

A Googleplex for $1000 by 2040? - bfrs

The Wikipedia donation page says: "Google might have close to a million servers."<p>Assuming as Kurzweil suggests that the limits of computing hardware are really far out, i.e., we can expect Moore's "Law" to continue unabated until we hit computoronium, today's Googleplex should be available for $1000 in 2040 (2011 + 1.5 [years per doubling] * log2(1e6)). Somehow it sounds <i>too good to be true</i>.
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nextparadigms
I don't think it's inconceivable for today's computing performance to seem
very trivial 30 years from now. But just like now, when we get there we'll
take it for granted that whatever service is available then uses 1 million
times more computational power than today's Google.

People don't seem to think that much of the fact that a simple smartphone that
you keep in your pocket today is more powerful than a computer powering a
rocket 50 years ago.

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tluyben2
Not even a smartphone; your cellphone is a lot more powerful as well.

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jacknews
I think moores law is a given until 2020, according to a couple of articles
I've read linked here. That gives us 7nm chips, I guess about 16x the density
of today. So your dual core laptop will have 32 cores. I think that might be
enough for most people, until we figure out some uses for that kind of power
for the everyday person. Moores law is bound to be an S curve, and I think
we'll start to get diminishing returns economically, as well as demand
dropping off for more power sometime in the 20's.

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nostromo
A Googleplex at any price in 2010 probably seemed too good to be true in 1980,
no?

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bfrs
As Tyler Cowen points out in "The Great Stagnation", maybe these first 20
doublings or so were the low hanging fruit.

Kurzweil keeps saying that people underestimate exponential processes (its
also the topic of "The most important video on math" [1]), but I think it cuts
both ways. It is by no means clear that the next 20 doublings will proceed at
the same rate as the last 20.

People might just say, "Siri via the cloud is good enough for me, I don't need
Siri running directly on my phone".

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY>

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ntkachov
Presumably, with quantum computers this isn't, exactly, far out.

