The World in 2030

64 The World in 2030
In the end, because the exponential rate of technology
development is, itself, increasing exponentially it is almost
impossible to estimate precisely how much more powerful
and more capable the computers of 2030 will be.
There are, however, some well-qualified experts prepared
to stick their necks out and make firm predictions about the
likely speed and power of computers and their networks in
the year 2030. Dr. Paul D. Tinari, 124 Director of the Pacific
Institute for Advanced Study (and formerly a Professor of
Future Studies at San Francisco University) writes:
According to Moore’s Law, computer power doubles
every 18 months, meaning that computers will be
about 500,000 times more powerful by 2030. Furthermore,
according to Nielsen’s Law of Internet
bandwidth, 125 connectivity to the home grows by 50
per cent per year; therefore by 2030, people will have
about 100,000 times more bandwidth than today. By
that year, chances are you will own a computer that
runs at 2.5 PHz CPU speed, has half of a petabyte
(a thousand terabytes) of memory, one quarter of an
exabyte (a billion gigabytes) of hard disk-equivalent
storage, and will connect to the Internet with a bandwidth
of an eighth of a terabit (a trillion binary digits)
per second. 126
So, Dr. Tinari suggests that the computers of 2030 will be
half-a-million times more powerful than today’s machines.
My view, however, is that he has underestimated. His
projections seem to ignore the evidence that the rate of
exponential change is itself speeding up exponentially and