Thriving Amid Exponential Growth: Lessons from a Chessboard

The world is no longer what it was, and we are only beginning to realize just how much it has changed. We’ve crossed into what we futurists like to call “the second half of the chessboard,” a term that vividly captures the exponential nature of progress. In this new era, change no longer inches forward; it leaps, accelerates, and compounds in ways that defy linear thinking. It’s no longer about gradual improvement but about paradigms shifting seemingly overnight.

Unfortunately, humanity is ill-prepared for exponential change. Our brains evolved to navigate linear challenges—spotting predators on the savanna or managing seasonal cycles. Exponential growth, however, operates on an entirely different scale, defying intuition and overwhelming our capacity to comprehend its full impact. While we’ve evolved to navigate a linear world, the accelerating forces of change demand a new mindset—one that can embrace compounding growth and its sweeping consequences. We must adapt our thinking to thrive.

The Second Half of the Chessboard

The story of Sissa Ibn Dahir and his clever chessboard request is often cited to illustrate exponential growth. The legend goes that an Indian king, bored with the usual pastimes of his court, summoned his wisest subjects and tasked them with inventing a game that would both entertain and challenge his intellect. Among them was Sissa ben Dahir, a mathematician and philosopher, who presented the game of chess. Intrigued by its intricate strategies and the way it mirrored the complexities of life and leadership, the king was captivated. Declaring the game a masterpiece, he promised Sissa any reward he desired. Sissa’s request seemed modest: one grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard, two grains on the second, doubling the amount with each square. The king readily agreed, imagining this to be a trivial gesture of generosity.

For the first few rows of the chessboard, the king’s storehouses easily supplied the rice. By the halfway mark—32 squares—the grains totaled 4 billion. At this point, the king probably wished he’d stuck with a gift card or a shiny trinket. Alas, exponential growth doesn’t negotiate, even with royalty. By the final square, however, the demand exceeded the global rice supply, with more grains required than had ever existed in human history. What began as a simple request spiraled into an impossible debt.

This tale captures the deceptive nature of exponential growth. Just as the king underestimated the implications of doubling grains, we often overlook how exponential growth manifests in modern life. Today, this principle underpins the explosive rise of social media platforms, the proliferation of AI capabilities, and the rapid accumulation of data. Early on, the curve is gentle, almost imperceptible. Then comes the inflection point, when growth accelerates beyond our ability to keep pace. Each ‘doubling’ brings us closer to a tipping point, reshaping industries and societies in the process. This same principle governs the world of technology today, where change starts subtly before cascading into transformations that reshape industries, societies, and lives. But what does this mean in today’s context? Let’s reimagine the tale.

Picture this: you pitch a revolutionary app to a tech billionaire. Instead of asking for a massive upfront investment, you propose a playful reward:

“Start me with one like on Day 1. Double it each day for 64 days.”

It sounds trivial. On Day 10, you’d have just over 500 likes—not exactly groundbreaking. But by Day 32, you’d hit 4 billion likes per day. By Day 64, the tally would be so astronomical it would surpass all conceivable bandwidth on Earth. Servers would crash, the internet would implode, and your quirky request would outpace the infrastructure of global connectivity.

This modern take on exponential growth demonstrates its insidious power. What seems manageable in the early stages becomes uncontainable in the second half. In the real world, this trajectory mirrors the rise of social media platforms, artificial intelligence, and other disruptive technologies.

Exponential Growth - A Journey Through Time

To truly grasp the magnitude of exponential growth, let’s take one more journey, a journey through time—not years, but seconds:

• 1 second: A blink. That’s all it takes—a moment so fleeting you hardly notice it.
• 10 seconds: Enough time to scroll through a TikTok video, take a deep breath, or send a quick text. You’re barely warmed up.
• 100 seconds: A little over a minute and a half. You could finish brushing your teeth or boil water for tea. It’s starting to feel like a chunk of time.
• 1,000 seconds: About 16 and a half minutes. You could squeeze in a short YouTube video or grab a coffee on your commute.
• 10,000 seconds: Roughly 2 hours and 45 minutes. Time enough for a long movie or a good gaming session.
• 100,000 seconds: That’s 27 hours and 46 minutes—more than a day! You’ve gone from “just a moment” to “Wow, I could have slept and woken up.”
• 1 million seconds: 11 days, 13 hours, and 46 minutes. By now, you could binge an entire TV series, fly around the world a few times, or recover from jet lag.
• 1 billion seconds: About 31.7 years. Imagine everything that happens in three decades: graduating, starting a career, maybe even raising a family. A billion seconds is literally a lifetime for some.
• 1 trillion seconds: Now we’re talking cosmic scales—31,709 years! That’s before the Great Pyramid of Giza was built, before writing was invented, back in the Stone Age. Humanity as we know it wouldn’t even recognize the world from that time.

To put this into perspective, as of November 2024, the world’s most powerful supercomputer is the United States’ El Capitan. It can achieve a performance of 1.742 exaFLOPS (exa floating-point operations per second) on the LINPACK benchmarks. 1 exaFLOP equals 1 quintillion (10¹⁸) FLOPS. Therefore, 1.742 exaFLOPS translates to 1.742 quintillion FLOPS. This means El Capitan can perform approximately 1.742 quintillion floating-point operations per second, highlighting the extraordinary computational capabilities of modern supercomputers.

In other words, El Capitan performs 1,742,000 trillion operations every second. That means in the blink of an eye—just 1 second—it completes more operations than there are seconds in 55 million years. By the time you’ve scrolled through a single TikTok video in 10 seconds, it has performed operations exceeding the number of seconds in 550 million years, roughly the age of complex life on Earth.

Now if we compare this to the launch of the new Google quantum chip, it is actually painstakingly slow. Google’s quantum chip Willow achieved a milestone that feels like a sci-fi plot: solving a computation in five minutes that would take classical supercomputers 10 septillion years. Beyond speed, its real victory lies in error correction. Willow’s “below threshold” rates mark the first practical step toward reliable, large-scale quantum systems. 

This isn’t just fast; it’s a speed so exponential that it dwarfs our comprehension of time and scale, embodying the extraordinary potential—and challenge—of exponential growth in the digital age.

The Challenge of Understanding Exponentiality

The challenge is not just the pace of change but our inability to intuitively grasp it. On the savanna, where survival depended on linear problem-solving, exponential thinking was unnecessary. Today, however, exponential forces govern nearly every aspect of life, from data generation to technological adoption. Without a paradigm shift in how we think, plan, and act, we risk being overwhelmed by the very systems we’ve created.

Understanding exponential growth is no longer optional. It’s a necessity for leaders, innovators, and policymakers navigating the Intelligence Age. The lesson of the chessboard is clear: by the time exponential growth feels urgent, it’s often too late to respond. Success in this era requires not just reacting to change but anticipating it and developing the foresight, flexibility, and adaptability to thrive in a world where the pace of progress doubles overnight.

As we move forward, remember: the second half of the chessboard is not just a mathematical phenomenon—it’s the world we live in. Are you ready to embrace it?