Moore's Law and its many relatives is the result of two phenomena working in parallel. 1. Improvements tend to be of the form "X% better by the way we are meas

Moore's Law and its many relatives is the result of two phenomena working in parallel. 1. Improvements tend to be of the form "X% better by the way we are measuring it." 2. Improvements tend to come at a consistent rate. This means that the overall trend includes many one-off improvements which do not look related to anything else. And indeed are not except that business pressures say, "We have to figure out how to do X by time Y because that is what we expect our competitors to do" and therefore create an environment where people are constantly looking at the next barrier to improving at the expected rate and are finding improvements at about that same rate. The Innovator's Dilemma has a good deal to say about the ubiquity of exponential improvements in various fields of technology. Moore's Law is by far the most famous, but is also not unique. Whenever an industry has agreed on a clear metric for "better" and is in a race to deliver it, they tend to get exponential rates of improvement until they either hit a physical limit, or sufficiently overdeliver customer needs that nobody cares any more. Historically at different times we have had exponential improvement on everything from producing batteries more cheaply, being able to scoop more dirt with a backhoe, or increasing the range of steamships.