As Moore's Law hits physical limits, photonics emerges to supercharge computing and AI using light instead of electricity.

Trying to keep up with technology trends is an exhilarating, if exhausting, business. I am not talking about AI here, which is hard enough, what with new advances arriving seemingly every few minutes, but rather all manner of stuff happening at other edges -- where science makes its determined trek from academia to labs and code, to startups and industry, and finally into our hands, our homes and even our bloodstreams.

So having written about the frontier AI labs for months, I wanted to look upstream from the industry at this "other stuff". This piece is about one such field where tech chatter has recently swelled from a murmur to a roar.

It is called photonics.

It's a big deal. It is one of those technologies that has always been "around the corner", since 1960, when the first laser was built. And when in 1966 a fellow named Charles Kao showed that light could be used to move information, the race was on (he won the Nobel Prize for that, and is now addressed as Sir Charles Kao).

We'll get back to photonics in a moment, but a little history is necessary. In 1965 Intel's Gordon Moore famously...