Federico Faggin designed the first microprocessor and the capacitive touchscreen. He joins Go/No-Go to argue that AI cannot be conscious, however capable it becomes.

About this episode

Federico Faggin designed the first microprocessor. The Intel 4004 was the chip that first made it possible to put an entire programmable computer on a single piece of silicon. The process technology he developed at Fairchild Semiconductor became the foundation for every microprocessor, memory chip, and logic device built in the half-century since. The touchscreen on your phone exists because of work he went on to do at Synaptics in the 1990s, when his team replaced the trackball with capacitive touch. In between, he spent years in the 1980s building hardware for neural networks at a moment when the AI research establishment considered the whole idea a dead end. History has proven him right.

Faggin joined Jon to recount the physical reality of early chip design, from drawing transistors by hand at 500 times scale to sizing circuits with a slide rule and building the Z80 with 11 people and $400,000. Decades of working at the vanguard of silicon technology led him to confront the ultimate capabilities of computers. That question has consumed the second half of his career. He has written a book, Irreducible (2024), arguing that consciousness is not something a classical computer can produce, no matter what it seems able to accomplish, and he cautions against allowing AI enthusiasm to make us forget what makes us human in the first place.

Links from the discussion:

Irreducible: Consciousness, Life, Computers and Human Nature (Essentia Books): https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/essentia-books/our-books/irreducible-consciousness-life-computers-human-nature

Irreducible on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1803415096

Silicon: From the Invention of the Microprocessor to the New Science of Consciousness on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Invention-Microprocessor-Science-Consciousness/dp/1949003418

Federico’s profile at the Computer History Museum: https://computerhistory.org/profile/federico-faggin/

Tom Wolfe, "The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce" (Esquire, 1983): https://classic.esquire.com/article/1983/12/1/the-tinkerings-of-robert-noyce