There are many sources for trend information out there that you can use to calculate out some future stakes in the ground. One that has a great deal of this material is Ray Kurzweil’s book: The Singularity is Near. It is still relatively recent and has numerous graphs about technical trends. There is even a website with the underlying data and its sources. Using this information as well as a few other websites that claim to have newer relevant information, I did some linear and logarithmic extrapolation (based on the type of data and its growth curve) to come up with some metrics for the future.
For the Internet:
- Number of internet nodes: 10 Billion
- Internet traffic: 4.5x 10^21 Bytes per year
- Home Internet Bandwidth: 290 Mb/s - Nielson's Law of Internet Bandwidth
- Internet unique users: 3.35 Billion
In the IT hardware space
- System memory: 6.8 Billion bits per $
- Average transistor price: 2.7x10^9 Transistors per $
- Transistors per processor: 13 Billion
- Wireless performance: 370Mb/s - Edholm's Law of Bandwidth
- Magnetic Storage: 41 Terabytes per $
In the Health care space
- Cost of DNA Sequencing 3x10^-4 dollars per sequenced pair (clearly this low price will change how ailments (or likely ailments) are diagnosed
Global population
- 7.4 Billion people (This one was interesting because it had numbers ranging all over the map based on the assumptions that were used).
I am not saying these are “Right”, but these numbers should be the basis of some significant thought.
