Imagine you’re climbing a mountain.

For decades, the pace of progress in computing—guided by Moore’s Law—has felt like hiking up a steady incline. Every couple of years, our computers became twice as powerful. It was impressive and transformative. Thanks to Moore’s Law, we got smaller, faster, and cheaper devices. In medicine, that led to digital imaging, electronic health records, telemedicine, and more.

But now, something new is happening. We’re no longer just walking up a hill.

We’ve strapped a rocket to our backs.

That rocket is Neven’s Law, a term coined by Google’s Hartmut Neven to describe how progress in quantum computing—and, by extension, certain types of AI—isn’t just exponential. It’s double exponential.

Moore’s Law says that computing power (or the number of transistors on a chip) doubles approximately every 18–24 months. That’s an example of exponential growth—like this:

• Year 1: 1
• Year 2: 2
• Year 3: 4
• Year 4: 8
• Year 5: 16
• Year 6: 32
  …and so on.

Now compare that to the “powers of powers of 2” growth (sometimes called tetration or super-exponential growth):

• Step 1: 2^1 = 2
• Step 2: 2^2 = 4
• Step 3: 2^(2^2) = 16
• Step 4: 2^(2^(2^2)) = 65,536
• Step 5: 2^(2^(2^(2^2))) = a number with nearly 20,000 digits

So while Moore’s Law is like climbing stairs, each step doubling your height, this kind of growth is like strapping a rocket to each step and launching into space—then launching again from orbit, and again from deep space.

So what does this mean for medicine?

Let’s take genomics as an example. It took 13 years and $3 billion to sequence the first human genome. Today, it takes just hours and costs less than $200….a 15 million-fold drop in cost in ~20 years, faster than Moore’s Law, which would have taken ~34 years or 17 .. “doublings”.

Now imagine AI that learns not just twice as fast every year—but at a rate where each year’s increase is itself doubling. The decline in sequencing cost will reach sub-$200 in just 4–5 steps. That’s Neven’s Law. That’s an AI system that could one day:

• Predict your disease risk before symptoms appear,
• Suggest personalized treatments in real time,
• Design drugs faster than any pharmaceutical pipeline ever could.

Or picture AI-assisted robotic surgery that doesn’t just improve incrementally, but becomes smarter every week—learning from every patient across the globe, in real time, and adapting instantly.

Moore’s Law is like upgrading from a bicycle to a car.
Neven’s Law is like going from a car… to teleportation.

With Moore’s Law, we digitized medicine.
With Neven’s Law, we’ll redefine it.

This leap isn’t just about speed—it’s about capability. Double exponential growth means that tasks we once thought impossible (like decoding the interaction between your genes, microbiome, environment, and lifestyle) may soon become routine. We’re moving from generalized protocols to precision care at planetary scale.

Of course, with great speed comes great responsibility. We must ensure our systems are safe, equitable, and transparent. But if harnessed wisely, the AI progress curve described by Neven’s Law will take medicine into a realm where we can finally deliver care that is predictive, personalized, proactive—and profoundly human.

The future of medicine isn’t just arriving fast.
It’s arriving faster than fast.