The Enigma of Exponential Growth

[My views are my own]

In the Industrial Age, change was slow, and major new threats were rare.

It took 26 years for Walmart to open its first Supercenter in a major market. It was a slow- and steady-moving train of disruption.

However, in the Information Age, exponential technologies can be upon you in the blink of an eye.

In 2010, Jeff Bewkes (former CEO of Time Warner) referred to Netflix as: “It’s a little bit like, is the Albanian army going to take over the world? I don’t think so.”

He wasn’t alone. In 2010, most media industry participants viewed Netflix as an over-hyped toy; one that would never be a real threat to the powerful incumbent media conglomerates where Content is King.

But, within 5 years, Netflix had more than 70 million global subscribers. Today, it is the Goliath with more than 200 million global subscribers and almost $20B per year of content spend.

One reason for this blind spot is that humans tend to overestimate what is possible in the short-term, and vastly under-estimate what’s possible over the long-term. We tend to think linearly — assuming a constant rate of change — not exponentially.

What the skeptics have missed is that Moore’s Law has jumped the tracks.

“In 1965, Intel founder Gordon Moore noticed that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit had been doubling every eighteen months. This meant every year-and-a-half computers got twice as powerful, yet their cost stayed the same. Moore thought this was pretty astounding. He predicted this trend might last a few more years, maybe five, possibly ten. Well, it’s been twenty, forty, going on sixty years. Moore’s Law is the reason the smartphone in your pocket is a thousand times smaller, a thousand times cheaper, and a million times more powerful than a supercomputer from the 1970s. And, it’s not slowing down.”

The Future is Faster Than You Think by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler

Exponential growth is no longer just about microprocessing power. It’s now converging with anything that’s been digitized.

“In the 1990s, Ray Kurzweil, the director of engineering at Google . . . discovered that once a technology becomes digital—that is, once it can be programmed in the ones and zeroes of computer code—it hops on the back of Moore’s Law and begins accelerating exponentially. In simple terms, we use our new computers to design even faster new computers, and this creates a positive feedback loop that further accelerates our acceleration—what Kurzweil calls the “Law of Accelerating Returns.”

The Future is Faster Than You Think by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler

Once digitized, whole industries and institutions are being re-engineered — including layering in the benefits of artificial intelligence, robotics, sensors, blockchain, etc.

One of the most mind-bending recent examples is the development of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine.

Historically, drug development was an extremely slow analog process of trial and error with a 90% failure rate.

But, today, the speed of drug development is accelerating at an exponential rate because we can now engineer biology the way we engineer other things. Genetics is just the software code for our bodies. And, the human genome project has mapped that code.

In January 2020, within a month of first identifying the virus in Wuhan, and months before the U.S. shutdown, Moderna designed the entire chemical structure of the vaccine based on digital versions of the virus.

And, it did it in just 48 hours.

The lesson for transformational leaders is that we are poised for one of the greatest periods of innovation (and disruption) that we’ve ever seen.

Underestimate exponential technology at your own peril!

If you are interested in engaging further in this conversation, I’d love to go on the journey with you. Please subscribe to this newsletter/blog (link at the top of the page on desktop browser and at the bottom of the page on mobile browser), follow me on Twitter, and connect with me on LinkedIn; and post a comment below. I’d love to know what you think.