Singularity t shirt by Lee Frangiamore

Moore's Law, said to have been penned on the back of an envelope by Gordon Moore in 1965, was intended as a predictor of the profitability of micro processor manufacturing plants.  It was based on the rate at which CPU's become obsolete.   The prediction had it that microprocessor plants have a fairly level net operating income.  When the chip is state of the art, early in its life, the profit margin is high.  As production ramps up and the chip becomes mainstream the profit margin falls broadly in proportion to the rising sales leaving the net income pretty steady - the margin drops pretty much as the sales volumes rise. The rate at which CPUs become obsolete and commoditised, is a function of how quickly their technology is refined by market pressure.   Give or take the time within which CPU performance has doubled has been a period of around 2 years since the '60s. Singularity, among other things, the moment computer systems can reproduce themselves without human intervention, was predicted in 2012 to be with us by 2029.  This provided Moore's Law held good for the 8 redoubles from '12-'29. The physical limits of the reduction is size of transistors, the things that give CPUs their functionality, are considered to be upon us - the silicone wafer between the cathode and anode of transistors in the most powerful/smallest CPUs is now around 4 nanometers.  The next step/redouble will likely require a quantum computing breakthrough. Lee's shirt illustrates the accelerating rate of key developments that might deliver singularity, events such as the full mapping of the human genome and the development of quantum computers.