“In March of 1953 there were 53 kilobytes of high-speed random-access memory on planet Earth.” This line from George Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral makes it clear how far we have come since computing’s dawn. My own laptop now has more than 100,000 times the RAM of the entire planet less than a century ago. While I couldn’t find estimates for the current global RAM (a related discussion is here), separately, it has been estimated that humanity’s technologies could, as of 2007, carry out a total of 6.4 × 1018 instructions per second, a phenomenal speed.
While everyone knows that technology grows at an exponential rate, we often have a certain blindness when it comes to the speed of changes and what these changes mean. Two researchers have put our current computational powers in perspective, with the kind of comparisons that I am a sucker for:
To put our findings in perspective, the 6.4 × 1018 instructions per second that humankind can carry out on its general-purpose computers in 2007 are in the same ballpark area as the maximum number of nerve impulses executed by one human brain per second (1017). The 2.4 × 1021 bits stored by humanity in all of its technological devices in 2007 is approaching an order of magnitude of the roughly 1023 bits stored in the DNA of a human adult, but it is still minuscule as compared with the 1090 bits stored in the observable universe. However, in contrast to natural information processing, the world’s technological information processing capacities are quickly growing at clearly exponential rates.
Such a journey from our humble beginnings sixty one years ago.
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