[webmaven]

> And if the pace of progress isn’t accelerating faster now than it ever has before then there’s really nothing special about this point in time.

I think the question of whether the exponent is changing depends on exactly what you're measuring.

Superficially, the exponent of something like Moore's Law is fairly constant, but when you throw additional aspects like the Gini Coefficient (how the power of computing is distributed within a society), Jevon's Paradox (lowering the cost of a resource causes the total consumption of the resource to go up) and network effects (use value of some capabilities grows as function of the number of participants), and the Innovator's Dilemma (low-end entrants to a market improve and push entrenched ones into higher margin but shrinking segments until they're squeezed out entirely) which causes systems to go through phase changes that can be fairly abrupt, even though the underlying transistors-per-dollar measure is accelerating at a constant rate.