Editor’s Note: This month our Spotlight is focused on George Gilder, the man Porter calls “the prophet” and says was instrumental in shaping much of his economic thinking and analysis.
In last week’s issue (click here if you missed it), we featured George’s latest research into what he believes could be the next major technological leap forward – the rise of wafer-scale computing.
At Porter & Co., we’re not in the business of predicting the future, our core philosophy revolves around identifying world-class “forever” companies that are overlooked or undervalued.
However, we also know that intelligent speculation in the future, especially in the technology field, can deliver phenomenal financial returns (see Porter’s 1990s recommendations of Amazon, Adobe, Texas Instruments, and others).
And as Porter says, there is nobody better at seeing the future than George Gilder.
He predicted everything from the rise of the microchip to personal computers, iPhones, Netflix, cryptocurrencies, and more – helping his readers invest in each trend years before they went mainstream.
This week’s Spotlight continues our exploration into George’s next big prediction – diving deeper into wafer-scale computing, graphene semiconductors, parallel computing and what it could mean for the future of America.
Despite the near-term risks facing us, despite the looming recession, and despite our major social, economic, and financial challenges – George believes a “New American Century” is coming.
What you’ll read below is Part I of a series that, until now, was only shared with members of Gilder’s research advisory (Part II will be published via next week’s Spotlight).
Ignore the gloomsters of MAGA and the Swamp alike. Welcome a new
century of American leadership, untold wealth and health, and a 50-year
bull market for investors…
The nation which enjoys the most freedom must necessarily be in proportion to its numbers the most powerful nation.
— John Quincy Adams
Everywhere in the echo-chambers of chatter, Romanesque visions of “decline and fall” pervade America’s media and universities, politics, and punditry. As Louis Gave of GaveKal Research points out, “The United States today accounts for 70% of global equity market capitalization with only 18% of global GDP and 4% of the global population.” We must be doing something right. Yet both parties propagate a vanity fair of victimhood.
MAGA makes victims of middle-class men. Democrats make victims of women, blacks, and Palestinians. Eminent universities reverberate glum rhetoric on human beings as a “plague on the planet.” History’s richest generation of youths complain to pollsters they cannot afford to marry or bear children. We are alleged to be running out of resources while breathing out gigatons of noxious carbon dioxide. For our sins, we will eat bugs and shiver in the dark. Even if mankind survives, so it is said, America is headed for the scrap heap of history, doomed to eclipse by tech-savvy Asian hordes or procreative Islam.
That’s one story. It is not our story. In our story, we stand on the threshold of a New American Century, the prospects for our nation and most of humanity burn brighter than ever.
We are on the verge of a technological transformation and an outpouring of wealth that will make the 50 years since the invention of the microprocessor seem sterile.
TIME TRAVEL, BACKWARDS
Looking backwards, as pessimists do, our politicos see a technological horizon glowing chiefly with the sunset of declining technologies. Glance at the raft of retro government reports raveled with paranoia about Chinese competition in technology, urging subsidies for one mature technology and bans on export of another. Without fail, the favored technologies are last decade’s news. We are subsidizing time travel, but backwards.
Often called futurists, we at Gilder’s Technology Report are more accurately deemed historians of the present. The transformation we are “predicting” is already well underway. Most of the advances in wealth and health, safety, and security over the past 50 years—the silicon era—are owed to the declining price and increasing power of computation. Based only on what historians of the present can see already, the even more fantastic abundances to come will be the gift of computing power 1,000 times greater than anything available today at lower cost and with a fraction of the energy consumed.
As the silicon era and the age of the Microcosm climax in a nano-tangle of overheating wires connecting ever more complicated 3-D architectures, on the way are new planar and wafer-scale electroi/onics beyond silicon and even beyond chips.
Whether under Moore’s Law of microchips or Metcalfe’s Law of networks or Schmidt’s Law of computing, the exponential yields of learning all succumb in time to the ever-growing costs of connection. Connections generate heat, emit noise, and degrade the computations that they enable. Moore’s Law defined the silicon era because the economics of computation so penalized excursions off the chip that the only way forward was to jam more and more circuits together into tiny, encapsulated slivers of silicon—so called “chips” in plastic packages linked across printed circuit boards with webs of copper or aluminum wires and projected on the world by fiber optic waves of light.
