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Exponential growth. Exponential growth is a process that increases quantity over time at an ever-increasing rate. It occurs when the instantaneous rate of change (that is, the derivative) of a quantity with respect to time is proportional to the quantity itself. Described as a function, a quantity undergoing exponential growth is an exponential ...
v. t. e. In futures studies and the history of technology, accelerating change is the observed exponential nature of the rate of technological change in recent history, which may suggest faster and more profound change in the future and may or may not be accompanied by equally profound social and cultural change.
A Malthusian growth model, sometimes called a simple exponential growth model, is essentially exponential growth based on the idea of the function being proportional to the speed to which the function grows. The model is named after Thomas Robert Malthus, who wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), one of the earliest and most ...
The exponential processor transistor growth predicted by Moore does not always translate into exponentially greater practical CPU performance. Since around 2005–2007, Dennard scaling has ended, so even though Moore's law continued after that, it has not yielded proportional dividends in improved performance.
To the right is the long tail, and to the left are the few that dominate (also known as the 80–20 rule ). In statistics, a power law is a functional relationship between two quantities, where a relative change in one quantity results in a relative change in the other quantity proportional to a power of the change, independent of the initial ...
For example, Kurzweil notes that when vacuum tubes stopped getting faster, cheaper transistors became popular and continued the overall exponential growth. Kurzweil calls this exponential growth the law of accelerating returns, and he believes it applies to many human-created technologies such as computer memory, transistors, microprocessors ...
The exponential growth in computing technology suggested by Moore's law is commonly cited as a reason to expect a singularity in the relatively near future, and a number of authors have proposed generalizations of Moore's law.
Malthusianism. Malthusianism is the theory that population growth is potentially exponential, according to the Malthusian growth model, while the growth of the food supply or other resources is linear, which eventually reduces living standards to the point of triggering a population decline. This event, called a Malthusian catastrophe (also ...