The Inner Monologue

There’s a pattern that repeats so reliably it ought to be carved into the lintel of every technology lab and startup accelerator on Earth: people always underestimate exponential progress. We laughed at $50 LED bulbs. We dismissed computers that filled a room. We rolled our eyes at electric cars that could barely reach the grocery store. Yet every one of those technologies went from punchline to necessity within a generation. Why? Because humanity, for all its brilliance, still thinks in straight lines while technology moves in curves.

The Linear Mind in an Exponential World

Our brains are wired for a world that changed slowly. For most of history, progress was linear. A better plow might make next year’s harvest 10% larger, not tenfold. So our instincts are tuned to the arithmetic of survival: steady, predictable improvement.

Moore’s Law—the 1965 observation by Intel’s co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years—isn’t just a rule of silicon. It’s a metaphor for the era we live in. Exponential growth means that each advance builds on the last, compounding faster than intuition can grasp. The first few doublings seem trivial; the last few change the world.

A thousand years ago, a human lifetime was long enough to see a village grow a little, perhaps see one or two new tools emerge. Today, one lifetime can hold the invention of the personal computer, the internet, the smartphone, and artificial intelligence. We live amid curves so steep that our minds slide right off them.

Why Early Versions Fool Us

Every technology starts out ugly, expensive, and disappointing. The first LED bulb cost $50 and glowed like a medical waiting room. Early personal computers were refrigerator-sized curiosities that could barely balance a checkbook. The first electric cars had all the range of a sick horse.

Yet these “failures” aren’t failures at all—they’re prototypes on the curve. The first step in an exponential climb always looks flat because the growth rate hides in the decimal places. It’s easy to mock a 30-mile EV when you’ve been told for a century that 300 miles is normal. What most people miss is that 30 doubles to 60, then 120, then 240—faster than social attitudes can pivot.

We don’t notice the acceleration until the inflection point, that moment when yesterday’s toy becomes today’s necessity. By then, the pundits who dismissed it as a fad are left rewriting history.

The Comfort of the Familiar

There’s also a social side to technological blindness. Established industries are built on yesterday’s tools, and nobody wants to torch their own business model. Incumbents sow doubt. Critics pile on. Consumers cling to the familiar. It’s the collective psychology of comfort—if something new threatens to change the order of things, we invent reasons it can’t work.

It happened with LEDs (“too expensive”), with computers (“for nerds only”), with solar energy (“won’t work at scale”), and with EVs (“batteries will never be cheap enough”). What these skeptics never seem to grasp is that exponential curves flatten their arguments. Costs fall, efficiencies soar, adoption snowballs. What was uneconomical yesterday becomes irresistible today.

The Laws Behind the Law

Moore’s Law gets the spotlight, but it’s part of a family of exponential patterns that quietly govern progress.

Haitz’s Law says that every decade, the cost per lumen of LED light falls by a factor of ten, while efficiency improves by twenty.

Swanson’s Law observes that the price of solar photovoltaic cells drops 20% for every doubling of global shipments.

Wright’s Law tracks the same pattern in manufacturing: each doubling of cumulative production cuts cost by about 20%.

Whether it’s photons, electrons, or transistors, the result is the same. Improvement compounds, prices crash, and adoption explodes. The laws differ in detail but rhyme in consequence: exponential progress outpaces belief.

The Curve Always Wins

Here’s the deeper truth: exponential change doesn’t care whether you believe in it. It just keeps compounding. LED prices didn’t fall because consumers demanded it; they fell because engineers kept iterating. Computers didn’t shrink because pundits approved; they shrank because physics allowed it. Electric vehicles didn’t extend their range because critics relented; they did because chemistry improved.

By the time public perception catches up, the revolution has already happened. The future doesn’t knock politely—it upgrades itself while you’re arguing about last year’s price tag.

The Paradox of Progress

There’s an irony in all this: the very people who underestimate Moore’s Law are also its beneficiaries. They scroll through social media on pocket supercomputers whose power would have bankrupted a nation in 1975. They drive under LED streetlights and stream high-definition video powered by server farms running on solar panels and batteries they once claimed would never be practical.

And yet, even as they live inside miracles, they doubt the next one. AI is just a gimmick. Fusion is always thirty years away. Quantum computing will never scale. Same script, different century.

The Lesson

The next time you see a new technology that seems too expensive, too slow, or too limited, remember: that’s how every revolution looks at the beginning. The world laughs at version 1.0 and then wakes up addicted to version 5.0.

The human brain may never fully adjust to exponential change, but we can at least learn humility in its presence. Moore’s Law—and its luminous, electrified, solar-powered offspring—reminds us that the impossible only stays impossible until it doubles a few more times.

The curve always wins. It just takes the rest of us a while to notice.