下一个科技热点在哪里？

    但到了2005年的时候，也就是大约到了每块指甲大的新型芯片可以集成多达10亿个晶体管的时候，一切都变了。摩尔定律带来的量变的积累，使这条曲线陡然出现了几乎垂直的增长，方向是正无穷，也就是每块芯片集成几千亿个晶体管。换句话说，摩尔定律为科技界带来了跳跃式发展，每年的发展速度都超过了自从硅谷诞生以来所有年头的总和。

    我们已经隐约地意识到了这一点。比如Facebook等企业的“指数级”崛起——Facebook是人类历史上第一项超过10亿名常规用户的服务型产品。此外还有Twitter等。另外你也可以看看智能手机、智能平板电脑和云服务的使用曲线，尤其是云服务基本上使我们实现了无限存储、随时随地存储和免费存储的能力。所有这些颠覆式的新产品和新技术，都是在过去短短8年之内井喷出来的。

    下一步有什么在等着我们？首先是大数据以及已经拥有500年历史的抽样统计学的潜力将被充分挖掘。很快我们将有能力监测我们的每一次心跳，追踪海里的每一条鱼，地球上的每一阵风。未来几十年里，我们对自然界的了解，将超过人类有史以来的总和。随着全球几十亿台设备实现了交流互联，我们很快也将成为所谓“物联网”的一分子，而物联网的贡献，有可能要比以人为核心的“互联网”大1000倍。

    摩尔定律的另一个潜在的应用领域是纳米技术革命，此外还有移动健康和医学等领域。未来人体的每一项功能、每一秒钟的人体指标都会被实时监测，纳米级的“猎人”传感器将游弋在我们的血液中，替我们杀死癌细胞或其它疾病。

    沿着摩尔定律的曲线，未来动漫和现实之间的界限也会渐渐消失。建模作为一项技术也将成为我们日常生活中的重要部分，无论是产品、我们眼中的世界甚至是我们的生活都可以进行建模。它可能首先会从虚拟性爱开始，因为科技的发展总是首先从性开始。

    然后呢？如果你相信雷•库茨维尔的论断，摩尔曲线会呈垂直发展态势，我们的大脑可以被扫描进电脑，然后在虚拟世界永远地活下去。如果你相信马尔科姆•格拉威德尔的预言，那么这条曲线最终会递减直至消失。

    无论哪种情形，都要等到几十年后才会发生。这意味着只要英特尔和其他芯片公司能持续发展下去，摩尔定律将成为影响我们余生的“大曲线”。最近英特尔和IBM又发布了一项革命性的新型芯片晶体管工艺，这意味着事情向乐观趋势发展的可能性将非常之大。

    虽然硅谷还没准备好迎接这种新的发展速度。但不管你是否已经准备好了，未来都在马不停蹄地到来……而且速度比以往任何时候更快。

    本文作者迈克尔•S•马龙是一名经验丰富的硅谷记者、作家，也是哈伯柯林斯出版社出版的《英特尔三杰：罗伯特•诺伊斯、戈登•摩尔、安迪•格鲁夫如何创立全球最重要的公司》一书的作者。（财富中文网）

    译者：朴成奎

    But then, about 2005, roughly the time the newest chips reached 1 billion transistors on their little squares of silicon, everything changed. Suddenly the great accumulating leaps caused by the biannual doubling of Moore’s Law began to turn the curve nearly straight up, heading toward infinity – and tens of billions of transistors on each chip. In other words, Moore’s Law is now jumping the tech world forward each year more than the sum of all that has been accomplished since the birth of Silicon Valley.

    We already have glimmerings. Look at the rise of ‘exponential’ corporations like Facebook FB – the first service product in human history to reach 1 billion regular users – and Twitter TWTR -1.50% . Look as well at the usage curves of the smartphone, the smart tablet, and the Cloud, the last of which essentially makes memory infinite, ubiquitous and free. All of these earthshaking new products and technologies have exploded on the scene in the last 8 years.

    What’s waiting in the wings? The full promise of Big Data – and the end of the 500-year age of sampling and statistics. Soon we’ll be tracking every one of our heartbeats, every fish in the sea and every gust of wind – and we will learn more about the natural world in a few decades than we have in human history. As a billion devices around the world begin to talk with each other, we will also soon be just a minor part of the “The Internet of Things,” which may be a thousand times greater than the human-oriented Internet we currently know.

    Further up the curve lies the nanotech revolution. Mobile health and medicine, too. Go up even further and every function of body will be measured every second of our lifetime, and nano-hunter-sensors will swim in our blood helping to hunt down cancer and other diseases.

    Up the curve the line between animation and reality also begins to disappear, and modeling – from new products to new worlds to new lives – become a major part of our daily existence. And it will all start with virtual sex, because in tech it always starts with sex.

    And then? If you believe Ray Kurzweil, the line goes vertical, we map our brains into computers and live forever. If you believe Malcolm Gladwell, then the curve will eventually taper off.

    But neither scenario may arrive for decades. That means that as long as Intel and other chip companies can sustain Moore’s Law we may live within the Great Inflection for the rest of our lives. And, given the announcement recently by Intel and IBM IBM 0.07%

    of a revolutionary new type of transistor technology for chips, the odds of that occurring look better than ever.

    Even here in Silicon Valley we are unprepared for this new pace of change. But ready or not, the future is coming … faster than ever.

    Michael S. Malone is a veteran Silicon Valley-based journalist and author. He is author of The Intel Trinity: How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World’s Most Important Companypublished by HarperBusiness.