For most of history, humanity’s greatest accomplishment has been its ability to out-accelerate its own existential problems.

The acceleration in population growth put pressure on food supplies, health, and energy. In response, we invented fertilizer, sanitation, and a vast array of energy generation and storage technologies. Humanity now thrives in high-density environments.

This acceleration has enabled humanity to adapt and flourish despite a constant barrage of challenges. One might assume that this trend will continue indefinitely.

But what if that era is ending — as we approach limits imposed by physics across a variety of domains?

Since the “ChatGPT moment,” the cultural zeitgeist has centered on the idea of runaway progress: artificial intelligence recursively improving itself until we become subservient to it.

That scenario is not impossible. But far more plausible, in my view, is the opposite — a world where the curve flattens and our rate of progress slows to a crawl.

What if the “singularity” lies beyond rather than in front of a plateau we cannot cross? If that’s the case, here are the reasons why:

The Bottlenecks Are Macro

In the past, small independent teams could make rapid progress across many domains.

That era is not yet over. However, many of our bottlenecks are now at the macro level: energy grids and generation, leading-edge semiconductor fabrication, data centers, and large-scale infrastructure.

These areas are subject to heavy regulation and environmental review, require massive upfront investment, and are physically large and logistically complex.

The bottleneck is shifting from purely technical to regulatory and logistical.

S-Curves and Diminishing Returns

Most technologies follow an S-curve: rapid acceleration early on, followed by slower progress as physical or practical limits emerge.

Many technologies are now in the flat part of their S-curves, yielding only incremental improvements. In many cases, these are hard limits defined by physics — not capital investment or innovation.

Data-center cooling efficiency, solar-panel performance, rocket-engine thrust, and transistor density are a few examples of systems optimized so thoroughly that further improvements will be marginal rather than exponential.

Physical Limits

Some domains are constrained by the fundamental laws of physics: the speed of light, thermodynamic efficiency, entropy.

Interstellar travel will always be slow. Nuclear energy has a well-defined upper limit (E = mc²). The laws of thermodynamics cap the efficiency of energy conversion.

Even human lifespan, at least in biological form, may never outrun the effects of entropy — though whether this is ultimately a physics problem or a technological one remains open to debate.

In other cases, approaching physical limits may simply be impractical. As transistors shrink toward the scale of a single silicon atom, quantum tunneling and the need for error correction begin to offset any further gains — which are already diminishing.

Breakthrough Uncertainty

There are still areas of promise for step-function improvements: fusion, quantum computing, high-temperature superconductors. But scientific progress is not guaranteed to continue.

We have no way of knowing whether the highest-temperature superconductor we’ve discovered is the best nature allows. Ambient-pressure, room-temperature superconductors may simply not exist under our current physical laws.

We don’t know whether quantum computing can ever do useful work at scale, or if physical constraints will relegate it to niche demonstrations that add small numbers together.

Even where progress is possible, we have no way to measure whether it will take years, decades, or centuries to reach the next breakthrough.

Economic Gravity

Even before we hit physical limits, we’re hitting economic ones. Across many domains, each new generation of technology costs more and delivers less.

For decades, transistor density improvements yielded a cheaper cost per transistor. That era is over: costs per transistor are now increasing.

The next particle accelerator may never be built — not because we lack the science, but because we can’t justify the expense. Could we technically build a 100-km LHC successor? Yes. A 1,000-km or 10,000-km collider? Almost certainly not. And even a 10,000-km collider would still be many orders of magnitude too small to detect particles outside of the standard model, such as the graviton.

We built our optimism during a rare century when progress got cheaper as it got faster. That era may be over. As the complexity and scale of projects rise, they may cease to be viable private-sector investments, relying instead on government funding and committee approval.

The Limited Benefits of Discovery

Some problems may be solvable — but their solutions would be intellectual more than practical. If the Riemann Hypothesis were proven tomorrow, most technology would continue unchanged. We’ve already built systems that assume it’s true, and they work fine.

The space of possible discoveries is infinite, but the space of meaningful ones is not — and it may shrink further as technology advances faster than the theory that underlies it.

The Real Exponential Risk

If we fail to accelerate, we will continue to succumb to disease, remain confined to our local cosmic environment, and leave future generations to look back on 21st-century technology as not fundamentally different from their own.

Some argue there is no plateau — that new physics will eventually emerge, that quantum mechanics will open paths our current models can’t yet imagine.

But the burden of proof lies with those claims. Based on what we know today, a plateau is inevitable. Within that plateau, we can only speculate:

• Are good AR glasses ahead of the plateau, dependent on breakthroughs in battery density and power efficiency? Very Likely, yes.
• Are therapies for broad set of complex autoimmune diseases ahead of the plateau? Probably.
• Will we have Earth-based space elevators before the plateau? Probably not.
• Will we ever have a Star Trek-style future of interstellar travel and colonization before the plateau? Unlikely.

With all that said, we can do no better than our physics allows. Whether or not the plateau exists, our mission should remain the same: accelerate to the maximum extent possible.