I’ve known about Moore’s law since time immemorial. But I never delved into thinking why it was exponential. What make it move at an exponential rate and not just a linear progression?
On reading Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark, the author talks about this and I found the reasoning quite compelling:
Each step creates the next step
And in case of technology, say we build something (v1) that’s twice as fast. Now, we can use this technology to build the next version (v2) that’s twice as fast as v1. And that starts the exponential growth.
I’ve known all about similar processes like cell division, viral growth, etc. But hadn’t really sunk in that the technology that we’re creating is itself used to create its next version.
This is how technology progresses as well: once technology gets twice as powerful, it can often be used to design and build technology that’s twice as powerful in turn, triggering repeated capability doubling in the spirit of Moore’s law.
What’s important about this reasoning is that it goes beyond the physical constraints of CPU or a transistor. Which means that we may continue to see exponential growth in technology irrespective of space running out CPUs/GPUs.