In April 1965, a young researcher named Gordon Moore wrote a short article for the now-defunct Electronics Magazine pointing out that each year, the number of transistors that could be economically crammed onto an integrated circuit roughly doubled. Moore predicted that this trend of cost-effective miniaturization would continue for quite some time.

Two years later Moore co-founded Intel Corporation with Robert Noyce. Today, Intel is the largest producer of semiconductor computer chips in the world, and Moore is a multi-billionaire. All this can be traced back to the semiconductor industry’s vigorous effort to realize Moore’s prediction, which is now known as “Moore’s Law.”

There are several variations of Moore’s Law—for instance, some formulations measure hard disk storage, while others concern power consumption or the size and density of components on a computer chip. Yet whatever their metric, nearly all versions still chart exponential growth, which translates into a doubling in

This is the power of waste. When scarce resources become abundant, smart people treat them differently, exploiting them rather than conserving them. It feels wrong, but done right it can change the world.

The problem is that abundant resources, like computing power, are too often treated as scarce. Consider another example: Wired's IT department used to send out occasional emails telling employees it was time to "delete unneeded files from the shared folders"—their way of saying they had run out of storage room on the servers. Because we're good corporate citizens, we all dutifully scanned through our files, deleting those we could live without. Perhaps you've done the same.

One day, after years of this ritual, I began to wonder just how much storage capacity we actually had. Turns out, not so much: 500 gigabytes. At the time, a terabyte of memory (1,000 gigabytes) cost about $130. I had recently purchased a standard Dell desktop PC for my family, which the kids used for playing vide