🔮 Ten charts to understand the Exponential Age

This week marks the 500th edition of the Sunday newsletter. My aim all along has been to show that we live in extraordinary times.

I sent the first edition to 20 friends in 2015 and called it Square 33. This was a nod to the chessboard-rice analogy of exponential growth. The first 32 squares on a chessboard involve relatively modest numbers that don’t feel world-changing. But crossing into the 33rd square launches us into the numbers that seem incomprehensible.

We are in square 33.

In today’s retrospective edition, we’ll step back to explore the building blocks of how we understand the Exponential Age.

10 charts to understand the Exponential Age

Technology transitions happen fast. Cars made horses obsolete as a mode of transportation in less than 30 years.

Over the span of a century, the dramatic shift we see in the graph above turns into mere blip. The new technology becomes a seed for the transformation of markets, social norms and economic systems.

Today, technological transitions are occurring faster than ever before, rendering old technologies obsolete. Horace Dediu was among the first to show this.

The costs of key exponential technologies are collapsing — thanks to learning rates — and this makes them more stable and predictable in the long term than linear technologies.

At the same time, their adoption is surging.

Generative AI is being adopted faster than both the internet and personal computers. Some 39% of Americans aged 18–64 have used generative AI and more than 24% have used it at work at least once a week.

This is extraordinarily rapid adoption. Yet the landmark moment for generative AI will be when we finally see it reflected in productivity statistics. For electricity and the PC, an uptrend began after around 25% household adoption. The same may be true for generative AI.

New markets are going to emerge, particularly in the realms of energy and information. This confluence of factors is creating a landscape of change that is both exhilarating and challenging.

Energy, for instance, is transitioning from being finite, geographically constrained commodities to ubiquitous, improving technologies. A paper in Nature argued that we’re already past the tipping point where solar has won. As we wrotebefore…

[t]his means that nearly every country in the world can become an energy superpower. The sun shines favourably on nearly all of us. The great game of the Persian gulf will lose its relevance. So too will dastardly pipelines that straddle continents. The result is a fundamentally different economic model: one of abundance rather than scarcity, of distributed production rather than centralised control.

Cheaper information and intelligence will unlock new markets, boosting productivity and accelerating scientific breakthroughs across fields.

One of the biggest bottlenecks for humanity’s future is our ability to keep creating knowledge amidst declining populations and the biological limits of human cognition. We’ll need all the help we can get.

As some of you already know, I believe that AI can help us address complex problems that require knowledge beyond human biological constraints. 

A great deal of innovation and science is combinatorial. I believe that in the next few years, systems built on LLMs, may break the siloed nature of scientific research. LLMs can help us analogise across domains, bringing insight from one domain to another. You can do this with consumer tools like Claude and with specific services like Elicit and Consensus. Mathematician Terence Tao makes a strong case this is happening today. He is “already seeing AI-enabled […] databases of ecosystems where people from many different areas of science are inputting their data on the same system and creating a holistic multimodal view.” 

As we stand in Square 33, it’s crucial to remain curious and adaptive.

Exponential View is not just about understanding change - we exist to empower you to shape a future defined by abundance, interconnectedness and new possibilities.

Here’s to navigating these extraordinary times together — with a spirit of wonder and an eye toward the opportunities that lie ahead!