Moore, Wright & Kurzweil: The Forces Behind 10x Technologies

5 min readMar 19, 2021

10x technologies are changing our world — exponentially. Moonshot thinking and three central principles are the secret behind it.

I am a child of the 90s and grew up with Amazon, Google, Netflix & Co. These companies saw the Internet as an opportunity and sensed the exponential growth of new 10x technologies before anyone else. They have developed a “moonshot” way of thinking that assumes that rethinking something from scratch is easier than just improving it.

What sounds simple at first is, however, incredibly difficult for us humans. It is difficult for us to imagine the future and exponential growth. A simple example makes this clear: Anyone can imagine 30 steps. But how far would we get with 30 exponential steps? The correct answer is surprising! We could use it to circle the earth 26 times.

10x thinking as an opportunity

But this radical thinking is not new. The term “moonshot” — building something so new that it is 10 times better than anything before — goes back to US President John F. Kennedy. In September 1962, Kennedy set the Americans the goal of sending the first man to the moon. Absolutely unimaginable at the time and a real moonshot. Seven years later, at a cost of $ 25.4 billion and 400,000 people involved, the Apollo program was successful and history was made.

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”
US-Präsident John F. Kennedy, 1962

Since then, the search engine giant Google in particular has internalized this thinking. With “X” the Californians founded their own Moonshot factory. It focuses solely on the development of radical new technologies to solve some of the most difficult human problems — as they say themselves. Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos takes a similar approach with his “Day 1” philosophy. The mentality to be at the beginning leads to the ability to deliver results quickly and to critically question processes. Day 2 means standstill.

In Germany we have a hard time with this kind of thinking. The agency for leap innovations (german: “Agentur für Sprunginnovationen”) was only founded in autumn 2019. But seriously: how many have heard of it?

Three principles that change everything

The basis for this moonshot thinking rests on many factors. However, there are three principles that have been proven over the past few decades that can help us better understand the future and exponential growth of new technologies.

Moore’s Law

Intel’s co-founder Gordon Moore made an interesting forecast in 1965, three years before the world’s largest chip maker was founded. The performance of a computer chip will double every two years. Or differently:

Technologies improve exponentially over time.

55 years later, this statement is still true. It has become a basis for all future technologies. A good example is our modern smartphone: the technology behind it has improved so exponentially that we could control 120 million Apollo missions at the same time.

But Moore’s Law is repeatedly declared death. Most recently at the beginning of 2019 by Nvidias CEO. Chip manufacturers are gradually reaching the limits of physics. Even Moore repeatedly doubted how long his principle could remain valid. Peter Lee, Microsoft’s vice president, said sarcastically, “The number of people predicting the death of Moore’s law doubles every two years.”

Rose’s Law offers a possible continuation of Moore’s principle. It is named after Geordie Rose, founder of the quantum computing company D-Wave. “Moore’s Law on Steroids” states that the number of qubits (storage units) in a quantum computer doubles every year. So there is hope for further exponential advances as new technologies replace old ones. In this case quantum computer our previous ones.

Wright’s Law

The American aeronautical engineer Theodore Paul Wright gave this principle its name in 1936. Most people, however, know it as the experience curve effects.

Wright’s work showed that doubling production would reduce labor by 10–15 percent. Wait what?! In simple words:

The costs depend on the units produced.

Take, for example, the lithium-ion batteries installed in electric cars. A few years ago production was very expensive. There was hardly any demand in the market. That changed — not least because of Elon Musk and his automaker Tesla. Since then, the price of the batteries has fallen over 80 percent and is likely to continue to fall in the future.

Kurzweil’s Law

The third of the three great principles goes back to Ray Kurzweil, computer pioneer and Google’s current Director of Engineering. Kurzweil coined the “Law of accelerating returns”.

Every new generation of scientists can draw on the results of the previous generation.

The German entrepreneur and investor Frank Thelen gives a nice example in his book 10x-DNA: “The inventors of the pocket calculator only had paper and pencil at their disposal. The next generation of inventors could already work with pocket calculators. Nowadays researchers have access to supercomputers, artificial intelligence and gas chromatographs — a whole arsenal of high-tech tools.”

What does the future hold for us?

Moore, Wright and Kurzweil hold up a mirror to us and show that we can only look to the future to a very limited extent. The new technologies will undoubtedly benefit from each other in their development. However, how we will use their capabilities in everyday life largely depends on us.

“We won’t experience one hundred years of technological advance in the twenty-first century; we will witness on the order of twenty thousand years of progress” — Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near

Cool Stuff

NASA wants to go to the moon again in 2024 — for 35 billion US dollars. This is a good example of the exponential evolution of technology. Thanks to increased demand, better technology and new production processes, this sum is small change compared to the 25.4 billion US dollars (that would be around 147 billion today) that the Apollo project cost in 1969.
Each year, MIT Technology Review Magazine publishes its Top 10 Breakthrough Technologies List that could change our future. Highly recommended.
Project Loon, Wing & Co: An overview of the disruptive projects of X, Google’s Moonshot Factory, is available HERE.

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