CONCEPT
The Engineer's Obligation
The specific responsibility Moore's career embodies: to measure the consequences of amplification with the same rigor applied to measuring the amplification itself — to see shadows alongside gains, and to make the accounting available to the society that will decide what to do about it.
The gap between what an engineer predicts and what the prediction produces is the space in which obligation lives. Gordon Moore was precise about what he observed and modest about what it meant. He was aware, in his later years, that the curve he had identified produced consequences he could not have anticipated and could not control. In his 2008 IEEE Spectrum contribution on the singularity, he addressed directly whether exponential growth in computation would produce artificial general intelligence. His answer was skeptical — not because he doubted the exponential, but because he understood that intelligence resisted the one-dimensional characterization exponential scaling presupposes. 'It is naïve,' Moore argued, 'to treat intelligence as a one-dimensional, quantifiable characteristic of humans or computers.'
In The You On AI Field Guide
The recognition did not lead Moore to oppose the technology. He did not argue for slowing the exponential.