I am not disagreeing with the conclusion of the article but the way they reached the conclusion is problematic (and wrong) and here is my nuanced explanation of

I am not disagreeing with the conclusion of the article but the way they reached the conclusion is problematic (and wrong) and here is my nuanced explanation of that : There is no attention paid to the origin (0,0) in any of the plots in the article. To see a meaningful trend you have to be be able to zoom out and zoom in, which means your origin is not a fixed point, ever. This also means that plots with fixed point origins don't tell us anything important at a societal level. For example: the flight airspeed plot, it starts at ~1900. Now of course it should start there bc we did not have planes before that. But let's change the plot heading from airspeed to human speed a.k.a at what speed could humans move. now you can change the origin meaningfully as we had chariots, horses, bicycles, ships before that. If you instead create a plot for last 5000 years you would see that the speed at which humans are able to move is rising exponentially, from walking on foot in a radius of 1000-2000feet in a thick jungle 5000 years ago to reentering earth at 25000 miles/hour in 1969 (yeah, read that again). Even for AI, if you zoom out the plot to last 70 years it will look exponential, if you zoom in to last 2 months it will look absolutely flat. The point is that the whole sigmoid/exponential argument is a function of the origin (0,0).