When I was a teenager, practical computers did not yet exist. In 1966, my first exposure to a computer in engineering school was a room-sized mainframe whose fast memory consisted of a foot-tall rotating magnetic disc that could store 8,000 “bytes” (each byte containing eight “bits,” which allow for 256 possible values representing alphabetic letters or numbers).
At the time, we could forget about storing the full text of the King James Version of the Bible on anything faster than magnetic tape: That would have required about five “Mega” bytes, more than 2,000 rotating magnetic disks.
The laws of technological growth
Many competent technologists have since tracked the growth of computer technology. From their observations, we have derived certain “laws”:
- Moore’s Law: Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, observed in 1965 that the number of transistors on a chip roughly doubles every year, later increased to every two years in 1975, while costs stay stable or drop.
- Rock’s Law: Semiconductor fabrication costs double every four years. This is also known as Moore’s second law.
- Kryder’s Law: Disk storage density doubles about every 13 months.
- Nielsen’s Law: Internet bandwidth for users grows 50 percent per year.
Our status today
The classic transistor-doubling pace has slowed due to atomic-scale limits, but innovations like 3D stacking and new materials sustain our overall scientific progress.
Flash forward 60 years and remember the power of compounded interest and inflation. Everything grows over time, even if we are not paying attention. These days, the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra leads technology by providing 2 terabytes of memory in a package you can carry in your pants pocket. That is two million megabytes. It is enough to store 400,000 King James Bibles without illustrations.
Today, AI-based search engines using large data farms of multiple computers refreshed constantly over the internet can access an exabyte of text. An exabyte is a million million megabytes. The maximum estimated storage capacity of the human brain is only about 2.5 thousand million megabytes.
(Is anybody getting lost yet?)
These days, I sometimes find myself wandering into my kitchen and then wondering what I came in here for.
The computers are catching up and surpassing us at an alarming rate. I think we humans might be headed for deep trouble. We had better hope that our computers develop some common sense, patience, and self-awareness. Else we might find ourselves taken over by machines that are decidedly peeved with our human foibles. Does anybody remember the computer HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey?
Richard A. Lawhern is a nationally recognized health care educator and patient advocate who has spent nearly three decades researching pain management and addiction policy. His extensive body of work, including over 300 published papers and interviews, reflects a deep critique of U.S. health care agencies and their approaches to chronic pain treatment. Now retired from formal academic and hospital affiliations, Richard continues to engage with professional and public audiences through platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and his contributions to KevinMD. His advocacy extends to online communities like Protect People in Pain, where he works to elevate the voices of patients navigating restrictive opioid policies. Among his many publications is a guideline on opioid use for chronic non-cancer pain, reflecting his commitment to evidence-based reform in pain medicine.
