After Moore's Law: Where Tech Progress Is Actually Heading

Remember when every new phone or laptop felt like a massive leap? That feeling is gone. Moore’s Law—the promise of doubling chip power every two years—is running out of steam.

The easy hardware wins are behind us. Progress is shifting into new territory.

Near-term

AI as infrastructure. Less about novelty apps, more like electricity—powering software that writes and debugs itself.

Energy upgrades. Better batteries, smarter grids, and small reactors to meet AI’s hunger for power.

Trust layers. Provenance, watermarks, governance so we can trust what AI generates.

Middle horizon

Human-computer interfaces. AR for surgeons and engineers, advanced prosthetics, even brain-computer links.

Autonomous logistics. Supply chains, fleets, and warehouses run by agents optimizing in real time.

Long bets

New computing models. Quantum and photonics—leaps that would make today’s supercomputers look like calculators.

Biotech at scale. CRISPR therapies as routine medicine, lab-grown food that tastes right and scales.

The orchard isn’t empty. The low-hanging fruit is gone, but higher up are breakthroughs that will reset the entire landscape.

I keep coming back to the trust layer piece. As AI generates more of what we consume—code, content, decisions—the infrastructure for verifying provenance and authenticity becomes critical. That’s the area I’m watching most closely, anyway.