3-D Magnetic Recording technology – where a magnetic head writes and reads data on stacked layers using microwaves – is commercially scalable, that would still mean maximum storage drives of hundreds of terabytes. Again, that may be impressive, but it certainly is not exponential.
But while a paradigm shift might be needed in storage, which slows progress in the short term, that could mean little in the broader picture. As impressive as digital storage is, we know that compared to storing data as DNA – which can be presumed as a hypothetical limit – we have barely scratched the surface. While technology like that might not be on your laptop anytime soon, the potential is astonishing, with a single gram of human DNA able to store 215 petabytes (215 million gigabytes) of information. This is not the realm of abstract speculation, and humans have been able to store data as DNA since 2012, when Harvard University geneticists encoded a 52,000-word book using strands of DNA’s fourletter alphabet of A, G, T, and C to encode the 0s and 1s of the digitised file.
While such progress might not have applications in the foreseeable future, here too discounting the possibility of going well beyond the final squares of the chessboard – in bandwidth and storage as well as processing speeds – appears unwise. It seems increasingly reasonable to presume that the primary constraints on technological advance are the laws of physics. For now, they remain a long way of.
The Power of Experience
Change doesn’t have to be exponential to be transformative in the context of the Third Disruption. Around the same time Gordon Moore made his forecast about the future of computing, Bruce Henderson – founder of the Boston Consulting
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chaos under heaven