world on brains that aren't fully developed yet. Yeah, there's been these like exponential rises in anxiety, depression, um, you know, young women and girls havefallen off a cliff almost with the rise of social media.
But actually, that's not the technical definition of exponential growth. Exponential growth is something which grows in proportion to its current size.So the money in your bank account, if you leave it there long enough, it is growing exponentially .
that really launched a thousand ships that really got this field going and marked the beginning of the phase of exponential growth that we are in today.So what is interesting about this is not only that it's an exoplanet, but the amplitude of the signal here is larger
get a chance to read the book Intel's Engineers to try to explain to people once the power of the exponential of microchips doubling every 24 months once did a back of the envelope calculation just for fun theysaid what if a 1971 VW Beetle improve improved at the same rate microchips had
You see not only uh lighting efficiency rising very quickly, but also the cost of a bulb falling. So, there's a double exponential trend on LED efficiency.May not seem like a big deal, but this will save a hundreds of billions of dollars
and 13 years. So, US dollar output of manufacturing never stopped going up and it followed that same parabolic exponential curve. But jobs are fewer.And that's where the problem is because well, what are these people going to do?
It's worth just examining for a moment the difference between linear progressions, which is our intuition, and the reality of information technology, which is exponential . So linear goes one, two, three, four.Exponential , which is information technology, goes to two, four, eight, siexteen.
exponential . So linear goes one, two, three, four.Exponential , which is information technology, goes to two, four, eight, siexteen.Is that really so different?
that worked just fine so we have built-in linear predictors but the nature of Information Technology is exponential and that causes an acceleration in technology because uh each technology Builds on the last sotechnology uh gets more powerful and the Paradigm shifts occur more rapidly uh
Pace it's an axiom that uh changes is a constant but actually it's not a constant it's a it's an exponential and that's why the future is surprising uh halfway through the general project the Skeptics were stillgoing strong saying I told you this wasn't going to work I mean here are halfway through the project and only 1%
brain scanning they form trajectories that are amazingly predictable and what is predictable is that they're exponential and and it's a it's a simple comparison but people really don't getit uh and the biggest criticism of these ideas I call the criticism from
OK, again, what's this got to do with anything? exponentially fast, it turns out.
Now this plot can be extended into the future, and we see all sorts of predictions of climate increasing, the temperature increasing exponentially throughout the next 50 years to 100 years.Of course, this is not the first time in Earth's recent history that the planet has experienced a really rapid increase in temperature.
It's called exponential growth. So exponential growth has multiple meanings in different contexts. In the media, it's often used to mean fast or to mean big, something that's big or growing quickly.
much bigger than we think. So exponential growth bias has a number of problems. It means that people who suffer from this bias don't tend to invest for the future because they tend to undervalue the value of their savings
But then very quickly, as we saw both in the first wave and indeed in the second wave, things can get out of hand if you don't take action. So exponential growth bias can damage our responses to things like pandemics. So that's the end of the first bit of the talk about nonlinearity.
So this is the number of objects launched into space in the past few years. an exponential growth here in the number of objects launched into space, so really reaching a new era where a lot more things are being put up in space.
To me, it means taking early and decisive action to address a problem, before the problem becomes an exponential one and before the problem outstrips our capacity to address it without terrible suffering. And so this is probably a graph you've all seen before.
You see what happened between 1900 and the year 2000? An exponential increase in all of them. And this is something that's often in quotes, but graphically, it's much, much easier to understand.
And at some point, aha, while crossing a street in London, he had this illumination of how to do what will be the principle of chain reaction and exponential growth of this energy and so on. This is the patent for the atomic reactor after Fermi and Szilard.
And this is one reason why we have an increasing problem with virulent forms of E. coli. So exponential growth of untreatable disease has already begun.
Because it's also affecting things like DNA sequencing. The exponential curve of DNA sequencing price fall is faster than Moore's law. It's actually, bang, off a cliff.
distributed exponential models of scaling are what's important again I won't go into it too much but it's
or exponential pace. Those of us in the real world, if you can think about how you adapt to change, it's not exponential .
gets exponentially cheaper. We used to get in traffic accidents.
um exponentially as with has has a lot of other stem Fields um with the Advent and and development of sort of Cutting Edge technologies that make it possible
For exponentially declining prices, people can build measles, smallpox, et cetera, put it in a drone, and fly it down our streets.
increases exponentially . So that is something that makes it very hard to replicate a network once the network gains scale, something that Googlers
is exponentially more fun but also harder than print or television
- So there's this exponential decay in frequency of earthquakes of a given magnitude and an exponential increase in the amount of energy released
So an exponential increase of access to creativity.
that the transformation creates exponential growth as a result of the transformation in an unexpected way. So, growing up, my mom worked in newspapers
This is a very specific example of a positive feedback loop, which many people will be familiar with. It's called exponential growth. So exponential growth has multiple meanings in different contexts.
It's not fast-growing. It doesn't seem very big in my bank account anyway. So it is an exponential growth process, but it's not big or fast, and that can surprise people, I think. And this is what exponential curves can look like sometimes.
So it is an exponential growth process, but it's not big or fast, and that can surprise people, I think. And this is what exponential curves can look like sometimes. They can look like they're growing very slowly, and linearly almost at the start.
They have more debt compared to their income, so it controls somewhat for educational attainment there. The other thing about exponential growth bias, going back to the pandemic, is that people who exhibit higher levels of exponential growth bias were also less likely to comply with non-pharmaceutical interventions, things like mask-wearing, social distancing, test-taking, contact tracing,
There's lots more in the book. But things like exponential growth, square laws. There's cube laws. There are feedback loops, both positive, which give us these growth processes which grow unexpectedly quickly like exponential growth,
to predominate or the exponential difficulty of the problem we're going to crack is going to predominate?
It is exponential . And as per law, it's double exponential .
If it's exponential , the sooner you can act, the more effectively you can shut it down.
It's like exponential . Thank you.
If in a forest you get a wildfire in the wet season, it might propagate a bit and then die out. "Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist." This is a quote I had in my office on the wall.
this headlong exponential growth that we've been doing, especially in the rich world.
And then the exponential benefits of being higher up in that spiral are such that if somebody starts too late, you're running at a completely different rate of speed.
And we've seen exponential improvements in many of these technologies in recent years.
is on an exponential J curve.
And this is the exponential change, right?
And that exponential algorithmic shift, in terms of speed and potential, it's just, it's crazy.
It's an exponential increase in global plastic production.
the numbers go exponential , as all you mathematicians know.