1 Gig Isn't What it Used to Be . . .

One gigabyte of computer storage (between 1 and 1.07 billion bytes depending on who you listen to) used to be a big deal (quite literally actually, see picture below). Nowadays flash disks do 1 Gig in about the size of your thumbnail and a single Blu-ray disc can hold 50 Gigs. Technological progress (in everything from transistor prices, processing speed, memory capacity, pixels per dollar etc.) is truly expanding in an exponential fashion. This is of course precisely what Intel co-founder Gordon Moore noted back in the 1960's when he noted that the number of transistors on integrated circuits was doubling every 2 years. The only limit to Moore's law will probably come when transistors reach the size of atoms, which could be in 15-20 years.


What does all this computing power mean? I love what Ray Kurzweil has to say:

"A $1000 of computing power is now somewhere between an insect and a mouse brain, it will intersect human intelligence in terms of capacity sometime in the 2020's . . . this is at an early stage, but you can show with the exponential growth in the amount of information about the brain and the exponential improvement in the resolution of brain scanning, we will succeed in reverse engineering the human brain sometime in the 2020's."

Scary huh?

Hat Tip: GagdetLite