<
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n06/john-lanchester/putting-the-silicon-in-silicon-valley>
"Picture the following age-old scene: a writer sitting at a kitchen table,
pretending to work. Set it forty years ago. The Conservatives are in power and
everything is broken, but our subject is the writer’s stuff. On the table is a
typewriter; to one side is a radio, to another is a phone; also in the room are
a fridge, an oven, a hob, a toaster, a set of car keys and a vacuum cleaner.
Now fast-forward to the same scene forty years later. The Conservatives are in
power again and everything is broken again; the room (and perhaps the writer)
is a little shinier, but the stuff in the room is more or less the same. At
least, it serves the same functions, if you swap laptop for typewriter, mobile
for landline, Dyson for Hoover.
One big thing, however, is different. In 1983, that kitchen contained just a
handful of transistors, all of which lived in the – there’s a clue in the name
– transistor radio. In 2023, every item on that list of domestic objects uses
microchips which are each made up of thousands, millions, billions of
transistors. Ovens, fridges, vacuums, car keys, radios, speakers: all of them
now contain microchips. An ordinary car contains dozens of them. A posh car
contains a thousand. And those are just the standard consumer items of the
mid-20th century. As for the things we think of as being this century’s new
technology, they are some of the most complicated and beautiful artefacts
humanity has ever made, mainly because of the chips they contain. The writer’s
phone is an iPhone 12, which uses a chip for the modem, a chip to control
Bluetooth, a chip to detect motion and orientation, a chip for image sensing,
chips for wireless charging and battery management and audio, and a couple of
memory chips. All of these are bought by Apple from other companies, and all
are simple beasts compared to the principal logic chip in that phone, Apple’s
own-designed A14, which contains 11,800,000,000 transistors. The writer’s
laptop, a MacBook Air, uses another ‘system on a chip’, Apple’s M2. That single
chip contains 20,000,000,000 transistors. The laptop contains so many
transistors that if the writer travelled back in time to 1983, he could give
every single person on the planet a transistor radio and still have a billion
of them left over."
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-global-malaria-lgbtq-warriors-river-albania/>
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
