Living with exponential trends is confounding because they mimic linear trends in their early stages then suddenly shoot skyward. As Kurzweil often describes it, “If I count 30 steps linearly I get to 30. If I count exponentially, 30 steps later I’m at a billion. It makes a dramatic difference.”
Here’s the point: Technology is advancing at an exponential rate, but we experience it linearly. If two points on an exponential curve are close enough, the experience of moving from one to the other will seem linear. Thus, our expectations and projections about the future are often based on the wrong scale — linear instead of exponential.
He thinks the sixth paradigm of computing will be modeled on the structure of the human brain:
Chips today are flat (although it does require up to 20 layers of material to produce one layer of circuitry). Our brain, in contrast, is organized in three dimensions. We live in a three dimensional world, why not use the third dimension? The human brain actually uses a very inefficient electrochemical digital controlled analog computational process. The bulk of the calculations are done in the interneuronal connections at a speed of only about 200 calculations per second (in each connection), which is about ten million times slower than contemporary electronic circuits. But the brain gains its prodigious powers from its extremely parallel organization in three dimensions.
There are many technologies in the wings that build circuitry in three dimensions.
As he writes in The Singularity is Near, it is specifically information technology that is growing exponentially. But this is far from a limiting factor:
