Kevin Kelly in a great book, What Technology Wants, gives fantastic illustrations of the power of the exponential in a number of areas related to the Fourth Revolution (read our post Why the Fourth Revolution is the Era of the Exponential, and How this Changes Everything).
First, the Kurzweil law showing how computation capability has evolved since the beginning of the 20th century (at a time where all calculations were manual), showing how it evolved exponentially even before the modern Moore’s law of doubling computational capability every 18 month. According to Kevin Kelly, “the curve (let’s call it Kurzweil’s Law) transects five different technological species of computation: electromechanical, relay, vacuum tube, transistors, and integrated circuits. An unobserved constant operating in five distinct paradigms of technology for over a century must be more than an industry road map . It suggests that the nature of these ratios is baked deep into the fabric of the technium.”
Also I noticed this depiction of the power density in various natural and artificial devices, showing how extreme it can be in a microprocessor:
The era of the exponential is really upon us!
