The best parable for the power of exponential growth that I have come across is "The Legend of Paal Paysam." The short of the story is that a king fancied himself a great chess player. He challenged anyone he could to a chess match and said he would give the person who beat him any reward the victor could name. Eventually a pilgrim did beat him and in return he humbly asked the king to put a single grain of rice on the first chess square and double it on every consequent one (1 grain on the first square, 2 on the second, 4 on the third, 8 on the fourth and so on). By the 20th square there would be 1,000,000 grains of rice. By the time you get 1/2 way across the board you have accumulated nearly 3 billion grains of rice and on the 64th square you would get to 18,000,000,000,000,000,000 grains of rice (larger than Mt. Everest). Rumor has it that the king had the pilgrim executed for humiliating him but that is neither here nor there.
Exponential growth is a term that gets tossed around a lot in the technology industry, its what every start-up CEO is looking for. It's also a principle used to calculate population growth as well as the growth and spread of bacteria and viruses like AIDS. What's fascinating is in all likelihood we are only half way through the chess board. Basically it took us 32 squares to get to 3 billion grains of rice but we will add another 3 billion in only 1 square. Technological change is going to speed up and humanity as a whole is going to benefit from it. How quickly are we going to progress when every human on earth has access to the internet? How many more Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Elon Musks are out there?
One of the major questions we are all going to have to face is; how does the role of government have to change in the coming years if we are in fact just getting to the 2nd half of the chess board? Government will always be playing catch-up to innovation and progress but what happens when changes are occurring so frequently and have such a large impact on society that government become powerless to adapt?