Peak computing?

While others focus on prominent issues – peak oil and carbon are particularly obvious right now – we try to stick to a wider interpretation of sustainability. My eyes pricked up then when people starting writing about “peak everything“. This graphic is from a New Scientist article by Armin Reller (University of Augsburg in Germany) and Tom Graedel (Yale) (see also long extract on Richard Dawkin).

Of special interest to us, of course, is the apparent speed at which elements constituting computers are running out (even if most of us have never heard of most of them).

I’m not alone in this observation of course:

IDTechEx returns frequently to this topic because we consider the situation to be very serious indeed.

It could be that Watson’s famous 1943 misquote (“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers“) comes true after all, except that the demand will be there, just not the supply.