It's not exponential, it's sigmoidal

Except that's a silly distinction, when you don't yet have any information about what the upper bound is, or any evidence that growth is slowing from its exponential stage. The growth of real-world things clearly has some upper bound, and in saying that it's "exponential" this is understood by all listeners.

Since calling a real-world trend "exponential growth" is always an approximation, pointing out that it's actually "approximately sigmoidal growth, i.e. only approximately exponential until it flattens out sometime in the eventual future" is (you guessed it) a redundant waste of breath.

And to say that pointless pedantry is the same as "mathematical literacy" is even sillier.

"And as Saul noted a few moments later, most of these curves aren't even sigmoidal, they are sinusoidal. (This is, incidentally, why Ray Kurzweil is most likely wrong about the singularity.)"

Am I the only one who gets tired of sweeping bullshit generalizations like this? I can't believe people will pay to hear this kind of nonsense.

He isn't actually saying anything you can rebut.

Modding this up is an even truer sign of mathematical illiteracy. The sigmoid itself contains an exponent that is damped at higher values. One could go further and say that it is not even a sigmoid because all web traffic will peter off eventually, with the eventuality in the undefined horizon. Does anyone really assume an exponential growth in the literal sense with users rushing in via some inter-galactic network when all earth users are exhausted?