After decades of devoted service, Moore's Law will have run its course around 2019. By that time, transistor features will be just a few atoms in width. But new computer architectures will continue the exponential growth of computing. For example, computing cubes are already being designed that will provide thousands of layers of circuits, not just one as in today's computer chips. It is the result of a fundamental attribute of any evolutionary process, a phenomenon I call the Law of Accelerating Returns.
Advancement speeds up.
The escalating growth in the price performance of computing is one important example of such accelerating returns. A frequent criticism of predictions is that they rely on an unjustified extrapolation of current trends, without considering the forces that may alter those trends. But an evolutionary process accelerates because it builds on past achievements, including improvements in its own means for further evolution. The resources it needs to continue exponential growth are its own increasing order and the chaos in the environment in which the evolutionary process takes place, which provides the options for further diversity. These two resources are essentially without limit.