Growth rates in nature are never exponential. They are sigmoidal. Sigmoids look very exponential when you're in the middle of them, but we are starting to see t

Growth rates in nature are never exponential. They are sigmoidal. Sigmoids look very exponential when you're in the middle of them, but we are starting to see the level of moore's law (yeah yeah, it's technology not ICs, still sigmoidal) So, yeah, we're not too far off from the end of the road for silicon lithography. We've had quite a good run, and we've advanced so, so far from the humble beginnings 60 years ago. With each generation of chips, with ever shrinking process size, the designs get harder and harder. At some point soon, we're going to decide that we just can't improve this technology any further. That silicon-lithography based computers just aren't going to get any better. So what happens then? What happens to Intel, and all the other semiconductor vendors when this year's newly released chips aren't any better than last year's chips? Is the market going to accept that? Will it be OK for Apple to say to everyone that the iPhone 20 (or whatever) is as good as it is going to get, and no new whizzy features are going to be implemented? I think the investors will file lawsuits, and all the heads of the technology companies will be replaced with people who are going to try harder, and use some other, better, technology instead to keep the profits rolling in. And what is that going to be? Molecular nanotechnology. Precise placement of individual atoms to create materials and structures with superior properties to what we have now. And that will enable a whole bunch of things, including AGI.