World is running out computer power, warns Microsoft boss Nadella

Satya Nadella has warned that computer power is running out of steam
Angela Jameson24 January 2018

Microsoft’s chief executive has warned that the world is rapidly “running out of computing capacity”.

Satya Nadella said at the World Economic Forum in Davos that the computing world’s famous “Moore’s Law” — in which computer processing power doubles every two years — was “kinda running out of steam”.

The Indian-born executive said that much faster computers were needed to solve some of the world’s most difficult problems and warned that, without superfast quantum computers, there would not be enough processing power to resolve issues such as climate change.

The business chief also took a swipe at so-called reskilling programmes that retrain people who have lost their jobs through automation or globalisation, calling them a waste of money unless they are tailored to jobs that are likely to exist in the future.

He said that urgent reform of school teaching was needed and that computer science should be as important a subject as maths or physics. Nadella said that children between the ages of nine and 13 should be taught the subject.

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