>>10902264"Exponential" is used in a very loose sense here since most people who use the word "exponential" don't even know exactly what an exponential function is. There is little doubt though that technological advancement has been accelerating, it doesn't matter whether truly exponentially or not.
>Humans went from shitting in the woods to building houses and then went without progress for thousands of years repeat advancement and stagnation.The thing is that those dry spells of stagnation seem to be getting shorter and shorter. Egyptians lived about 4,000 years without any major advance, but then the Greeks came along and they started building gadgets with Archimedes and Heron. Then you get a period of (relative) stagnation towards the end of Antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages, but even during that time the Arabs made some minor improvements to Greek science and then you get an explosion of new science with the Renaissance. Galilei and Newton are the turning point and from then on you don't get any prolonged period of true stagnation. Learned societies start to spring up and the pursuit of science becomes autistically systematic. Barring catastrophic collapse (which might happen sooner or later, sicne nothing lasts forever) it's very unlikely that we will see any prolonged period of stagnation anymore. If anything, things will accelerate even more with memetic AI and increasing computational power.
