“we already have nearly unlimited computing power at our disposal” I have to disagree. To tackle hard problems I would be glad to have a billion times more computational power. We are doing semantic processing of texts. For one customer we have a million texts, and processing one takes about one second. To have the computer automatically generate rules (Genetic Programming) we would like to have this: the computer generates a rule, processes the million texts, and checks if that rule improved the overall understanding. Currently one million processing seconds are required. But if we could do this on one million cores, we could generate one rule per second. The thing is: an evolutionary system will generate millions and millions of rules. So, even if we had a million times more computational power, it would still require several months to finish a run. Renting such capacity from Amazon & Co. would cost easily 5-10 millions. With a billion times more computational power however this would fall in the range of perhaps a few thousand dollars.

Also, it would be useful, if mobile phones would feature such a computational power, so that strong AI software with above human intelligence could run on it. Such software could technically run on a C64 if enough memory were available, but answers would take quite a long time.

So, I really hope that we will see maaany trillion times more computational power in this century.