The Moore’s law predicts that the power of computing doubles every two years. There are some details that qualify such a statement, but that’s the baseline concept.
The Moore’s law has been observed, with some reasonable accuracy, especially around the age of the dot com bubble a few years back. It is allegedly in force today.
It sounds really modern and progress-minded. Except I don’t care for it much. . . . Sundry nothings to catch even more sundry nothings. It seems to me that the more precise and scientifically advanced this world gets, the more uncertain and imprecise it is becoming.
Have you noticed it, too?
We see it in the field of physics with quantum mechanics and the string theory. This is also why there are more malpractice suits today than a century ago. Maybe we try more things. God bless us for that.
But the new opportunities are ridden with dangers. We won’t fare better than our predecessors unless we raise the bar for our heuristic approach (it means we find out what’s working or not by trial and error, by roughing it).
It is inevitable that the more things we try with a heuristic approach, the more failures we will experience. I don’t advocate shackling the science with a rigorous moral code. But we can’t let loose the heuristic machine age and then watch the world teeter on the brink of a disaster whenever there’s a new animal flu or someone comes up with an easy heuristic way to a mass annihilation.
Here’s my Heurist Theorem for all of us so we don’t get the blues from all this nonsense: (1) The more precise this world becomes, the more unprecise and uncertain, and thus the more precarious and heuristic the core of our existence becomes. (2) Therefore, it will require the faith in the value of human beings, intimately advanceable and infinitely renewable, and the intervening afflatus. (3) Otherwise, we will get the blues, stemming from being such a heurist with modern, merry abandon.
