Law of Accelerating Returns

The law of accelerating returns is a theory put forward by the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, most fully in a 2001 essay of that name, which holds that the pace of technological change itself speeds up over time. Kurzweil argued that each new generation of technology provides better tools for creating the next, so progress follows an exponential rather than a straight-line path. He presented Moore's Law on computer chips as one example of a broader pattern running from early computing machines to modern processors, and used the idea to predict a technological "singularity" around the middle of the twenty-first century. The concept is popular in discussions of innovation, artificial intelligence and crypto, but it is a forecast rather than a scientific law. Critics point out that many technologies follow S-shaped curves that slow down as they mature. Also see Metcalfe's Law.