Futurists such as
Ray Kurzweil,
Bruce Sterling, and
Vernor Vinge believe that the exponential improvement described by Moore's law will ultimately lead to a
technological singularity: a period where progress in technology occurs almost instantly.
[49]
Although
Kurzweil agrees that by 2019 the current strategy of ever-finer
photolithography will have run its course, he speculates that this does not mean the end of Moore's law:
Moore's law of Integrated Circuits was not the first, but the fifth
paradigm to forecast accelerating price-performance ratios. Computing devices have been consistently multiplying in power (per unit of time) from the mechanical calculating devices used in the
1890 U.S. Census, to [
Newman's] relay-based "
[Heath] Robinson" machine that cracked the
Lorenz cipher, to the
CBS vacuum tube computer that predicted the election of
Eisenhower, to the transistor-based machines used in the first
space launches, to the integrated-circuit-based personal computer.
[50]Kurzweil speculates that it is likely that some new type of technology (possibly
optical or
quantum computers) will replace current integrated-circuit technology, and that Moore's Law will hold true long after 2020.
Lloyd shows how the potential computing capacity of a kilogram of matter equals pi times energy divided by Planck's constant. Since the energy is such a large number and Plancks's constant is so small, this equation generates an extremely large number: about 5.0 * 1050 operations per second.
[49] He believes that the
exponential growth of Moore's law will continue beyond the use of integrated circuits into technologies that will lead to the
technological singularity. The
Law of Accelerating Returns described by Ray Kurzweil has in many ways altered the public's perception of Moore's Law. It is a common (but mistaken) belief that Moore's Law makes predictions regarding all forms of technology, when it has only actually been demonstrated clearly for
semiconductor circuits. However many people including Richard Dawkins have observed that Moore's law will apply - at least by inference - to any problem that can be attacked by digital computers and is in it essence also a digital problem. Therefore progress in genetics where the coding is digital 'the genetic coding of GATC' may also advance at a Moore's law rate. Many futurists still use the term "Moore's law" in this broader sense to describe ideas like those put forth by Kurzweil but do not fully understand the difference between linear problems and digital problems.