CONCEPT
The Relentless Arithmetic
Moravec’s empirical claim that the cost of computation has fallen at a steady exponential rate across five successive hardware technologies without breaking stride—the original long-form argument for the bet that now dominates AI, that capability follows hardware rather than waiting for conceptual breakthrough, and that the timeline of machine intelligence is therefore legible from a graph.
The relentless arithmetic is
Moravec’s name for the observation that the exponential growth of computing power has run continuously since the first mechanical computers, across electromechanical relays, vacuum tubes, transistors, and integrated circuits, without breaking stride. Each hardware technology ran its exponential curve until it was exhausted, and the next technology inherited the slope. Moravec charted this curve across a century of computing history and concluded that it was not an artifact of any single technology but a deeper regularity—and that drawing the line forward gave a legible timeline for when machines would reach human-equivalent computational capacity. He estimated the crossover for affordable personal machines somewhere around 2040. His thesis—that scale is the binding constraint on machine intelligence, and that the right algorithms would follow the hardware rather than precede it—was the original sustained argument for what the present