Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts solar industry dominance in six years

Futurist Ray Kurzweil made a thought-provoking presentation at a recent trade show for medical device companies, MD&M, in Anaheim, California. At one point during his 45-minute talk he shifted his attention to solar. Explaining the accelerating rate of technical progress, Kurzweil said technical developments form very predictable trajectories, and those trajectories are exponential. Consider the progress of the computing industry, he said. He spoke about his cell phone, which he said is several billion times more powerful per dollar than the computer he used as an undergraduate at MIT. "I went to MIT because it was so advanced that it actually had a computer in the late 1960s," Kurzweil said.