Beyond the Horizon: Extending Moore's Law and the Technological Singularity

This year we surpassed one billion computers on the planet with two billion predicted by 2015.

Moore's Law, like the Energizer Bunny, just keeps going and going and going. Its demise has been predicted half a dozen times, but just in time a new technology is developed to keep the pace going. Simply stated, the law is that the capability of integrated circuits, the building block of computing capacity, increases at an exponential rate - doubling every two years (at an equal or lower cost).

Here's a logarithmic chart: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Moores_law.svg

The technological singularity is described as a time when the power of artificial intelligence on single computer will eclipse the capability of a human brain. Promoted by futurist Ray Kurzweil this is calculated to be achieved in the coming decade or two. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:PPTSuperComputersPRINT.jpg