Something that occurs just as regularly as the doubling of our technological power is the appearance of claims that the doubling is ending. Yes, Moore’s law will of course end, meaning that there’s a physical limit to how small transistors can be made. But some people mistakenly assume that Moore’s law is synonymous with the persistent doubling of our technological power. Contrariwise, Ray Kurzweil points out that Moore’s law involves not the first but the fifth technological paradigm to bring exponential growth in computing, as illustrated in figure 2.8: whenever one technology stopped
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