The technology platform in 2020

In a relative old blog, There's Plenty of Room in the Future (dated May 9, 2003) Naval Ravikant wrote:

Twenty years ago, the personal computer revolution fuelled silicon valley based on two drivers:

The complexity for minimum component costs in the semiconductor industry increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year and a half (Moore's Law). This drove up CPU speed, RAM size, GPU power, etc.

Hard disk storage for a given cost increased by a factor of two every 9-12 months

Geometric growth in CPU power and disk space drove the PC revolution. Big winners -- Intel, Seagate, Microsoft, others...

In the last five to ten years, it became obvious that other predictable factors were at play:

Modem speeds doubled every 21 months, up until the point where they made the jump to broadband

Optical communications bandwidth doubled to tripled every year

LAN bandwidth increased 10x every two to three years

Geometric growth in modem speeds, LAN networking, and optics drove the Internet revolution. Big winners -- Yahoo! Ebay, Google, others...

In the last three-five years, yet more steadily advancing technical trends have come into play:

Internet traffic continues to double every year for the foreseeable future

CMOS image sensors are doubling in density every 18 months

Liquid Crystal Displays and Liquid Crystal on Silicon are increasing panel size and density, roughly doubling every two to three years

Solid-state non-volatile memory is doubling in capacity every 18 months

Improved power management and new batteries are increasing effective battery life by about 20-30% every year

Wireless networks are doubling in capacity every 18 months

On the other hand, I saw a report about a 64-bit traffic jam. According to the growth trend of the internal memory of computer (RAM), the physical address space for a 32-bit computer is 4G. Today, most consumer grade desktop computer are sold with 512M RAM (Dell is promoting a free upgrade to 1G today). If the trend continues, the 4G limit will be reached in a couple of years. Will the current lack of software support for 64-bit computing spell the first reversal of the trend? I doubt that!

The current consumer grade computer has over-supplied the computational power to the average users. The main economic driving force will be a new application which will use up the current over-supplied computational power. Will that come from video processing? image processing? natural language processing? I don't know. Whatever that may be, it will change the life in 2020.