Then of course there is Moore’s Law (variously formulated), which people kept prematurely predicting the end of, and indeed clock speed stalled, but FLOPS nevertheless has been on an exponential track at least to 2017.
And there is a notable graph comparing “experts’” predictions of the future of something or other that over an extended period of time predicted that now it’s going to flatten, when it just kept on going up. I don’t remember enough details to track that one down.
It’s easy to predict that an exponential will end, next to impossible to predict when or how. Nice, symmetrical business-as-usual-during-alterations logistic curves are not the rule, and the end is not to be found in the beginning.
Not many S-curves here, except the imaginary ones hand-drawn over the data:
From “Little Science, Big Science” by Derek de Solla Price, 1963, pp.26-29.
Nor here:
Data plotted from table 1 of Sami Haddad, Concetta Restieri & Kannan Krishnan (2001): “Characterization of age-related changes in body weight and organ weights from birth to adolescence in humans”.
Then of course there is Moore’s Law (variously formulated), which people kept prematurely predicting the end of, and indeed clock speed stalled, but FLOPS nevertheless has been on an exponential track at least to 2017.
And there is a notable graph comparing “experts’” predictions of the future of something or other that over an extended period of time predicted that now it’s going to flatten, when it just kept on going up. I don’t remember enough details to track that one down.
It’s easy to predict that an exponential will end, next to impossible to predict when or how. Nice, symmetrical business-as-usual-during-alterations logistic curves are not the rule, and the end is not to be found in the beginning.