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Comment by bawolff | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure there are actually any predictions in this article. To sum it up, in the future, transistors will be smaller, more power efficient, they may or may not use differnt materials, and the technology may or may not already exist in the lab.

Talk about covering all potential bases.

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Covering all the bases and emittors.

No collectors?

That's where your input comes in.

The coverage is full of holes.

Ahhh when I see this responses I (fondly) remember slashdot!!!

You forgot that transistors may or may not be replaced by something completely different not yet invented... now everything is covered

Don't forget the possibility that we'll be to busy fighting a war with sticks and stones to make transistors.

I’m really looking forward to what a Star Trek ‘transtator’ turns out to be.

And “isolinear circuitry” is going to look awesome when illuminated by LEDs in gamer rigs.

To be fair, they predict that transistors will be everywhere including places where they (mostly) aren't found today such as in our bodies and close to our food.

Sounds a lot like microplastics.

Smart asbestoes.

Suddenly those 5G-chips-in-vaccine conspiracies aren't so far fetched anymore.

The tech isn’t what makes those ridiculous. It’s that there are a million and a half less obvious ways to achieve this goal. Starting with the fact we all carry our phones with us everywhere.

When technologists say that transistors (read: computers) are going to be in literally everything, even in people's bodies, some people find that scary and interpret that as a threat. They ask: why do these things suddenly need computers in them? Bodies have gotten along fine without them for millions of years. Why the sudden change? Conspiracies will emerge to answer that.

It's the "natural == good" fallacy. Humans have lived with problems like disease, aging, and death for millions of years. If technology can help to alleviate or solve these problems then that is a good thing.

Will they actually be smaller, though? AIUI, industry consensus is that future progress will come from 3D-stacking multiple layers of transistors on the same die, not from finer lithography.

It's possible to make single-atom transistors (demonstrated 2004), but I have no idea if there's a planned path to making tens of billions of those at a time, in a single chip, that doesn't cost more than a few hundred USD.

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