The article “We need a moonshot for computing” is basically saying that the United States needs to do something really big and bold to stay ahead in the computer chip game. It’s like when President Kennedy said he wanted to send a person to the moon. He set a huge goal for the whole country to work towards, and that’s what this article suggests the US needs to do now for computers.
There’s this thing called Moore’s Law that says computer chips get faster and cheaper over time because companies make the transistors (tiny switches) on them smaller and pack them closer together. But we’re reaching a point where they can’t get much smaller, which is a big problem because it means making chips faster and cheaper won’t work the same way anymore.
The US government passed a law called the CHIPS and Science Act, which is a plan to help build more chip factories in the US and to do more research to make better chips. They want to start this place called the National Semiconductor Technology Center, or NSTC, to gather lots of people educated on this field so that they can work together to invent new kinds of computer chips.
Cover Image of Chapter 13 “Microelectronics” from National Security Commission on AI
The article says we can keep improving chips a little bit at a time for the next 10 years, but after that, it’ll get extremely difficult. So, we should start thinking about totally new kinds of computers, such as ones that work like our brains or ones that use quantum mechanics to process information.
But all these new ideas are kind of risky because they’re different from what we’re used to, and nobody knows for sure if they’ll work out. The NSTC has to decide whether to play it safe and make small improvements or go all out and try for something as big as the moon landing but for computers.
In the end, the article is saying that now is a super important time for the US to figure out how to keep being the best at making computer stuff. If we don’t aim for something really huge and new, we might fall behind other countries.