Society’s next great acceleration isn’t driven by faster chips or bigger models, it’s emerging from the mesh of interactions between humans, machines, agents and systems. This is the "other exponential curve" we might be overlooking.

For decades, Moore’s Law gave us a reliable story that faster chips, smaller transistors, exponential progress—was contained within the device. But the exponential we now face doesn’t live inside the machine, it lives between them. And now, we’ve entered a new phase of complexity that isn't driven by raw processing power, but by the explosive growth of interactions across a networked world of humans, agents, and systems.

It’s not just scale. It’s permutation. And it’s accelerating.

Let's call it the Permutation Curve. Simply put, this curve is the exponential explosion of new possibilities from the growing mesh of interactions between humans, machines, and machines with each other.

This isn’t a metaphor. It’s a shift in the "substrate of civilization" that pushes us from computation to complex interconnection. And here's the key insight. This new substrate isn’t found in any single model, device, or algorithm. It emerges from the relationships between them. It is not the growth of one thing, but the unpredictable consequences of everything interacting.

Moore’s Law gave us a lens to understand the pace of computational progress. It's the doubling of transistors on a chip every two years meant that computers got faster, cheaper, and more powerful. This steady drumbeat shaped the way we thought about innovation. But now, that locus of progress has shifted.

The Permutation Curve doesn’t chart the inner evolution of machines, it suggests the growth of what........

© Psychology Today