OK I’ll bite. Memes and genes are obvious enough, but why is the rate of technological improvement proportional to the current technological level (or basically zero)? Don’t ideas get harder to find?
Well Big Ideas do get harder to find, but if you make a 1% improvement to the US’s steel production, then you get an extra 800,000 tons of steel. That doesn’t help you think up new improvements but it does mean that the next 1% improvement will yield 808,000 tons.
Basically, any cost reduction or speedup or quality improvement is on top of what you have. How would you save a silicon foundry $500,000 flat, without saving them more money as they expand? Maybe you could get a one-time government grant or a one-time supplier discount. You have to do a lot of one-time things like this for it to add up to anything significant.
Consider a technological improvement that seems to be constant or linear. Say you come up with a voltage regulator that uses 1 microwatt less than its predecessor. There’s two reasons this isn’t actually so linear. First, the total power consumption reduction is proportional to the number of times that circuit is used across all chips/devices. Second, if someone later finds a 1% power save across all transistors, then your little circuit will probably get that improvement too. It ends up being like a deposit into a savings account with interest.
If your savings account doesn’t have interest, then you probably will never be a millionaire from small deposits. If some branch of technology hasn’t found a few sequential compounding improvements then it probably won’t go anywhere.
For the sake of argument, I’ll accept your points about memes, genes, and technology being domains where growth is usually exponential. But even if those points are true, I think we still need an argument that growth is almost always exponential across all/most domains.
OK I’ll bite. Memes and genes are obvious enough, but why is the rate of technological improvement proportional to the current technological level (or basically zero)? Don’t ideas get harder to find?
Well Big Ideas do get harder to find, but if you make a 1% improvement to the US’s steel production, then you get an extra 800,000 tons of steel. That doesn’t help you think up new improvements but it does mean that the next 1% improvement will yield 808,000 tons.
Basically, any cost reduction or speedup or quality improvement is on top of what you have. How would you save a silicon foundry $500,000 flat, without saving them more money as they expand? Maybe you could get a one-time government grant or a one-time supplier discount. You have to do a lot of one-time things like this for it to add up to anything significant.
Consider a technological improvement that seems to be constant or linear. Say you come up with a voltage regulator that uses 1 microwatt less than its predecessor. There’s two reasons this isn’t actually so linear. First, the total power consumption reduction is proportional to the number of times that circuit is used across all chips/devices. Second, if someone later finds a 1% power save across all transistors, then your little circuit will probably get that improvement too. It ends up being like a deposit into a savings account with interest.
If your savings account doesn’t have interest, then you probably will never be a millionaire from small deposits. If some branch of technology hasn’t found a few sequential compounding improvements then it probably won’t go anywhere.
For the sake of argument, I’ll accept your points about memes, genes, and technology being domains where growth is usually exponential. But even if those points are true, I think we still need an argument that growth is almost always exponential across all/most domains.