Another way of putting it is that predictions based on an assumption of "exponential growth" of anything (which is presumed to slow down at some point) are almo

Another way of putting it is that predictions based on an assumption of "exponential growth" of anything (which is presumed to slow down at some point) are almost always wrong. It's saying, sure, we may be at 1 right now, but in a year we'll be at 100, and that's the future we should prepare for! But if you believe that, then if you're off by only a little about the stopping point, we could just as likely have to prepare for a future where we're at 10 or 1000 for a while. Once you talk about exponential growth of some capability, by definition a small error in the timing of when that growth plateaus translates to an error of the plateau capability by an order of magnitude. It's likely to be be much smaller or much greater than your prediction. In other words, you can believe in exponential growth and you can believe you have a good prediction of the future, but you can't believe in both simultaneously. Yegge believes that "the future" will arrive by end of year. If he's off by only a few months in one direction, such a future may not arrive for a while; in the other direction, and "the future" will be quite different.