The microchip’s secret goal: the metaverse

In 1965, Gordon Moore of Fairchild Semiconductor, the legendary pioneer of microchips, was asked to speculate on the future of integrated circuits. He looked around the lab, where engineers were beginning to fit roughly 60 components onto a chip, a number that had roughly doubled every year since the origins of planar chip design in 1959. Then he made a staggering prediction: complexity and miniaturization. they would stay doubling every year, so that within a decade a chip would have 60,000 components, even as prices and costs continued to plummet. And so it happened, more or less, with the prediction for 1975 remarkably close to reality. Today, the most advanced chips have complexity counts in excess of 100 billion.

It should come as no surprise to learn that we can…