The World in 2030

58 The World in 2030
‘lore’ than ‘law’) and has become a ‘bench-mark’ to which
the computer industry works.
Tellingly though, Moore’s law has contracted sharply and
microprocessor speeds and densities have for many years been
increasing much faster than Gordon Moore predicted in 1965.
Dr. Nick Bostrom observed in a 1997 paper on superintelligent
machines:
Moore’s law states that processor speed doubles every
eighteen months. The doubling time used to be two
years, but that changed about fifteen years ago. The
most recent data points indicate a doubling time as
short as twelve months. This would mean that there
will be a thousand-fold increase in computational
power in ten years. Moore’s law is what chip manufacturers
rely on when they decide what sort of chip
to develop in order to remain competitive. 111
Also in 1997 noted American futurists Marvin Cetron 112 and
Owen Davis 113 wrote in their best-selling book ‘Probable
Tomorrows’:
If the most optimistic computer scientists are correct,
tomorrow’s shirt pocket computer could hold
a billion bytes (a gigabyte) in its working memory
(RAM) – and run at 50 million times the speed of
today’s fastest personal computers. 114
Well, that ten year old prediction was heading in the right
direction; my shirt pocket iPod offers 80 gigabytes rather