I think there are two components that are required for exponential growth, with the second one being a corollary of the other: 1) There needs to be some feedba

I think there are two components that are required for exponential growth, with the second one being a corollary of the other: 1) There needs to be some feedback from the effect of the process back to the constraints on the process 2) There must not be a significant external limitation where 2) implies that the total (economic) effort expended towards the process is small compared to the total (economic) benefit derived from the process. As the sibling comment already states: We could not produce modern chips without (at least modernish) chips to execute the design tools. But I'm not sure how critical that actually is for the exponential growth (extrapolating from the inefficiency of all other software written today). The interesting question is, whether we are close to a limit yet. Which, I think, translates to the question, whether we are already close enough to the edge of what is physically possible to have some significant economic cost (with respect to the derived economic benefit) What makes me think right now is your 3) .. What would a (sustained) better-than-exponential growth require and how would we identify such a thing/opportunity