once a technology becomes digital — that is, once it can be programmed in the ones and zeroes of computer code — it hops on the back of Moore's Law and begins accelerating exponentially.

Anything that becomes digitized (biology, medicine, manufacturing, and so forth) hops on Moore's law of increasing computational power.

Anything that becomes digitized (biology, medicine, manufacturing, and so forth) hops on Moore’s law of increasing computational power.

What's not fully realized is that Moore's Law was not the first paradigm to bring exponential growth to computers. We had electromechanical calculators, relay-based computers, vacuum tubes, and transistors. Every time one paradigm ran out of steam, another took over.

Faster-than-exponential growth also occurs in computing power, as measured by the evolution of the number of MIPS per $1,000 of computer from 1900 to 1997. Thus the so-called Moore's law is incorrect, since it implies only an exponential growth. This faster than exponential acceleration has been argued to lead to a transition to a new era, around 2030, corresponding to the epoch when we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.

We use one stage of technology to create the next stage, which is why technology accelerates, why it grows in power.

In 1965, Gordon Moore, the founder of Intel, noticed the number of integrated circuits on a transistor had been doubling every twelve to twenty-four months. The trend had been going on for about a decade and, Moore predicted, would probably last for another.9 About this last part, he was off by a bit. All told, Moore's law has held steady for nearly sixty years. This relentless progress in price and performance is the reason the smartphone in your pocket is a thousand times faster and million times cheaper than a supercomputer from the 1970s. It is exponential growth in action.

Technology is not simply additive; it is more often exponential. An invention usually triggers other inventions.

Moore thought this was pretty amazing and he predicted that this trend might continue. Well, it has for fifty-five years. Moore’s Law is the reason the smartphone in your pocket is a thousand times smaller, a thousand times cheaper, and a million times more powerful than a supercomputer from the 1970s.

The point about digitization, just to explain what I mean by that, is the way that information is no longer a physical commodity. It doesn't have a mass like it used to. So it used to be that if you wanted to leak a bunch of documents, you physically had to carry away these huge boxes of documents and then you had to physically photocopy them somehow. And they had this physical mass, and it was through that mass that they could be controlled by people in power. When information is digitized, it loses that mass for the most part. It becomes almost ephemeral, it's like an idea; it's like a thought. And it spreads and it can be shared almost instantaneously. So you can take that, and then you combine it with the internet, which is this web in which everybody is talking to each other and sharing information. And you've got the makings of what I think is a digital revolution, which nobody quite knows how to handle it, what to do with it.

If it can be said, it can be built [using digital technology].

If anything, there's a reverse Moore's Law observable in software: As processors become faster and memory becomes cheaper, software becomes correspondingly slower and more bloated, using up all available resources.

Biotechnology isn't just accelerating at the speed of Moore's law, it's accelerating at five times the speed of Moore's law — doubling in power and halving in price every four months!

Six Ds of Exponentials,” or the growth cycle of exponential technologies: Digitalization, Deception, Disruption, Demonetization, Dematerialization, and Democratization