In a not-too-distant past…
The Exponential Times
Issue 1: Founding Letter
Dear Reader,
Perhaps you no longer remember a time when you couldn’t make video calls with family members no matter where in the world they were. Or maybe you’re simply too young. The fact that new technological developments appear so frequently hasn’t always been the norm.
Technological innovations that enable revolutionary change have been happening more and more often. So much so that one appears every few years. This trend is set to become even more pronounced, to the point where every year there will be a technology that meets this revolutionary criterion in one field or another. And it will accelerate even further afterward.
News can no longer be told as they have been up to now.
It is necessary that we take into account this exponential growth both in the emergence of new technologies and in how quickly they begin to be used on a planetary scale.
That is why Today, we, a group of journalists, editors, and technology communicators are founding The Exponential Times.
Our editorial team will be responsible for identifying the potential of new technologies and the growth patterns they bring. And at the same time, understanding the moment they occupy on the exponential curve.
We hope our contribution will allow you, dear reader, to easily understand these developments and what they will enable in the future.
Sincerely,
The founding team of The Exponential Times.
The Background
We are in the age of exponential development, or exponential time. Hence the wordplay in the publication’s name. “Times” as in newspapers, but also referring to exponential time.
It is true that the intervals between technological milestones are getting shorter. In the following table, even though is not exhaustive, we can see the pattern in telephone communications1:
1844: Morse Telegraph (First implementation)
1877: Telephone
1983: Analog mobile phone (Motorola DynaTAC 8000X commercial launch)
1991: Digital mobile phone (2G)
1999: BlackBerry (Phone with email)
2008: iPhone (Modern 3G smartphone, though the first model was released in 2007)
Even though not all intervals are strictly decreasing on an individual basis, they are statistically decreasing overall when considering all fields. I’m leaving out a lot of precursors, but I want you to take away one main idea:
Major changes are taking less and less time.
You can also see this in Moore’s Law2, where integrated circuit manufacturing technology allows twice as many electronic components to fit on a chip every two years. That is, for the same chip size, after two years, you can fit twice as many things inside. This is exponential change.
This pace of technological advancement is not what it was 500 years ago, nor what it was 2000 years ago. It hasn’t been constant throughout history.
Of course, there have been many political, territorial, and cultural changes. Indeed, some happened abruptly due to wars or conquests. And in fact, the level of change, mobility, and technology that we generally assume our ancestors of 2,000 or 4,000 years ago had is lower than what some cultures actually achieved.
But it’s not just about the time between innovations; it’s about how quickly they spread in use. From the time the mobile phone was invented to when millions of people owned one, many years passed.
But now that timeframe is getting ever shorter. For example, Instagram took two and a half years to reach 100 million users. TikTok took nine months.
Consider that figure: 100 million people. A service. In nine months.
ChatGPT took two months3.
60 days.
If all days brought the same adoption (which is not the case), how many users a day would that be?
How long will the next one take?
Certain technologies, referred to as hyper-scalers, make this possible. What once took several decades to reach every country now happens in a matter of months.
This speed it what the foundational team of The Exponential Times forecasted in our story. And that’s why news must be told differently.
Which is The Exponential Times for you? Do you follow it?
See you next time, Future Enthusiast!
These dates refer to commercialization. The dates considered to mark the invention itself are earlier. In some cases there is controversy regarding the original authorship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
Search for this one on the Internet.