The graphene semiconductor will enable wafer-scale computation. The natural graphene film emerging on the surface of the silicon carbide wafer replaces most of the metallic conductors on current silicon chips. At wafer scale, we will integrate not billions of circuits but trillions on the same device, running at terahertz rhythms of trillions a second and besting any current supercomputer, while generating barely detectable heat.
Jensen Huang, promethean CEO of Nvidia (NVDA), predicts a future of “intelligence factories”—hyper-scaled and mega-accelerated data centers—packed with tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs. These centers, he eagerly tells his stockholders, represent a trillion-dollar opportunity for NVDA.
LOOK IT’S A TELEPUTER!
NVDA better bank those bucks quickly (which seems quite likely) because when wafer scale electronics hits the market, supercomputers will become as common as smart phones. (Hey, maybe this could revive George’s original name for the smart phone—the teleputer—which he coined way back in 1990 when predicting it in his book “Life After Television.” (Or maybe not! That chip has sailed)). Regardless of the name, every one of us will carry in our pockets computational power costing millions today, even as the capabilities of our smart phone would have cost millions 20 years ago.
THE NEW WAY OF INNOVATION
Massive parallel computation—what we now call “AI”—is changing the world…again. It has become the catalyst for a convergence of technologies developed independently of each other but now combining to create what is wholly new. As our own John Schroeter and Richard Vigilante explain it in their forthcoming book, “The Verge,” convergent innovation is what happens when multiple different technological advances, in diverse fields, progressing not only in ignorance but in indifference to each other, suddenly come together.
The result can dramatically enhance human life in ways unanticipated by those who developed the converging technologies. In nearly every case, however, massively increasing computational power is Peter Drucker’s missing link that will complete the system.
To take just one example, Neurocord, a company we cover in Gilder’s Private Reserve, proposes to cure spinal paralysis by combining a graphene conductor of the electrical current powering the human nervous system with hundreds of millions of new nerve cells grown in vitro from the patient’s own skin cells.
The Neurocord spinal technology is typical of convergent innovation. It is not the result of any single multi-million-dollar research project, or a heroic squad of spinal scientists toiling long into many nights, trying one formula after another until finally at iteration 9,999 they hit upon the answer, the cure, the Eureka moment, and break out the champagne.
The Neurocord treatment cannot even be called a step forward in spinal therapy. None of the leading contributors had previous careers in spinal therapy any more than the inventor of the first microprocessor had been known previously for his pioneering work on the abacus.
Rather the Neurocord therapy is the result of at least four independently developed technologies:
- Graphene nanoribbons, developed at Professor James Tour’s lab at Rice University in 2022.
- CRISPR, the first practical gene-editing tool, developed by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier in 2009.
- Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells, developed by Shinya Yamanaka in 2006.
- Microfluidics (used to isolate and nurture cell lines) invented originally for ink jet printers in the 1980s!
Each of these technologies were developed independently of each other with no thought to curing spinal paralysis. Each (even 1980s microfluidics) was made possible only with the aid of massive computation. And it is massive computation that will provide the final missing link to bring them together.
The great remaining challenge, the missing link, is to reduce the cost of growing the cell lines, which today could reach as much as a million dollars. Much of that cost comes from the compensation of highly skilled human technicians identifying the most viable cell lines from hundreds of possibilities. The answer once again is massive computation, Neurocord is building an AI model that will do the work of identifying the best cell lines, bringing the cost down by two orders of magnitude.
These particular converging technologies will do more than heal spinal paralysis. The same combinations will enable us to regenerate lost limbs or to replace them with prosthetics that outperform the originals and are operated directly by the brain. We will replace hearts, kidneys, and livers with healthy versions generated from the patient’s own cells. We will reverse the effects of aging. Scars from injuries and surgeries will become a thing of the past. We will eradicate currently incurable diseases by targeting the genetic vulnerabilities leading to Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and diabetes.
