[heavenlyblue]

If you assume the availability of hosts is local to the perimeter of the infected hosts, then the relative growth is limited to 2/R where R is the distance from patient 0 in 2 dimensions. It's becuase an area of the circle defines how many hosts are already ill but the interaction can only happen on the perimeter of the circle.

The disease is obviously also limited by the total amount of hosts, but I assume there's also the "bottom" limit - i.e. the resource consumption of already-infected hosts.

[CamperBob2]

It also depends on how panicked people are. Covid was never going to spread like ebola, for instance: it was worse. Bad enough to harm and kill people, but not bad enough to scare them into self-enforced isolation and voluntary compliance with public health measures.

Back on the subject of AI, I think the flat part of the curve has always been in sight. Transformers can achieve human performance in some, even many respects, but they're like children who have to spend a million years in grade school to learn their multiplication tables. We will have to figure out why that is the case and how to improve upon it drastically before this stuff really starts to pay off. I'm sure we will but we'll be on a completely different S-shaped curve at that point.