Justice & Law Quote by Seth Lloyd

Moore's law has always been less a law than a dare: a neat, market-friendly curve that turned engineering into destiny. Seth Lloyd, a physicist-educator steeped in the thermodynamics and information theory that underwrite computation, punctures that optimism with a calm inevitability. "At some point" does the heavy lifting here. It refuses the breathless futurist timeline while still insisting on an endpoint. No apocalypse, no hype cycle - just physics waiting patiently in the wings.

The intent is corrective. Lloyd isn't predicting a bad quarter for chipmakers; he's reminding listeners that exponential trends are storytelling devices that borrow credibility from graphs. Moore's law worked because of a historically specific cocktail: shrinking transistors, clever lithography, cheap energy, globalized manufacturing, and a consumer market hungry for new devices. His subtext is that we've mistaken that contingent success for a natural right.

Context matters: by the time Lloyd is saying this in public discourse, the field is already feeling the pinch - heat dissipation, quantum tunneling, fabrication costs, and the absurdity of atom-scale features. Coming from someone who has written about the physical limits of computation and the promise of quantum computing, the line also carries a quiet pivot. If the old road ends, you don't stop traveling; you change vehicles. The real critique is cultural: our innovation economy treats "more" as a default setting, and Lloyd is asking what happens when progress has to become something other than smaller, faster, cheaper.