Is Hamming's Prediction a Good Idea?

In the first chapter of am hamming's book, he uses order of magnitude estimation to make prediction about what the world is going to do. It reminds me of at least one other place where i've seen that, which is an example that i've come across recently: jack northrop gave a talk in 19 forty two saying that basically, like modern aircraft were possible given auto pilot. In many ways, it is really interesting. O, what do you think would have surprised him about the state of computing to day? I don't think he'd be surprised by ano decreasing, corps performance per wat trading off with sam moulty corp, or something like that. And i don