Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns forsees faster growth in computational power over the next several decades than Moore’s Law predicts. Kurzweil said we can “expect the process to accelerate at a double exponential rate.””The next paradigm, the sixth, will be three-dimensional molecular computing,” Kurzweil said. “In the past year, there have been major strides, for example, in creating three-dimensional carbon nanotube-based electronic circuits.”

Lucent Technologies and IBM have already succeeded in fabricating molecular-scale computing elements.