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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Hi,

I confess I've always been very suspicious of this "sequence of exponential growth modes" "model." It seemed to me that "within a century or so" is not much of a prediction. For example, suppose in 2130, economic growth increased dramatically. Robin would be "right," but most of us would have forgotten (mainly by virtue of being dead).

But I do see that I'd failed to find the buried lead in another paper of Robin's, wherein he writes:

"Without machine intelligence, world product grows at a familiar rate of 4.3% per year, doubling every 16 years, with about 40% of technological progress coming from ordinary computers. With machine intelligence, the (instantaneous) annual growth rate would be 45%, ten times higher, making world product double every 18 months!"

Hanson on economic growth with machine intelligence (caution: contains math ;-))

Since he does give a approximate time frame of the next decade or two, I consider that a much more bold prediction. In fact, I don't think it's unreasonable, if it comes to pass, to call it the greatest prediction in the history of economics.

So he'd have that going for him, which is nice...

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

1) Kurzweil did update his graphs to 2009 or so for a presentation, but I cant remember which. It may be the one where he is talking with an Army group.

2) I wondered the same thing about non human primates, but my guess is that Hanson would argue that there was growth but tiny. I'd say zero growth and then very tiny but...

3) Intel has argued that computer speed should continue to at least 2029 and this has kept me up worrying some nights....

4) Does anyone have a edition to Omni that was put out in summer 1989? Some author scared the crap out of me by arguing chips in brains by 2030. It was convincing at the time. That sounds like Kurzweil, but I didn't see his name in the special Future issue. (a special future Issue seems redundant for Omni.)

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