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That Moore's law was more or less consciously adopted as a performance goal by the chip-design industry goes a long way toward explaining the otherwise improbable fact that it still has some predictive utility after some forty years. Compare, for example, the original microprocessor, Intel's 1971 4004, to a 2004 version of the same company's Pentium 4 chip: the 4004 packed 2,300 transistors and ran at a clock speed of 740 KHz, while the Pentium 4 boasts a transistor count of 178 million and runs at 3.4 GHz. That's not so far off the numbers called for by a 24-month doubling curve.

In a purely technodeterminist reading, anyway, Moore's law tells us exactly where we're headed next. It's true that Gordon Moore made his observation in the long-ago of 1965, and so one might be forgiven for thinking that his "law" had little left to tell us. But as far as anyone knowledgeable can tell, its limits are a long way off. A vocal minority continues to assert the belief that even after the photolithography used in chip fabrication hits the limits inherent in matter, more exotic methods will allow the extension of Moore's unprecedented run. Whether or not Moore's law can be extended indefinitely, there is sufficient reason to believe that information-processing componentry will keep getting smaller, cheaper, and more powerful for some time yet to come.

Because processors will be so ridiculously cheap, the world can be seeded with them economically. Because their cheapness will mean their disposability, they'll be installed in places it wouldn't have made sense to put them before—light switches, sneakers, milk cartons. There will be so very, very many of them, thousands of them devoted to every person and place, and it won't really matter whether some percentage of them fail. They will be both powerful individually, and able to share computation among themselves besides, and able to parse the complexities presented by problems of everyday life. Whatever name it is called by, however little it may resemble the calm technology envisioned by Mark Weiser, a computing with these properties will effectively be ubiquitous, in any meaningful sense of the word.

Thesis 33

The appeal of everyware is at some level universal.

Be honest now: Who among us has not wished, from time to time, for some powerful sympathetic agency to intervene in our lives, to fix our mistakes and rescue us from the consequences of our lapses in judgment?

This is one desire I sense, beneath all the various projects devoted to ubiquitous surveillance or memory augmentation or encalming. What are they if not dreams of welcome and safety, of some cushion against the buffeting of our times? What are they if not a promise of some awareness in the world other than our own, infused into everything around us, capable of autonomous action and dedicated to our well-being?

In a sense this is only a return to a much older tradition. For most of our sojourn on this planet, human beings have understood the physical world as a place intensely invested with consciousness and agency; the idea that the world is alive, that the objects therein are sentient and can be transacted with, is old and deep and so common to all the cultures of humanity that it may as well be called universal.

As Freud described it, "the world was full of spirits...and all the objects in the external world were their dwelling-place, or perhaps identical with them." It is only comparatively recently that most people have believed otherwise—indeed, most of the humans who ever walked the planet would have found it utter folly to conceive of the natural world as mainstream Western culture did until very recently: a passive, inert, purely material stage, on which the only meaningful actors are human ones.

If we have always acted as though the things around us are alive, then the will to make it so in fact (or at least make it seem so) at the moment the technical wherewithal became available is understandable. That things like gestural and voice-recognition interfaces are so fervently pursued despite the