Exponential growth: A portent for computing and society

Just recently I wrote an article for Venture Beat where I retold the story of the chess playing king and the traveling sage. The sage, in return for beating the king at chess, requests that the king pays his reward in rice - one grain on the first square of the board, two on the second, four on the fourth and then so on. After losing, the king quickly discovered he could not pay his debt, for on the 20th square he needed to place 1,000,000 grains of rice, on the 40th 1,000,000,000 grains of rice. And, finally on the 64th square, the king would have had to put more than 18,000,000,000,000,000,000 grains of rice - equal to about 210 billion tons. The point behind all of this is to start thinking about the power of exponential growth and how it is impacting our world and our future.