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The World In 2004 | The smart-dust revolution

In an Economist feature The World In 2004 A story on the Smart Dust revolution.

Alun Andersen, the Editor in Chief comments that for decades we have considered progress to be packing of more and more transistors on less and less silicon... Progress he argues is, things like the coming smart dust revolution. Smart dust or more accurately networked intelligenece to do hazaar things like do remote surveliiance for the military. or the use of RFID in supermarkets... enabling tracking of merchandise and a fully automated staff less supermakret...


For almost 40 years we have all been subscribing to a simple dogma about the growth of the information age: progress means making more and more computing power available at lower and lower prices. Back in 1965 Gordon Moore laid out his famous law that the number of components that could be squeezed on to a silicon chip would double every year or two. Now everybody can buy a laptop computer with the computing power that entire nations were aspiring to in the 1970s.

Moore’s law still has a long future. But in 2004 the belief that progress means packing in ever more computing power will be seen as far too narrow. Just arriving is another kind of information revolution, driven by the ability to manufacture billions of tiny, intelligent communicating sensors. Capable of organising themselves into networks, intelligent sensors will make up for their small brains by their immense numbers.

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