Exponential: Order and Chaos in an Age of Accelerating Technology

by Azeem Azhar

Silicon chips get faster as you make their components smaller. And since chips live on a square wafer, each time you shrink a component you get the efficiency gain squared. If you have a wafer that is 100 square millimetres and you can fit one component onto every millimetre, then a single wafer can hold 10,000 components (100 × 100). If you shrink the components by 50 per cent, so that you can fit two onto every millimetre, you end up with 40,000 components (200 × 200) on the same die. This process holds true for many exponential technologies. Even mighty wind turbines are not immune to such effects. The generating capacity of a wind turbine is proportional to the area that the blades sweep through. That area grows by the square of the length of the blades, so if you are able to manufacture a blade twice as long, you get quadruple the impact.