You’re right in that information/communications technologies as a whole have developed rapidly over the last century. This is part of Robert Gordon’s idea of an overall innovation slowdown (lots of progress in bits, very linear progress almost everywhere else).

I don’t buy his whole argument or his outlook for the future, I just wanted to dispute the idea that exponentials are a guaranteed and perpetually ongoing trend.

I agree with your general sentiment about AI being the crucial technology here, but I think you're simplifying it a lot.

> Arguments become weaker the more conservative they are because of exponential growth.

Technology doesn't always advance exponentially. Most of the time it's actually pretty linear. It's the adoption rates that tend to be exponential. Look at cars. The step up from horse and buggy to an automobile was a MASSIVE singular jump in tech, and it was rapidly adopted by the majority of the world. But since then, cars have gotten better, faster, more fuel efficient, etc, but all that progress over the last hundred years has been slow and linear.

Moore's Law is actually very unusual in that almost no other technologies follow an exponential trend like that, especially not for as long as Moore's Law has held.

AI has been exponential over the last decade or so, mostly owing to scaling up parameters and data, but we've already hit realistic parameter limits and we're rapidly closing in on the limits of how much data exists for training. I have no doubt that these issues will be circumvented at some point, but there's no guarantee the exponential will continue to hold indefinitely.