Moore's law and Kurzweil's law of accelerating returns

Moore's law was founded by Gordon Moore, who co-founded Intel. It is based on his observation that computing power seems to be doubling every two years or so. However, initially this only described the number of transistors on an integrated circuit, but eventually this law was expanded to include other significant trends as well (describing the growth in computer power in terms of price/performance).

This law is important as it can be used, with the law of accelerating returns, to predict the singularity.

The law of accelerating returns describes that systems that evolve will do so exponentially until it 'hits a wall' (ie. biological evolution) unless it goes through a paradigm shift in which case the exponential growth can continue (ie. vacuum tube computers to microprocessors).

With this knowledge - some futurists can predict the future very accurately, within a certain standard deviation of a point of time in the future, given that such trends will continue unabated.

Links:

The Law of Accelerating Returns - http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1

Moore's Law - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law