About fifty years ago, the newspapers had acknowledged
the public that in 50 years we would build the marine cities underneath the sea
and migrate to Mars. 50 years have gone, the dreams are still far away from the
reality. On the other hand, the development of the computer science and telecommunication
industry exceeds the folk’s expectations. How does it come?
For about nearly hundreds years, the property of the constructional material and architecture of buildings have not been considerably changed. On the contrary, the clock speed of chips have been improved thousands times , architectures are much more advanced. If we have built the first moon station, the second one will not be much easier than the first ones, for the reason that much building materials have to be transported to moon from the earth. On the contrary, if we have built the first computer, the second one will be produced as the first one easily.
The reason listed above is obvious, and
then we consider the question deeper. In fact, the reasons lay in the control
theory. The semiconductor industry is self-sustaining while the moon station is hard to maintain self-sustaining. This is to say, the high speed computer would contribute to the designing and manufacturing of powerful chips while bigger moon station will only consume more supply and power. The computer industry, from the hardware to the software, has formed a
closed circle system, while building the the seafloor city and moon station is a open circle system. The output of closed circle system with positive feedback is exponential function
of the time, which is just as Moore's law. The exponential
function owns many advantages comparing with linear or quadratic function, which is probably represented
by the moon station construction. The computer world is nearly an autonomous
world as it can develop itself starting with only a little material input, which is the
silicon and manufacture pipelines. Despite of technology subsystem of computer industry, the finance subsystem of computer industry is also a closed
circle. Computer
technologies have improved almost every industries and every people, the industries and people contribute continually cash flow to this industry in return. Huge market demand promotes semiconductor manufacturers to produce more
powerful and more energy-saving chips.
Then we raise the question, which
industry will be the next autonomous industry in the future? My answer is the artificial
intelligence area. The soul of the AI is to let it be an autonomous system. It
learns from the books and internet and synthesizes the knowledge;
afterwards it will utilize the knowledge to solve our problems. This will be a more closed system with positive feedback than the semiconductor industry.
