Why does our technology keep doubling its power at regular intervals, displaying what mathematicians call exponential growth? Indeed, why is it happening not only in terms of transistor miniaturization (a trend known as Moore’s law), but also more broadly for computation as a whole (figure 2.8), for memory (figure 2.4) and for a plethora of other technologies ranging from genome sequencing to brain imaging? Ray Kurzweil calls this persistent doubling phenomenon “the law of accelerating returns.”
