🤩 The Exponential Age is here

At some point between 2013 and 2015, I argue that we entered the Exponential Age. It is a new period of human affairs catalysed by accelerating technologies in four broad domains: computing, energy, biology and manufacturing.

I call technologies that improve at least 10% per annum on a compounding basis for decades exponential technologies. And the four domains feature several of them. As these technologies mature from proto-science to well-understood breakthroughs, their compounding improvements become more and more noticeable. At some point, they become very, very powerful (or very, very cheap) depending on how you look at things.

Consider the first transistors. In 1958 Fairchild Semiconductor sold IBM 100 transistors for $150 each. Sixty years later, a transistor, embedded in a chip, cost a few billionths of a dollar, deflation of a factor of 100 billion or a trillion. And these cheaper transistors were smaller, faster and more energy-efficient than their ancestors. That is the rhyth…