“The explosion in computing capability is a historical phenomenon that has been going on for decades. For “specific numbers”, for example, look at the well-documented growth of the computer industry since the 1950s. Yes, there are probably limits, but they seem far away—so far away, we are not even sure where they are, or even whether they exist.”
The growth you are referring to has a hard upper limit which is when transistors are measured in angstroms, at the point when they start playing by the rules of quantum mechanics. That is the hard upper limit of computing that you are referring to. Now if we take quantum computing that may or may not take us further there has been a lot of work done recently that casts doubt on quantum computing and its ability to solve a lot of our computing issues. There are a lot of other possible computing technologies it is just not clear which one will emerge at the top yet.
“If anyone from Intel reads this, and wishes to explain to me how it would be unbelievably difficult to do their jobs using computers from ten years earlier, so that Moore’s Law would slow to a crawl—then I stand ready to be corrected. But relative to my present state of partial knowledge, I would say that this does not look like a strong feedback loop, compared to what happens to a compound interest investor when we bound their coupon income at 1998 levels for a while.”
This is simple to disprove whether being part of intel or not. The issue is that since current processors with multiple cores and millions-now billions of transistors are getting so complex that the actual design has to be done on computer. What is more before fabrication the design needs to be simulate to check for logic errors and to ensure good performance. It would be impossible to simulate a Tera-scale research chip on 1998 hardware. The issue is that simulating a computers design require a lot of computational power. The advances made in going from 65nm to 45nm now moving to 32nm were enabled by computers that could better simulate the designs without todays computers it would be hard to design the fabrication systems or run the fabrication system for the future processors. Since you admit partial knowledge I won’t bore you with the details of all this, suffices to say that your claim as state is incorrect.
I would however like to point out a misconception about Moores law, the law never says speed increases merely the number of transistors double every 18 months. There are a lot of facts apart from the number of transistors that play into computer speed. While more transistors are useful one has to match them with an architecture to take advantage of them otherwise you would not get the speed increase necessarily.