[dan-robertson]

The opposite of compounding effects are compounding difficulties. Computer science is full of problems where a multiplicative increase in effort results in an additive increase in output. We call these “exponentially hard” and they crop up annoyingly frequently. So one argument is that compounding improvements will result in linear increases in output because of exponential difficulty. The counter-argument is that many of these hard problems have good but not perfect solutions which may be found more efficiently.