ADAM SMITH can be baffled by microelectronics. When the good economist died in 1790 James Watt’s two-cylinder steam engine handed for the peak of technological sophistication. If he recognised the prefix “nano”—a good guess for a precocious classicist proficient in lifeless languages by 14—it could be as a derivation of the Greek phrase for “dwarf”, not as a reference to the billionths of a metre wherein fashionable semiconductors are measured. The phrase “billion” had entered the English language by Smith’s time however the quantity it denotes would have appeared unfathomable. Some 200bn transistors etched onto a couple of halfpennies in Nvidia’s newest Blackwell artificial-intelligence (AI) chip? Black magic, even for an enlightened Scottish rationalist.
