Posts Tagged ‘Gordon Moore’
“We have the best government that money can buy”*…
Most Americans agree that the prevalence of big money in politics is a problem. But sometimes it can be hard to see the (tallest) trees for the forest. The estimable Molly White…
Did you know that the cryptocurrency industry has spent more on 2024 elections in the United States than the oil industry? More than the pharmaceutical industry?
In fact, the cryptocurrency industry has spent more on 2024 elections than [either] the entire energy sector [or] the entire health sector. Those industries, both worth hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars, are being outspent by an industry that, even by generous estimates, is worth less than $20 billion.**
Most of the cryptocurrency industry’s money is going to massive super PACs like Fairshake — that is, single-issue committees focused only on installing crypto-friendly politicians and ousting those the industry views as a threat.
Although these PACs have spent only a fraction of the more than $200 million in their combined war chests, they’re already finding some success. Democratic California Senate candidate Katie Porter lost her primary race after Fairshake spent $10 million on attack ads against her. In New York, Fairshake piled on $2 million to oppose Democratic House Candidate Jamaal Bowman, who ultimately lost his primary race. $1.5 million from the Republican-focused blockchain super PAC, Defend American Jobs, helped Republican Jim Justice win his West Virginia Senate primary. $1.7 million from the Democrat-focused blockchain super PAC, Protect Progress, similarly aided Shomari Figures in winning his Alabama House primary.
Although election spending information is public, it can be incredibly time- and labor-intensive to comb through. The crypto industry isn’t helping to make things clearer, either, with innocuously-named PACs like “Fairshake” that obscure the goals of these committees. Although the industry likes to claim that crypto is a major election issue with grassroots support, advertisements run by these committees rarely mention cryptocurrency or blockchains at all, or even technology or finance more broadly. And some of these PACs funnel money through surrogate committees, obscuring the origins of some of the more heavily partisan spending.
Furthermore, the wealthy executives and venture capitalists associated with the industry are spending heavily as individuals, without going through these PACs or spending through their companies. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss — founders of the Gemini cryptocurrency exchange — each donated $1 million each to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. They were followed soon after by Jesse Powell, chairman of the Kraken cryptocurrency exchange, who pitched in another million…
** Unlike most other industries, people really like to estimate the “size” of the cryptocurrency industry by the total market cap of all cryptocurrencies (a notoriously inaccurate number). Estimates based on traditional metrics vary widely from low single-digit billions to around $20 billion, although the higher numbers are typically projections rather than historical data.
The biggest big corporate money on politics– how the cryptocurrency industry is spending to influence 2024 elections in the United States: “Follow the Crypto,” from @molly0xFFF.
You can, in fact, “follow the crypto” on White’s new site, which tracks contributions to cryptocurrency-focused super PACs like Fairshake, Defend American Jobs, and Protect Progress. As White observes:
Despite how much these PACs have already raised, the cryptocurrency industry is only ramping up their spending as elections draw nearer, and most of the money held by these PACs is still waiting to be deployed. 50% of the funds in Fairshake’s coffers — $85 million — was raised in May alone, and that’s the last month with complete data. These companies show no sign of slowing down. With this site, we will be able to follow how these industries are working to buy influence across the country…
* Mark Twain
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As we ponder the purchase of the plebiscite, we might recall that it was on this date in 1968 that a major contributor to the technostructure supporting crypto was born when Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore incorporated Intel with $2.5 million in capital. The semiconductor company became the emergent industry’s leader, before relinquishing that title (currently held by TSMC); still, the company is currently valued at $131.32 billion.
“The number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years”*…
Moore’s Law has held up almost astoundingly well…
This seemingly inexorable march has enabled an extraordinary range of new products and services– from intercontinental ballistic missiles to global environmental monitoring systems and from smart phones to medical implants… But researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are sounding an alarm…
The speed of our technology doubles every year, right? Not anymore. We’ve come to take for granted that as the years go on, computing technology gets faster, cheaper and more energy-efficient.
In their recent paper, “Science and research policy at the end of Moore’s law” published in Nature Electronics, however, Carnegie Mellon University researchers Hassan Khan, David Hounshell, and Erica Fuchs argue that future advancement in microprocessors faces new and unprecedented challenges…
In the seven decades following the invention of the transistor at Bell Labs, warnings about impending limits to miniaturization and the corresponding slow down of Moore’s Law have come regularly from industry observers and academic researchers. Despite these warnings, semiconductor technology continually progressed along the Moore’s Law trajectory. Khan, Hounshell, and Fuchs’ archival work and oral histories, however, make clear that times are changing.
“The current technological and structural challenges facing the industry are unprecedented and undermine the incentives for continued collective action in research and development,” the authors state in the paper, “which has underpinned the last 50 years of transformational worldwide economic growth and social advance.”
As the authors explain in their paper, progress in semiconductor technology is undergoing a seismic shift driven by changes in the underlying technology and product-end markets…
To continue advancing general purpose computing capabilities at reduced cost with economy-wide benefits will likely require entirely new semiconductor process and device technology.” explains Engineering and Public Policy graduate Hassan Khan. “The underlying science for this technology is as of yet unknown, and will require significant research funds – an order of magnitude more than is being invested today.”
The authors conclude by arguing that the lack of private incentives creates a case for greatly increased public funding and the need for leadership beyond traditional stakeholders. They suggest that funding is needed of $600 million dollars per year with 90% of those funds from public research dollars, and the rest most likely from defense agencies…
Read the complete summary at “Moore’s law has ended. What comes next?“; read the complete Nature article here.
* a paraphrase of Gordon’s Moore’s assertion– known as “Moore’s law”– in the thirty-fifth anniversary issue of Electronics magazine, published on April 19, 1965
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As we pack ’em ever tighter, we might send carefully-computed birthday greetings to Thomas John Watson Sr.; he was born on this date in 1874. A mentee of from John Henry Patterson’s at NCR, where Watson began his career, Watson became the chairman and CEO of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), which, in 1924, he renamed International Business Machines– IBM. He began using his famous motto– THINK– while still at NCR, but carried it with him to IBM… where it became that corporation’s first trademark (in 1935). That motto was the inspiration for the naming of the Thinkpad– and Watson himself (along with Sherlock’s Holmes’ trusty companion), for the naming of IBM’s Artificial Intelligence product.
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