By the late 2010s I had started seeing something in the data that did not fit the way most of my industry talked about the future. Every adoption curve we had on record, for every technology that mattered, was bending. Not slightly. Steeply. Each new platform was being adopted faster than the one before, and the curves had stopped looking like the linear projections that economists and strategists kept drawing through them.
In April 2021 I sat down and wrote a paper called The Exponential Age to explain what I was looking at.
The core observation is that we live inside compounding processes and keep modelling them as if they were straight lines. Networks compound, because each new participant adds value for every existing participant. Technology compounds, because last year's chips are the foundation for this year's algorithms. Adoption compounds, because once a tool crosses a certain threshold of usefulness it spreads through populations the way fire spreads through dry grass.
But the deeper insight is what these curves are actually doing underneath the surface. They are not just adopting technology faster. They are converting energy into intelligence faster, year after year, at a rate that has no historical precedent. The same machinery that lets a chip do more computation per watt is letting an economy produce more knowledge per kilowatt hour. The Exponential Age is best understood not as a story about gadgets but as the moment when intelligence itself went exponential.
And it is no longer one curve. It is many, all converging at once. Artificial intelligence, blockchain, robotics, biotechnology, autonomous systems, virtual worlds, energy storage, genetic engineering. Each individually obeys something close to Metcalfe's Law. Together they behave more like Reed's Law of Reed's Law, a double exponential, where the technologies accelerate each other. AI improves biotech. Biotech generates data that trains better AI. Better AI designs better chips. Better chips run better AI. The feedback loops multiply faster than any single industry can absorb.
What this means in practice is that the next decade is not going to be a slightly faster version of the last. It is going to be a different surface entirely. The Exponential Age is not really a prediction. It is a way of seeing. Once you stop drawing straight lines through curved data, most of the big calls of the next ten years become obvious.
It all started here.