PERSON
Carver Mead
The Caltech physicist and engineer who named Moore’s Law, co-authored the textbook that democratized chip design, and spent forty years arguing that the brain’s analog physics is a radically more efficient substrate for intelligence than the digital machines he helped build—a dissent that the energy crisis of modern AI is now forcing the field to take seriously.
Carver Mead is the engineer who helped pour the concrete beneath every AI system running today and who has spent most of his career arguing that the concrete was poured wrong. With Lynn Conway he wrote the 1979 textbook
Introduction to VLSI Systems that turned chip design from an arcane craft into a teachable discipline, multiplying the number of minds that could contribute to the hardware substrate and licensing the exponential that made
deep learning possible. He coined the name that has governed semiconductor progress for sixty years:
Moore’s Law. And then, with an engineer’s empiricism rather than a prophet’s rhetoric, he looked at what the digital machines were actually doing and judged it profligate. The human brain computes its prodigious work on roughly twenty watts; a data center training a frontier model draws the output of a