As I’ve discussed before, including in my book, the history of humanity so far can be roughly summarized as a sequence of three exponential growth modes: foragers with culture started a few million years ago, farming started about ten thousand years ago, and industry starting a few hundred years ago. Doubling times got progressively shorter: a quarter million years, then a millennia, and now fifteen years. Each time the transition lasted less than a previously doubling time, and roughly similar numbers of humans have lived during each era.
"putting the unused capacity to use for something is ideologically opposed by our ruling elite"
This is a strange theory. You think that politicians can and should give all of the unemployed people jobs but don't because they are ideological?
Remember the JOBS act? Politicians are always talking about getting people employed by various projects.
"We live in a world where paradoxically the big economic problem is a "demand shortfall" while at the same time there is a huge amount of incredibly useful stuff going undone."
In my earlier comment I tried to address this. It doesn't seem right that people wanting things too little can be an explanation.
OTOH, behind many technological innovations, the US government paid for the basic research. Microelectronics, the Internet and the current boom in biotech come to mind. Not to mention that government provides the infrastructure that defines and enforced property rights. And certainly there are places on earth where the hand of government rests very lightly, such as Afghanistan and the northwest province of Pakistan, but they're not noted for high levels of prosperity.
Something like this is already happening: Consider data-center-based information services like Google and Facebook. They resemble manufacturing companies, but the "workers" are the computers in the data centers. Their software engineers are analogous to industrial design engineers. The "workers" for these companies are essentially produced in factories, so the population of "workers" can expand very quickly.
What you don't get is exponential growth. But it seems to me that's a general limitation -- you can only get pure exponential growth of New Things if *every* component of the New Thing can be produced by New Things -- but real New Things are created from many inputs, and the rate of creating New Things ultimately becomes limited by whichever input has the slowest exponential growth rate. E.g., if you had a factory that could produce clones of itself whenever a human pushed a button, their growth rate would ultimately becomes limited by the population of humans available to push the button.
I note that GDP growth in industrialized society grows faster than the population. (Which is equivalent to saying humans escaped the Malthusian trap.) That seems to be achieved by the fact that GDP is not a thing, there is no particular resource whose production is growing with a doubling time of 15 years. GDP is a number formed by a complicated weighted sum of the amounts of various resources. Which points out that if there is a Next Wave with a much shorter doubling time, that, too, will be of an abstract quantity, not a specific thing, and it might be calculated in a substantially different way than GDP.
Doubling every month has a timescale that is 120 times faster than doubling every decade. So instead of a change that runs to its limit in a century, it runs to its limit in a year.
There are (at least) two routes to AI: 1) accumulating better code and 2) porting brain code via emulation. Lognormal post applies only to 1, this post applies to both, but only after reach near full displacement of human workers.
Think again, Hammurabi. I would have come closer to agreeing with your OP 15 years ago, when I was more of a pure AI type. Productivity in manufacturing is already slightly hyperexponential; I don't see any trend to AGI that is rising faster on a decadal or longer scale.Are you trying to say that you don't believe your following post where you think the effect of exponentially improving AI might have linear results in the real world?
Seems you are saying that some kinds of abstractions, eg scaling laws in manufacturing, are trustworthy even into strange future where many things change, but that other kinds of abstractions, eg growth theory that says growth booms when labor substitutes can be made in factories, are less trustworthy, and can't be relied on in strange futures. This seems close to simple favoritism of the disciplines you were trained in, relative to others.
There are trends (e.g. Productivity of manufacturing) and scaling laws that let us readily imagine a major takeoff in the coming century. Something a lot like the computing takeoff when the corporate computer center gave way to PCs. I don't see AI as providing a sudden foom in the process, though; something more like your log normal analysis is likely.
I'm not sure why we should trust such an intuition much. We don't know how much we'll be able to understand anything until we get into the details and try.
Doesn't that support the contention that the nearest rapid material increases will be space based? There aren't many rules governing space based manufacturing/mining. There eventually will be, but this is an area where I imagine governments moving slow works in favor of growth.
I would like to think that this could someday come true. But, realistically, a much larger limiting factor looms ahead: Government. It is the ultimate road block which prevents progress in almost every meaningful area of advancement: from self driving cars, to flying cars, to building height restrictions to innovations in building techniques to medical advancements, etc. Although government is necessary - it's also far too slow. Before anyone starts making the exponential jumps this article hopes for, you'll have to reform government - and that takes a long, long time.
