Editorial: The “Consumer Electronics” fallacy

As someone who as been around computers for a long time now, its tough to refocus your expectations of technological advancement when it comes to other, slower, industries that aren’t doubling their performance or capacity every 18-24 months. I look around and see a lot of enthusiasm for companies that are advancing technology, but its not going to go anywhere near as fast as they expect.

The consumer electronics industry is one now driving by computers and microchips, which follows “Moore’s Law”. This law states that the number of transistors (the most basic building blocks of a microchip) doubles every 18 (now 24) months because of advances in technology. For consumers, this means the performance of your computer should double as well. Lately we’ve seen this in dual and quad core CPUs. Bluray players are getting cheaper as manufacturing ramps up, as well as the ability of your cell phone. Slowly but surely, waves of new technologies are infiltrating the consumer electronics sector.

However there is a distinct danger to extending this same law to other industries. Mostly because they cant keep up. I see posts on boards about emerging technologies about how we’ll have batteries the size of a 12V car battery that will take us 300 miles by 2020 and will be dirt cheap. Guess what, it wont happen. To say that’s unrealistic is an understatement, it likely wouldn’t happen for a good 30-50 years. They aren’t completely to blame, there are plenty of researchers out there who are happy to hype technologies, take investor money, promise results in three to five years, and never end up delivering because they couldn’t get it from a lab to manufacturing.

Technology progress is sometimes slow and frustrating. We first went into space in the early 60s, then got to the moon in 1969, over 40 years ago. But today we don’t have flying cars, we haven’t got to Mars, and we’re actually struggling to keep our presence in low earth orbit. We haven’t made a significant reduction in pounds-to-orbit (either LEO or GTO) costs since the mid 1990s when commercial launches started getting competition from China and Russia.

So I approach these big “curve busters” very carefully – extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Sometimes the claims come with disclaimers, where a technology might only work in certain conditions, which is fine if they’re up front about it. But there is no such thing as a free lunch, you aren’t going to get 10 times the performance of a current technology by spreading fairy dust (usually carbon nanotubes) on an existing technology. If it takes another 10 years for batteries to get good enough and cheap enough to allow mass production of plug-in hybrids that can go for miles before you use a drop of gas, then that’s how long it will take.