exponentials
csm had a commentary recently about exponential growth. heh. usually i don't have a problem with csm. usually they don't publish pie-in-the-sky god-will-provide everything-is-rosy garbage. it's true that computer capacity has increased a billion times since 1965. however, there are limits. the article expects another billion fold increase in the next 25 years. uh, right. that would make the desktop computer a million times smarter than a person. from
the straight dope, if i hadn't squished 52 house flies as a kid their descendants would occupy a volume of space quite a bit larger than the entire universe. exponential growth is always an approximation valid over some limited range. it can't go on forever. i'm hoping for three more orders of magnitude before computer growth rate slows to nearly nothing. that'll give them computational power equivalent to a human brain. course programming the things always lags. so maybe, just maybe, in my lifetime. course that might also just be pie in the sky.