The business that powers everything around us from cars to smartphones to our utilities faces a reckoning.
In the early days of semiconductor technology, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore posited that the number of components on an integrated circuit would double every year. The 1965 prediction, now known as Moore’s Law, was later revised to the doubling of the number of transistors roughly every two years. Progress has marched on for decades as the chip industry has cranked out once-unimaginable devices and then consistently one-upped itself.
