1. Humanity has already been on the path of exponential growth. Take GDP for example. We measure GDP growth by percentages, and that's exponential. (Of course, real GDP growth has stagnated for a bit, but at least for the past ~3 centuries it has been generally exponential AFAIK). Not saying it can be sustained, just that we've been quite exponential for a while.
2. Not every function is linear. Sometimes the exponentially increased inputs will produce a linear output. I'd argue R&D is kind of like that. When the lower hanging fruits are already taken, you'd need to expend even more effort into achieving the next breakthrough. So despite the "exponential" increase in productivity, the result could feel very linear.
I would also like to add that physical and computational limits make the whole singularity thing literally impossible. 3D space means that even theoretically sound speedups (eg. binary trees) are impossible in scale because you can't assume O(1) lookups - the best you can get is O(n^1/3). Maybe people understand the singularity concept poetically, I don't know.
I'm also gonna recommend Accelerando - https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...
As an aside, I'd also recommend Glasshouse (also by Charles Stross) as an exploration into the human remnants post singularity (and war)... followed by Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams...
> “I and my confederates,” Aristide said, “did our best to prevent that degree of autonomy among artificial intelligences. We made the decision to turn away from the Vingean Singularity before most people even knew what it was. But—” He made a gesture with his hands as if dropping a ball. “—I claim no more than the average share of wisdom. We could have made mistakes.”
for a singularity averted approach of what could be done.
One more I'll toss in, is The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts which feels like you're missing a lot of the story (but it is because that's one book of a series) and... well... spoilers.
His example was the internet boom. Look back to the very toe of the curve in the late 80s and early 90s where the internet started being a thing that was accessible and not just a way for colleges to send email to each other. Could you predict what it would be like two or three decades later?
The other works are science fiction that explore the Vingean Singularity (which was from '84) that were written in the '00s and explore (not panic) the ideas around society and economy during the time of accelerating technical growth and after.
My conclusion is similar to Verge’s: predicting the far future is impossible. We can imagine a variety of scenarios, but you shouldn’t place much faith in them.
Predicting even a couple years in advance looks pretty hard. Consider the next presidential election: the most boring scenario is Biden vs. Trump and Biden wins. Wildcard scenarios: either one of them, or both, dies before election day. Who can rule that out?
Also consider that in any given year, there could be another pandemic.
History is largely a sequence of surprise events.
In other words, Vernor described an exponential curve. But are there any exponential curves in reality? AFAIK they always hit resource limits where growth stops. That is, anything that looks like an exponential curve eventually becomes an S-shaped curve.