THE SKINNY

Gordon Moore, one of the three founders of Intel, in 1965 noted that the number of transistors you could cram onto a piece of silicon for a dollar had been routinely doubling since the first commercial chip six years before. His bold prediction that such doublings would continue came to be known as “Moore’s Law.”

By any name, the pace of technological change is prodding human evolution. In 2003, Intel shipped its 1 billionth microchip. In 2007, it expects to ship its 2 billionth. What’s clear is that computing power is getting cheaper and the Internet is getting faster. What’s unclear is what it will mean.

Here’s how quickly a few things are doubling:

Number of scientific journals:

every 15 years

*

Number of U.S. engineers:

every 10 years

*

Number of transistors on a chip, human genes mapped per year:

every 18 months

*

Amount of computer memory you can buy for $1:

every 15 months

*

Performance-to- cost ratio of Internet service, Internet size and speed, and the resolution of brain scans:

annually

*

Number of robots:

every 9 months

-- Joel Garreau