I haven’t done a detailed analysis, but my suspicion is that, if one removes the Moore’s law and its consequences from the [technological] progress, the rest will look nothing like an exponent. Various branches would speed up for some time, then stall, or even regress. The overall rate of progress (how do you even qualitatively measure it?) would probably be closer to linear on average, or possibly too all-over-the-map to fit a curve through reliably.
My point is that we might be living in a Moore’s bubble, and the consequences of its bursting would be hard to predict.
Economic growth on the whole is exponential, that’s why it’s expressed as percentage growth.
The rest of technology looks like many separate curves, which do tend to show exponential or logistic shapes, at least for long periods, from agriculture yields to coal plant efficiency, to solar. Economies do that too: the norm is exponential growth, n% multiplicative increase per year, rather than linear growth. There are shifts, e.g. the fast exponential for top speeds in aerospace ended once we got into space, while DNA sequencing just increased its growth rate several fold, but it’s common for annual change to be multiplicative rather than additive.
I spent about 50 hours researching technological forecasting methods in the past few months and the performance curves database does look to be the most exciting thing happening in that field.
I haven’t done a detailed analysis, but my suspicion is that, if one removes the Moore’s law and its consequences from the [technological] progress, the rest will look nothing like an exponent. Various branches would speed up for some time, then stall, or even regress. The overall rate of progress (how do you even qualitatively measure it?) would probably be closer to linear on average, or possibly too all-over-the-map to fit a curve through reliably.
My point is that we might be living in a Moore’s bubble, and the consequences of its bursting would be hard to predict.
Economic growth on the whole is exponential, that’s why it’s expressed as percentage growth.
The rest of technology looks like many separate curves, which do tend to show exponential or logistic shapes, at least for long periods, from agriculture yields to coal plant efficiency, to solar. Economies do that too: the norm is exponential growth, n% multiplicative increase per year, rather than linear growth. There are shifts, e.g. the fast exponential for top speeds in aerospace ended once we got into space, while DNA sequencing just increased its growth rate several fold, but it’s common for annual change to be multiplicative rather than additive.
Check out the Performance Curve Database for many individual improvement curves.
I spent about 50 hours researching technological forecasting methods in the past few months and the performance curves database does look to be the most exciting thing happening in that field.
Amdahl’s law comes to mind in these discussions. The question is to what extent computing power can substitute for other things.