ABSTRACT
A number of technological developments have been observed to progress at an exponential rate, including memory capacity, LEDs, sensors and the number of pixels in digital cameras. In February 2015, Intel updated journalists on their chip programme for the next few years, and the schedule maintained Gordon Moore's law's exponential growth. The fact that exponential growth is back-loaded helps explain another phenomenon, known as Amara's Law, after the scientist Roy Amara. This states that people tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. People often talk about the 'knee' of an exponential curve, the point at which past progress seems sluggish, and projected future growth looks dramatic. Moore's law was an observation which became a target-generator rather than being a description of a fundamental property of the world.
