Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100

dying of cancer in 1999.)
    The driving source behind Weiser’s prophetic dreams is something called Moore’s law, a rule of thumb that has driven the computer industry for fifty or more years, setting the pace for modern civilization like clockwork. Moore’s law simply says that computer power doubles about every eighteen months. First stated in 1965 by Gordon Moore, one of the founders of the Intel Corporation, this simple law has helped to revolutionize the world economy, generated fabulous new wealth, and irreversibly altered our way of life. When you plot the plunging price of computer chips and their rapid advancements in speed, processing power, and memory, you find a remarkably straight line going back fifty years. (This is plotted on a logarithmic curve. In fact, if you extend the graph, so that it includes vacuum tube technology and even mechanical hand-crank adding machines, the line can be extended more than 100 years into the past.)
    Exponential growth is often hard to grasp, since our minds think linearly.It is so gradual that you sometimes cannot experience the change at all. But over decades, it can completely alter everything around us.
    According to Moore’s law, every Christmas your new computer games are almost twice as powerful (in terms of the number of transistors) as those from the previous year. Furthermore, as the years pass, this incremental gain becomes monumental. For example, when you receive a birthday card in the mail, it often has a chip that sings “Happy Birthday” to you. Remarkably, that chip has more computer power than all the Allied forces of 1945. Hitler, Churchill, or Roosevelt might have killed to get that chip. But what do we do with it? After the birthday, we throw the card and chip away. Today, your cell phone has more computer power than all of NASA back in 1969, when it placed two astronauts on the moon. Video games, which consume enormous amounts of computer power to simulate 3-D situations, use more computer power than mainframe computers of the previous decade. The Sony PlayStation of today, which costs $300, has the power of a military supercomputer of 1997, which cost millions of dollars.
    We can see the difference between linear and exponential growth of computer power when we analyze how people viewed the future of the computer back in 1949, when
Popular Mechanics
predicted that computers would grow linearly into the future, perhaps only doubling or tripling with time. It wrote: “ Where a calculator like the ENIAC today is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1½ tons.”
    (Mother Nature appreciates the power of the exponential. A single virus can hijack a human cell and force it to create several hundred copies of itself. Growing by a factor of 100 in each generation, one virus can generate 10 billion viruses in just five generations. No wonder a single virus can infect the human body, with trillions of healthy cells, and give you a cold in just a week or so.)
    Not only has the amount of computer power increased, but the way that this power is delivered has also radically changed, with enormous implications for the economy. We can see this progression, decade by decade:
     
    • 1950s. Vacuum tube computers were gigantic contraptions filling entire rooms with jungles of wires, coils, and steel. Only the military was rich enough to fund these monstrosities.
    • 1960s. Transistors replaced vacuum tube computers, and mainframe computers gradually entered the commercial marketplace.
    • 1970s. Integrated circuit boards, containing hundreds of transistors, created the minicomputer, which was the size of a large desk.
    • 1980s. Chips, containing tens of millions of transistors, made possible personal computers that can fit inside a briefcase.
    • 1990s. The Internet connected hundreds of millions of computers into a single, global computer network.
    • 2000s. Ubiquitous computing freed the chip from the computer, so chips were dispersed into the environment.
    So the old paradigm (a single chip inside a desktop computer or laptop connected to a computer) is being replaced by a new paradigm (thousands of chips scattered inside every artifact, such as furniture, appliances, pictures, walls, cars, and clothes, all talking to one another and connected to the Internet).
    When these chips are inserted into an appliance, it is miraculously transformed. When chips were