Exponential: Order and Chaos in an Age of Accelerating Technology

by Azeem Azhar

Put simply, exponential growth refers to an increase that compounds consistently over time. Whereas a linear process is what happens to your age, increasing by a predictable one with each revolution of the earth around the sun, an exponential process is like a savings account with interest. It increases by a fixed percentage, say 2 per cent every year. But next year’s 2 per cent applies not just to your original savings but to your savings plus last year’s interest. Such compounding starts slow – it’s even slightly boring. But at some point, the curve turns upwards and starts to take off. From this point onwards, the value leaps higher at a dizzying pace. Any number of natural processes follow an exponential pattern: the number of bacteria in a petri dish, or the spread of a virus through a population, for example. A more recent development, however, is the emergence of exponential technologies. I define an exponential technology as one that can, for a roughly fixed cost, improve at a rate of more than 10 per cent per year for several decades. A mathematical purist, of course, would argue that even a 1 per cent compounding change is an exponential change. Strictly speaking, it is. But a 1 per cent annual change takes a lot of time to get going. A figure compounding at 1 per cent per annum would take 70 years, the better part of a lifetime, to double.