The Decline of Computers as a General Purpose Technology

Abstract

The general-purposeness of today?s computers comes from the technical breakthroughs of computer scientists like von Neumann and Turing, but also from a mutually-reinforcing economic cycle, where product improvement and market growth fuel each other. This article argues that technological and economic forces are now pushing computing away from being general purpose and towards specialization. This process, driven by the breakdown in Moore?s Law, has already begun and threatens to fragment computing into 'fast lane' applications that get powerful specialized processors and 'slow lane' applications that get stuck using general purpose processors whose progress fades.