Silicon chips? So last century. They can’t get any smaller, and they only think in straight lines. What comes next, asks Andrew Smith. A weird world where algae, mushrooms and microbes do our computing for us Until the mid-20th century, there were only two certainties in life: death and taxes. Then out of the blue came a third — a descriptive “law” that anticipated the motion of science and society, and defined an era: Moore’s Law.Moore’s Law began as a prediction by a computer scientist named Gordon Moore in 1965 and was named after him retrospectively.

For the foreseeable future, he decreed, rapid advances in computing technology were likely to see the silicon-based microprocessors at the heart of our machines double in speed and capability every 18 months.

• [Editor:tianyawei]