Why then, are exponential extrapolations so extremely valueable?
It is because these extrapolations have, in the past few decades, proven to be very accurate at predicting our technological future. These extrapolations have, for example, been used to predict when the Internet would become mainstream. For many people, it just seemed to pop out of nowhere in the middle of the nineties. This is not correct. The Internet has been around since the late sixties, and it has been consistently doubling its nodes ever since. If you had known about it (and some people did), you could have plotted this trend on a graph. It would show up as an exponential curve, that hit the sky-rocket part around the mid-nineties. Extrapolations have also been used to accurately predict when a computer would beat a human being at chess. Computers were consistently improving 45 rating points per year, and Ray Kurzweil was smart enough to notice the trend. He predicted 1998 to be the year. It turned out to be 1997. Not bad. Extrapolations have been used to accurately predict so m
