The law of accelerating returns: optimism as arithmetic
Ask anyone how the world is doing and you almost always get the same answer. Downhill. The climate, the politics, the kids these days, it was all better before. That feeling sits deep, and it feels like realism. Looking soberly at the facts and concluding that things are grim.
I don't buy it. The numbers say something very different, and staying upbeat has nothing to do with it. One man wrote that down more sharply than anyone.
The law of accelerating returns
Ray Kurzweil is an inventor, and for years a director of one of Google's research labs. In 2001 he wrote an essay with a title that sounds rather academic: The Law of Accelerating Returns.[1] The core of it is simple enough to explain over dinner.
Most people think linearly. You take a step, then another, then another, and you estimate the future by adding those steps up. Ten steps forward feels like ten times as far. But that is not how progress works. It doubles, then the result doubles again, and again, and the pace of that doubling speeds up too. Ten steps forward takes you a thousand times as far, not ten.
The most famous slice of that curve is Moore's law. Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, noticed in 1965 that the number of transistors on a chip roughly doubles every two years.[2] No law of nature, and certainly no accident. Decades later it still holds roughly true, and it is the reason the phone in your pocket holds more computing power than the machines that sent Apollo to the moon. What Kurzweil did was lift that one pattern out of chip technology and show that it turns up everywhere. In computing power, in storage, in DNA sequencing, in the price of solar energy.
We won't experience a hundred years of progress in the 21st century, more like twenty thousand.
That is Kurzweil's most famous claim, and he means it literally.[3] The clock doesn't run faster; the pace of progress keeps accelerating, and so it compounds. Calculate at today's speed and you badly underestimate what is possible by the end of the century. We have a built-in talent for getting this wrong, because our brains add up where reality multiplies.
Optimism as extrapolation
This is where the behavioural side comes in.
If the line of what people can do has bent upward for two centuries, and ever faster, then betting on more progress is simply extrapolation. You draw out the line you have watched for two hundred years. Optimism becomes a conclusion from the data, not a personality trait or a mood you happen to wake up with. It is the pessimist who looks selectively, who ignores the curve and mistakes one bad year for the trend.
Take the most fundamental number there is. In 1990, around 36 per cent of the world's population lived in extreme poverty. By 2015 it had fallen below 10 per cent.[4] Within a quarter of a century, a single lifetime, more than a billion people out. It is the largest fall in poverty in history, and most people have no idea. In Factfulness, Hans Rosling showed that highly educated audiences get questions like this systematically wrong, worse even than random guessing.[4] Their picture of the world got stuck years ago, fed by news that shows them the opposite every single day. Stupidity has nothing to do with it.
That is exactly the problem. Our worldview comes from the feed, not from the curve. And that feed is tuned for alarm. Fear holds attention better than a graph that climbs quietly upward. So we get a steady drip of what is breaking and almost nothing of what is being built. The picture we end up with leans hard towards the threat.
"But technology doesn't fix everything"
No. And I want to be precise here, because this is where naïve techno-optimism goes wrong.
The curve hands you tools, not outcomes. That an MRI scanner exists says nothing about whether people see a doctor in time. That a vaccine can be made in eleven months says nothing about whether people take it. The technology doubles exponentially, while behaviour, adoption and trust move at a completely different pace. Linear on a good day. The law of accelerating returns doesn't close the gap between what is possible and what people actually do, it widens it.
And that is where the whole job sits.
Why the behavioural designer must be an optimist
Look at what the law of accelerating returns does to the work of a behavioural designer. Your raw material, the tools you use to shape behaviour, keeps doubling: more data on how people actually decide, more reach, more ways to run an experiment and know within a week whether something works. What took a university research budget ten years ago now runs on a laptop.
That means something uncomfortable and something freeing at once. The constraint is never capability. The tools are there, and better ones arrive every month. What is left is imagination and will. Whether someone believes it can be different, and is willing to do the work.
Which is why "it can't be done" is the one belief that disqualifies a behavioural designer. That is a factual misreading of the curve, and has nothing to do with manners. Anyone who looks at a stuck situation and is certain nothing can be done about it has not looked very carefully at the last two hundred years. Stubborn optimism, for our craft, is fitness for the job, not a temperament. The pessimist who misreads the curve misreads the work along with it.
This is what we built SUE for. For people who look at the widening gap between what is possible and what happens and feel curious rather than defeated. Who see the acceleration as room to work in. We are evidence-based optimists, not dreamers. We work with data and experiments, and we keep iterating, always from the conviction that it can be better, because the numbers keep showing us it can.
Behaviour is a design choice, not destiny. And the future does not happen to us, it gets built, by the stubborn optimists who refuse to believe the curve stops at them.
If you want to learn how to design for behaviour rather than trying to motivate it, that's exactly what the Behavioural Design Fundamentals Course covers. View upcoming dates →
Frequently asked questions about the law of accelerating returns
What is the law of accelerating returns?
The law of accelerating returns, formulated by Ray Kurzweil in 2001, states that technological progress is exponential rather than linear, and that the rate of that progress itself also increases. It is a broader version of Moore's law: not only computing power doubles on a fixed rhythm, but progress in general.
What is the difference between the law of accelerating returns and Moore's law?
Moore's law describes one specific phenomenon: the number of transistors on a chip roughly doubles every two years. The law of accelerating returns generalises that pattern to progress more broadly and holds that the acceleration itself is a recurring pattern, not a one-off in chip technology.
Why does the law of accelerating returns make optimism rational?
If the line of what people can do has bent upward for two centuries, and ever faster, then betting on more progress is simply extrapolation. Optimism becomes a conclusion from the data. It is the pessimist who ignores the curve and mistakes one bad year for the trend.
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