CONVERGE TO INNOVATE
Convergence is not limited to the medical field. Convergence catalyzed by exponentially increasing computational power is the way innovation happens now. It has become common for quite brilliant people to lament the alleged slowing of innovation. The great Peter Thiel wrote an entire book on the subject called “Zero to One,”, and famously lamented “we were promised flying cars; instead we got 140 characters.”
Well, we have flying cars. Nevertheless, Thiel was right. The path to those amazing machines was not zero to one because we no longer start from zero or one. The greatest advances today start from at least two.
Here are just a few things we can expect by mid-century:
Life expectancy will begin to rise again, and faster than ever before. A reasonable guess is that lifespan will grow two to three years per decade until mid-century, and then at an increasingly faster pace. Your children will live past the century mark.
- Fatal or crippling automobile accidents, already in decline, will disappear, along with human drivers.
- Most chronic diseases will disappear. Virtually all once-crippling injuries will be healed.
- The ongoing materials revolution—graphene is only the start—will make every structure and machine an order of magnitude lighter, easier to build, cheaper, and longer lasting (except you might dump them sooner, as better, cheaper replacements come online.)
- The “crisis of the energy grid” will disappear in the face of four developments:
- AI-driven power management will reduce waste.
- Breakthrough battery technology offered by companies such as Solidion (one of our Moonshots calls) will eliminate the need for “peak power.”
- Small, inherently safe nuclear generators, (including possibly a radioisotope generator in your basement.) will generate more power than we’ve ever had at a lower cost than we’ve ever seen.
- When we do get around to rebuilding the grid, it will be with graphene, not copper for 1000x the efficiency.
- Anthropogenic “Climate Change,” now a concern as a spurious pretext for “emergency socialism,” will vanish from our politics because progress in energy sources will enable any adaptation needed in the future. The savings from flushing the green goo out of global systems will mount into the tens of trillions not spent on government mandates.
- The threat of nuclear war will vanish as all the viable delivery options from bombers to ICBMs are neutralized by laser weapons made viable by the catalyst of AI.
- Crimes against property and persons—rape, robbery, burglary, assault—will disappear as ever smaller, lower energy, more powerful sensors feed real time data to ever more powerful AI interpreters to detect crime and identify the criminals. This will start with wearables. When wearables are replaced by embeddables, nudists will be safe as well.
- The spatial web will do for engineering and architecture, construction and manufacture, what the software compiler did for programming and silicon compiler did for microchip design: translate human communications into the language of machines, only more completely and dramatically. Tell some future Alexa you want a flying car that looks like a 1956 Thunderbird convertible, and it will design the car, issue specifications, send out requests for bids for every part, commission parts that don’t exist, arrange for assembly and test, and have it delivered to your door. Thoughts will become things.
A New American Century will launch a new American economics. Time Prices, pioneered by Gale Pooley and Marian Tupy (see our new feature Time Price of the Month) will be embraced as a measuring gauge as its findings proceed from intriguing, to obvious, to undeniable. Pooley and Tupy estimate that per-capita resource abundance has been increasing at approximately 4% a year for more than a century. Expect that number to rise significantly making measures like the CPI (consumer price index) so obviously ridiculous they will be impossible to cite without blushing.
What could stop us? Where’s the monkey in the wrench?
In Part 2, I’ll be taking the Pessimists to task and walking through how these developments affect, and will be affected by Nvidia…
Until Then!
George Gilder
Editor, Gilder’s Technology Report & Gilder’s Moonshots
Special Note from George Gilder: In 2024, for the first time ever, scientists achieved a major breakthrough for AI. The world’s first fully functional graphene semiconductor was just created inside the Georgia Institute of Technology. Walter de Heer, Regents’ Professor of Physics, calls it a “paradigm shift, a different way of doing electronics.”
This breakthrough has 10 times faster computing power than ordinary silicon chips, and now, it’s about to unleash AI that’s 10-times as intelligent as any large language model (LLM) we use today.
de Heer says “It’s like driving on a gravel road versus driving on a freeway.” This new graphene semiconductor has electrical properties that are far superior to any silicon semiconductor ever made, but soon, it won’t just be a breakthrough inside a college campus. It will be the engine powering every electronics device on Earth.
I’ve uncovered a company trading under $10 a share and it’s playing a critical role in bringing this new breakthrough to the masses.
Discover the details here.