I would have to argue that refinements to our processes for acquiring and sharing knowledge is probably a big player. Yes you need funding for research and more

I would have to argue that refinements to our processes for acquiring and sharing knowledge is probably a big player. Yes you need funding for research and more funding helps. More money isn't some sort of guarantee of results though. I would also have to argue that a lot of our technological progress comes from an existing infrastructure and incremental improvements. We have a lot of momentum driving rapid incremental improvements, money does sustain that system, but an infinite amount of money isn't going to yield infinite improvements. And simple more money isn't always going to yield multiples worth of improvements. One of the reason is some things just end up being dead ends. Or some other dependency doesn't exist yet. We've been making transistor, silicon based, x86 CPU's for 40+ years now. ARM is 33 years old. And we're just making improvements and refinements to those and to most technology for that matter. I would have to so the only thing that's growing at a quadratic-hyperbolic rate is adoption and application, not the technology itself.