Consider almost any metric for the performance or cost‐effectiveness of information technology, and you will find exponentially compounding rates of improvement that extend over years and decades. For example, the silicon field‐effect transistor—the ubiquitous logical switch that performs nearly all of today's information processing—has a wonderful attribute. Properly scaled to smaller dimensions, it uses less power and switches faster. And the smaller the transistor, the more of them that can be fabricated on a given area of Si substrate. Because the processes used to fabricate one transistor can be implemented in parallel to fabricate many transistors, the cost per transistor tends to decline as transistors shrink. True, the manufacturing control of ever smaller dimensions and tighter tolerances requires new and expensive equipment and factories, but the industry has so far successfully amortized those costs over the expanding revenue base enabled by ever cheaper IT products, including cameras, cell phones, televisions, and automobiles. For decades now, the cost of a finished Si chip has remained roughly constant, while the number of circuits on that chip has risen exponentially and the cost of information processing has plummeted.