Our Silicon Master?
By The PHANTOM –
This time I write about something I’ve never experienced: genius. My favorite saying is by Thomas Edison, “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” Albert Einstein said the same thing in different words, “Genius is 1 percent talent and 99 percent hard work.” I encountered these sayings again recently in an article that Lee Goldberg wrote in Electronic Design magazine, about meeting Jack Kilby of integrated circuit fame, and Gordon Moore, the legend of Fairchild Semi and later Intel. (The article is in the April 24, 2024 magazine if you’d like to check my honesty. Actually, it is in that issue even if you don’t give a dirty old F connector for my honesty.) When a reporter encounters such famous people, he’d better have some great questions to ask. Lee asked, “How much of the creation of the transistor was based on a skillful extrapolation of what we knew at the time, and how much of its success was the result of unanticipated developments and a healthy dose of good luck?”
Now when you start developing something as revolutionary as the transistor, and the same goes for more ordinary developments, too, you have an idea of where you’re going, but not exactly how you are going to get there. And when you do get “there,” you discover that the “there” you got to is not exactly the “there” that you expected to get to. The first transistors were made using germanium as the base semiconductor material; good but not the best. Researchers shortly switched over to doing semiconductor development based on silicon. Several other materials seemed about equally promising at the time. Of the candidate materials, silicon is probably the best choice, based on its chemical and electrical properties, but that wasn’t known at the time. Apparently it was something of an arbitrary decision to use silicon. Between the choice of silicon, and benefiting from its properties, lay years of hard work—the 99% piece of genius.
Kilby told Lee that the invention of the transistor was pretty much inevitable, but the explosive growth made possible by silicon was not. “It was almost as if silicon was waiting for us,” added Moore, noting that even he was initially surprised at its ability to support the steadily increasing circuit densities that enabled him to make his fortune with Intel.
This led Lee down the proverbial rabbit-hole (which he acknowledged) of wondering who was the master: us or silicon. Are we using silicon to develop all of these neat integrated circuits that do so much for us today? Or is silicon using us as its hands and feet, the workhorses that enable it to move toward a position of dominance over us? After all, silicon-based computers are getting smarter all the time.
Hey, I’ve just finished an extremely long book of science fiction short stories (Arthur C. Clark) and silicon dominance seems perfectly plausible to me. One of the short stories in the book was about this mysterious city in a far eastern jungle that was run completely by machines. This genius of a human being, the hero, was sent in to disable the city by disabling the silicon-based intelligence running it, because it was threatening life as we know it, and was on the verge of taking over. The city was originally built by humans, who put in the machines that were running it. But the machines outdid their human makers and threatened to take over. Previous humans sent in to neutralize the “silicon city” were never heard from again. Anyway, our hero was able to figure out the weaknesses of the machines acting as the “city fathers,” and he brought the whole rebellion to a screeching halt just in the nick of time. He used human trickery and I guess the machines didn’t know what to do with illogical human actions.
Anyway, it was fun to take a digression into the idea that we are the slaves and silicon the master. Is silicon, as the dominant semiconductor, planning to supplant us as the most intelligent race on the earth? Sometimes I think that would be really easy to do, given our questionable ability to live up to our intelligence level, meager though that may be. Would it be a good idea for us to form an alliance with some of the bit-part semiconductor players, such as gallium arsenide?
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You never know when The “masked” Phantom is standing right beside you. Sometimes he is in a Zoom meeting or virtual SCTE training session with you. He may be hanging with the suits and other times with the front liners. But be assured, The Phantom knows all and, most importantly, The Phantom sees all!
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You never know when The “masked” Phantom is standing right beside you. Sometimes he is in a Zoom meeting or virtual SCTE training session with you. He may be hanging with the suits and other times with the front liners. But be assured, The Phantom knows all and, most importantly, The Phantom sees all!
Shutterstock
