MacBook Pros for a Nickel by 2028

Scale is probably one of the most important skills necessary to become an exponential thinker. Recently Sal Kahn, the founder of KahnAcademy, came out with a video explaining exponential growth. It's worth watching. He shows how for many periods in the past, growth from a very small number seems imperceptible but at some point explodes with huge increments of change ... even though the rate of change remains constant.

Exponential Growth


In the real world you may have seen some of the terms in the chart below. It shows both expansion and decay based on exponential change. You will hear a lot about nano technology in months and years ahead. It is effectively 1 billionth of a meter. This is very small.
The promise is it will lead to fundamental changes in everything from energy to manufacturing. Since computing power is on a course to double every 20 months or so, in 15 years we will see it grow from a relative 1 to 2^15 which equals 32,768. By the way, that would make a $1000 MacBook Pro worth less than a Nickel. 

That amount of computing power for the same price we pay for a single unit will lead to  a level of progress in Nanotechnology that is hard to comprehend.

SI multiples for metre (m)

Submultiples				Multiples
Value	Symbol	Name		Value	Symbol	Name
10−1 m	dm	decimetre		101 m	dam	decametre
10−2 m	cm	centimetre		102 m	hm	hectometre
10−3 m	mm	millimetre		103 m	km	kilometre
10−6 m	µm	micrometre		106 m	Mm	megametre
10−9 m	nm	nanometre		109 m	Gm	gigametre
10−12 m	pm	picometre		1012 m	Tm	terametre
10−15 m	fm	femtometre		1015 m	Pm	petametre
10−18 m	am	attometre		1018 m	Em	exametre
10−21 m	zm	zeptometre		1021 m	Zm	zettametre
10−24 m	ym	yoctometre		1024 m	Ym	yottametre
Common prefixed units are in bold face.

So, this is why an understanding of scale and exponential growth and decay is so critical. Every individual and enterprise will be faced with an amount of change that will challenge the status quo. It's not in 100 years, it's around the corner.