^And yet, you could apply the same exact growth observation to personal transportation 100 years ago. By your logic we should have had personal teleporters around 1960.No, although I have had relevatory moments...possibly 4 or 5 of them. My biggest in general was when my accepted idea (which I tried to ignore for 10+ years) of an inevitable computational march to AI superseding man was changed to one where human-derived AI superseding machine AI seemed more possible. Now I'm only 50% certain of it. My biggest specific one was realizing the dematerialized hardware and sheer power of my smartphone one day as opposed to what I had in the 70s and 80s. It was one of those moments you could feel your synapses firing. Another related one was when I had the first physical MP3 player at my gym 2 years before the Ipod, but in 1999 it held 17-20 songs., the new smartphone did away with the player hardware and had storage for 1000s and with a comparative increase in capability in the interface software. In my everyday nomenclature, I kept thinking/saying: " this wasn't possible 3-5 years ago with the same item", and I've been following technology since I was very young. I realized the time between noticing them was compressing. Recently I noted several things that couldn't even be done a year ago.
I recall many years ago responding to a thread here where I agreed the pace of technology would continue as it was, and we wouldn't have most of the tech of Star Trek, but it was a view devoid of the proper frame of reference, one that took things at face value, the one that Dennis thinks of when he sees an 8-track player, turn into a tape player, then CD, then finally digital media. These are in fact the result of exponential growth, the rate of change took 30 years. If Dennis could compare the previous 30, where he was alive only part of the time, he'd see that 30 years had much more change than the time before. The next 10 will have more change than the last 30 that he takes for granted. Sure the next music player will be more advanced, but it also ignores the context of where it came from...infotech on a wide front.
Still working on that multiqoute function I see.