The power of Moore’s law: Predicting the future | Michio Kaku

One way to predict the future is to look at Moore's law. Moore's Law says that computer power doubles every 18 months. So if you put it on a chart, you can actually see where certain technologies kicked in and where people were ahead of the game or behind the eight ball and lost out, by simply looking at Moore's law.

For example, look at IBM. IBM was king of the heap back in the 1950s. But if you look at Moore's law, you would basically see that supercomputers would be replaced by cell phones. Your cell phone today has more computer power than all of NASA in 1969, when they put two men on the moon. That's the power of Moore's law.

And sure enough, what happened to all the gigantic computers of IBM? They're museum pieces because they didn't see the future. What rose up in the ashes? Microsoft. Microsoft saw that, yes, Moore's law is going to take us into the realm of personal computers. But even they almost missed the boat.

You realize that Bill Gates wrote a bestselling book, The Road Ahead. He was predicting the future. But if you read the book very carefully, you realize there's something missing in that book. And that is the internet. He was predicting a world where we would all have standalone computers, computers that just stood by themselves, but were very powerful. What are those kinds of computers called? They're called museum pieces.

Nobody, nobody has computers today that are not connected to the internet. And so Microsoft almost blew it because they failed to see the coming of the next entry in Moore's law, the coming of small computers that you could put in a cell phone. And they're connected by the internet.

And now, of course, we have yet another revolution coming, and again, Microsoft is playing catch-up to that. And we're talking about 5G technology, where everything is wired up. And it's just not in a cell phone. It's basically everywhere, and it's hooked up to artificial intelligence.

So seeing the feature is actually not so hard. By looking at Moore's law, you could see then we would go from the era of mainframes, to the era of PCs, to the era of the internet, to the era of cell phone five technologies, and next, artificial intelligence.

It don't take a great genius to see that. But so many companies ignore it and think, we're number one. Well, yeah, you're number one temporarily because Moore's law allowed you to become a surfer riding the surf of Moore's law. But when that surf crests, and the next wave comes, unless you can see the future, you go bankrupt.