By Ray Kurzweil
Sunday, April 13, 2008;
Page B04
M IT was so advanced in 1965 (the year I entered as a freshman) that it
actually had a computer. Housed in its own building, it cost $11
million (in today's dollars) and was shared by all students and
faculty. Four decades later, the computer in your cellphone is a
million times smaller, a million times less expensive and a thousand
times more powerful. That's a billion-fold increase in the amount of
computation you can buy per dollar.
Yet as powerful as information technology is today, we will make
another billion-fold increase in capability (for the same cost) over
the next 25 years. That's because information technology builds on
itself -- we are continually using the latest tools to create the next
so they grow in capability at an exponential rate. This doesn't just
mean snazzier cellphones. It means that change will rock every aspect
of our world. The exponential growth in computing speed will unlock a
solution to global warming, unmask the secret to longer life and solve
myriad other worldly conundrums...
More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/
