Saturday, March 28, 2020

this triple trend...........................


The first digital camera, built in 1976 by Kodak engineer Steven Sasson, was the size of a toaster oven, took twelve black-and-white images, and cost over $10,000.  Today, the average camera that comes with the average smartphone shows a thousand-fold improvement in weight, cost, and resolution over Sasson's model.  And these cameras are everywhere.  In cars, drones, phones, satellites, and such, and with an image resolution that's downright spooky.  Satellites photograph the Earth down to the half-meter range.  Drones shrink that to a centimeter.  But the LIDAR sensors atom autonomous cars capture just about everything—gathering 1.3 million data points per second.
     We see this triple trend of decreasing size and cost, and increasing performance everywhere.  The first commercial GPS hit shelves in 1981, weighing fifty-three points and costing $119,900.  By 2010, it had shrunk to a $5 chip small enough to sit on your finger.  The "inertial measurement unit" that guided our early rockets is another example.  In the mid-sixties, this was a fifty-pound $20 million device.  Today, the accelerometer and gyroscope in your cell phone do the same job for about $4 and weigh less than a grain of rice.

-Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler,  The Future Is Faster Than You Think:  How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives

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