Submission Statement:

Most of us are familiar with Moore’s Law. Gordon Moore, who first observed that computer capacity grew exponentially, was talking about the density of transistors in integrated circuits, but others (among them the famous futurist Ray Kurzweil) have later reformulated the ‘law’ to refer to the growth of processing power compared to cost – how many calculations per second a computer chip can perform for every USD 100 it costs.

This makes the law robust to changes in technology, extending it backwards to before the invention of the integrated and possibly forwards into the future when new technologies may replace the current siliconbased chip.

This article was first published in FARSIGHT - Futures Reviewed. A quarterly publication from Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies.