The difference between semi-conductors and solar/battery tech is that you are already working at the molecular level with solar panels/batteries and have to change materials to get different results, this is complex as we don't have analytical models of this sort of thing.

With semi-conductors things materials don't need to be changed so much. We are still working with doped silicon (although we do need to make variations with SOI), we are just shrinking something we understand well.

Can't help but follow Kevin Kelly's vision of the future. Thanks for the share raju, surprised I missed this in my reader. Now to sneak out of the office for a walk so I can enjoy the read.

(my comment) While reading this post Kevin, I was captivated by a background image of a great stonelike wheel with many great spindles, your technium, grinding forward inevitably. Have you ever commissioned artisits to capture a fleeting image?

The paths our society rifles down are chosen by us. Even accepting the unerring push of progress we are free to navigate what rechnologies to pursue by the resources allocated to their improvement. We may be able to steer the technium rudder more easily than that of our world’s societies.

KK is no blogger. I have absolutely no time to read this giant essay while at work.

I did skim enough to have some optimism that Kelly knows what he's talking about. The biggest problem with many pundits is that they overgeneralize Moore's Law. It's not some magical exponential improvement in everything that has a battery attached. It's a statement about a specific technology: silicon transistors.

Kelly seems to have noticed this. He spends some time discussing the fact that magnetic storage is on a different exponential curve.