Is there a maximum threshold computers can advance to?

Sort of.... There's a whole library of corollaries to Moore's Law. And we're a little behind target to hit wall at the end of that road. Originally the target was around 2020, certainly on silicon. substrate changes might get a little more out of that. After that for us, there will be a little bit in the way of progress. Quantum processing will open some doors, but there are a lot of limits on that as to the kinds of problems which can take advantage of that (factoring, searching). Photonics will give us more bandwidth. It is certainly going to help with cloud computing, which could grow geometrically. The limitations on the gains from this is one of the corollaries to Moore's law and might continue past 2050.

But you're actually asking a more fundamental question about the limits of computation. Most of the absolute limits based on the physical laws of the universe as we understand them point to black holes as the information kings. They can store the most energy, they can compute the fastest.

If you're asking the sociological question of "Will people always find progressively more computing power available or will that end in my lifetime?" For you it will probably last for your whole lifetime, but there is going to be a transition period coming up which might change the rates of those gains. Cloud computing is probably the one with the biggest broadest future. It's limited by energy, available area to put data centers, and of course the ability to pay for them. That could be geometric early on. But One shouldn't expect 50 years of geometric gains in storage and processing power. That's probably gone, even as we're ever more able to push more bits through pipes of the same size.

But your children are grandchildren are likely to live on a computing plateau where it's just a linear function of how much a computer costs/is difficult to build. They won't even be able to understand the change you lived through. But their computers will be even closer to superscience than ours are. For instance an SD card will hold TBs, enough for a picture from every minute of a person's life. That period may last a very long time, or quickly be supplemented by things like molecular computing or something else. In time new technologies which would appear magical to us may become available, and change the game again. In that coming dark period, real advancement might be driven by applied mathematics and the ability to express previously intractable problems in terms of already well understood easy ones.

/r/technology Thread