Yes - accelerating exponentially
Ah, Mr Miller. You've committed the classic schoolboy error of looking at output of things which are not derived from information technology. Yes, 40 years ago we could do wonderful things. 100 years ago we could do just as many marvelous things. Tut tut, we haven't really changed that much, right?
Go back to anytime in recorded history, and you'll probably find things that haven't changed that much. Consider the height of buildings. Although we have billions times more processing power at our fingertips, our buildings aren't billions of times taller. Nor are our trains or planes billions of times faster. Nor are our lives billions of times longer.
But we're not talking about output. We're talking about information technology and its exponential growth. Anything which is inherently an information technology does grow exponentially, whether we like it or not. DNA, communication, computing power, photovoltaic cells. Once we start to treat something as an information technology, it will improve in price-performance exponentially.
Moore's law rightly described the exponential grown of the price-performance of integrated circuits. However it was the fifth exponential growth in computing power. We are currently on the cusp of the 6th phase of exponential growth, all of which has followed seamlessly as expected. (For information, the first was electromechanical calculators, cicra 1890; the second was Turing's relay-based Robinson machine; the third was vacuum tubes; the fourth was transistors; the fifth was integrated circuits; the sixth will be 3 dimensional circuits).
In terms of your examples - storage (of information technology) has in fact seen exponential growth. Consider how much it costs you to save 1 MB of data in an external hard drive now, versus 20 years ago.
In terms of transport - well, that is not an information technology. Its purely mechanical - at the moment. Although you could look at certain aspects of transport which are I.T. For example, consider how much it costs to transport 1MB of information electronically - now, versus 20 years ago.
And for power generation, well, we're still in a mechanical phase for most of our power generation. Even something like solar (concentrated solar) is just a mechanical process (heating water to create steam to turn a turbine). However, photovoltaic cells are an information technology, as we're dealing with electrons and light. Solar P.V. is following a predictable exponential growth in price-performance. But because we're still in the very early stages, it's hardly noticeable. But it's growing just the same (see http://bigthink.com/ideas/31635). The growth rate is a doubling every 2 years (as opposed to every 18 months for processing power).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
