This prediction, now grandly known as Moore's law, implies the exponentially expanding power of circuit-based computation over time. A rough corollary is that you will get double the computational power for the same price at two-year intervals. Thus computers today can perform millions more computations per second than equivalently priced computers of only a few decades ago. It is further predicted that new computer technologies will take over where integrated circuits leave off and continue the inexorable march toward exponentially increasing computational power. The computational capacity of the human brain is only a few decades away from being duplicated on an affordable computing machine.
Brains are about to be outpaced by one of their products.
All three of these books provide a vivid window on the state of the art in artificial intelligence research, and offer provocative speculations on where we might be heading as the information age advances. Since the books cover much the same ground, with some difference of emphasis, Kurzweil's gives you the most bits for your buck. Gershenfeld's breezily chatty book sometimes reads too much like an advertisement for the Media Lab at M.I.T., of which he is director. Moravec's book is more intellectually adventurous and free with confident futuristic speculation. His vision is of a world in which machines are the next evolutionary step, with organic tissue but a blink in the eye of cosmic history.