You'd never even consider a Rolls as the family sedan. But imagine the Rolls drops in price by a factor of two each year. In the fourth year, the kids take one with them to college. Now, instead of renting a car on vacation, you buy a Rolls at the airport and leave it with the redcap in lieu of a tip on your return. In twenty years, a Rolls costs under a quarter and they are soon redesigned as ocean breakwaters and highway barriers.
Exponentials start slowly and remain disarmingly out of sight.
Yet they build strength relentlessly until they've grown too large to ignore. By then, whole industries have changed and whole cultures have fallen. The cost and intelligence of computers follows an exponential curve, having improved by a factor of two every 30 months over the last century. That's a factor of one trillion every hundred years, and there is no sign the pace will slow appreciably for another century. Processors that once filled entire floors directing the manufacture of automobile engines, now sit inside V-8s, adjusting valve timing.