So I want to talk today about an idea. It’s a big idea. Actually, I think it’ll eventually be seen as probably the single biggest idea that’s emerged in the past century. It’s the idea of computation. Now, of course, that idea has brought us all of the computer technology we have today and so on. But there’s actually a lot more to computation than that. It’s really a very deep, very powerful, very fundamental idea, whose effects we’ve only just begun to see.

Well, I myself have spent the past 30 years of my life working on three large projects that really try to take the idea of computation seriously. So I started off at a young age as a physicist using computers as tools. Then, I started sort of drilling down, thinking about the computations I might want to do, trying to figure out what primitives they could be built up from and how they could be automated as much as possible. Eventually, I created a whole structure based on symbolic programming and so on that let me build Mathematica. And for the past 23 years, at an increasing rate, we’ve been pouring more and more ideas and capabilities and so on into Mathematica, and I’m happy to say that’s led to many good things in R and D and education, lots of other areas. Well, I have to admit, actually, that I also had a very selfish reason for building Mathematica. I wanted to use it myself, a bit like Galileo got to use his telescope 400 years ago. But I wanted to look, not at the astronomical universe, but at the computational universe.

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Information technology grows in an exponential manner. It’s not linear. And our intuition is linear. When we walked through the savanna a thousand years ago we made linear predictions where that animal would be. And that worked fine. It’s hardwired in our brains. But the pace of exponential growth is really what describes information technologies. And it’s not just computation. There is a big difference between linear and exponential growth. If I take 30 steps linearly, one, two, three, four, five, I get to 30. If I take 30 steps exponentially, two, four, eight, 16, I get to a billion. It makes a huge difference. And that really describes information technology.

When I was a student at MIT we all shared one computer that took up a whole building. The computer in your cellphone today is a million times cheaper, a million times smaller, a thousand times more powerful. That’s a billion-fold increase in capability per dollar that we’ve actually experienced since I was a student. And we’re going to do it again in the next 25 years. Information technology progresses through a series of S-curves where each one is a different paradigm. So people say, “What’s going to happen when Moore’s Law comes to an end?” Which will happen around 2020. We’ll then go to the next paradigm. And Moore’s Law was not the first paradigm to bring exponential growth to computing. The exponential growth of computing started decades before Gordon Moore was even born. And it doesn’t just apply to computation. It’s really any technology where we can measure the underlying information properties.

It’s amazing, when you meet a head of state and you say, “What is your most precious natural resource?” — they will not say children at first. And then when you say children, they will pretty quickly agree with you.

(Video): We’re traveling today with the Minister of Defense of Colombia, head of the army and the head of the police, and we’re dropping off 650 laptops today to children who have no television, no telephone and have been in a community cut off from the rest of the world for the past 40 years.

The importance of delivering laptops to this region is connecting kids who have otherwise been unconnected because of the FARC, the guerrillas that started off 40 years ago as a political movement and then became a drug movement. There are one billion children in the world, and 50 percent of them don’t have electricity at home or at school. And in some countries — let me pick Afghanistan — 75 percent of the little girls don’t go to school. And I don’t mean that they drop out of school in the third or fourth grade — they don’t go.

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