I know Rodney Brooks from his starring role in Errol Morris’s sublime Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. Today Brooks contributes an essay to MIT’s Technology Review on exponential growth in various aspects of IT. If this excerpt grabs you, you’ll want to read the whole thing (registration required):

If we go out a few more years, iPods and similar devices will be able to store massive numbers of movies, rather than the paltry one or two you can carry around today. In fact, 20 years from now, a teenager will probably be able to shuffle down the street with every movie ever made in a $400 iPod. There will be tremendous business opportunities in digitizing old television shows and films, and for developing technologies that will let users browse and search them all. And of course we’ll witness epic battles over content ownership and compensation.