I don't understand what you are saying. Are you suggesting that we should not try to foresee the next big change? That none of today's concepts arerelevant? You seem to think the concept of nanofactories is relevant; why is that concept more useful than the others I invoke?
This is something like trying to foresee the Internet in 1916 by thinking about pneumatic message tubes (which quite a few SF writers actually did). Robin is one of the best at avoiding Failure of Nerve, but no one can avoid Failure of the Imagination. Remember that latter 21st century nanotech could most likely produce fully-formed, fully educated, adult humans in factories.
Really what I'm saying is that we are currently limited more by our economic and political system than we are by technology in terms of what and how much we are producing. We live in a world where paradoxically the big economic problem is a "demand shortfall" while at the same time there is a huge amount of incredibly useful stuff going undone. The easy solution of having the state play the role of 'demander of last resort' and putting the unused capacity to use for something is ideologically opposed by our ruling elite, and hence our current pickle. I don't know if much more efficient consumer good production would really change that equation much.
There are several emerging technologies which could substantially substitute for current labor force participation: quickly reprogrammable and cheap robot arms, autonomous vehicles, automated and online checkout, and 3d printing. Looking at BLS industry data (http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_t..., I'd say those technologies could substantially replace construction, mining, manufacturing, wholesale and retail trade, and transportation and warehousing. Together those account for about a third of the labor force. There is also likely to be some if less innovation in finance, professional services, and leisure. Education and health care seem to be a current bottleneck due to government regulation. Finance appears to be a bottleneck due to market irrationality. Actively managed funds still represent about 75% of the market (http://www.wsj.com/articles... although index funds and ETFs are slowly making gains. We might hit a market growth acceleration well before AGI arrives. I think an innovation in how information is exchanged over the internet could also happen at any moment, and could present a major leap forward.
"putting the unused capacity to use for something is ideologically opposed by our ruling elite"
This is a strange theory. You think that politicians can and should give all of the unemployed people jobs but don't because they are ideological?
Remember the JOBS act? Politicians are always talking about getting people employed by various projects.
"We live in a world where paradoxically the big economic problem is a "demand shortfall" while at the same time there is a huge amount of incredibly useful stuff going undone."
In my earlier comment I tried to address this. It doesn't seem right that people wanting things too little can be an explanation.
OTOH, behind many technological innovations, the US government paid for the basic research. Microelectronics, the Internet and the current boom in biotech come to mind. Not to mention that government provides the infrastructure that defines and enforced property rights. And certainly there are places on earth where the hand of government rests very lightly, such as Afghanistan and the northwest province of Pakistan, but they're not noted for high levels of prosperity.
Something like this is already happening: Consider data-center-based information services like Google and Facebook. They resemble manufacturing companies, but the "workers" are the computers in the data centers. Their software engineers are analogous to industrial design engineers. The "workers" for these companies are essentially produced in factories, so the population of "workers" can expand very quickly.
What you don't get is exponential growth. But it seems to me that's a general limitation -- you can only get pure exponential growth of New Things if *every* component of the New Thing can be produced by New Things -- but real New Things are created from many inputs, and the rate of creating New Things ultimately becomes limited by whichever input has the slowest exponential growth rate. E.g., if you had a factory that could produce clones of itself whenever a human pushed a button, their growth rate would ultimately becomes limited by the population of humans available to push the button.
I note that GDP growth in industrialized society grows faster than the population. (Which is equivalent to saying humans escaped the Malthusian trap.) That seems to be achieved by the fact that GDP is not a thing, there is no particular resource whose production is growing with a doubling time of 15 years. GDP is a number formed by a complicated weighted sum of the amounts of various resources. Which points out that if there is a Next Wave with a much shorter doubling time, that, too, will be of an abstract quantity, not a specific thing, and it might be calculated in a substantially different way than GDP.
Doubling every month has a timescale that is 120 times faster than doubling every decade. So instead of a change that runs to its limit in a century, it runs to its limit in a year.
There are (at least) two routes to AI: 1) accumulating better code and 2) porting brain code via emulation. Lognormal post applies only to 1, this post applies to both, but only after reach near full displacement of human workers.
Think again, Hammurabi. I would have come closer to agreeing with your OP 15 years ago, when I was more of a pure AI type. Productivity in manufacturing is already slightly hyperexponential; I don't see any trend to AGI that is rising faster on a decadal or longer scale.Are you trying to say that you don't believe your following post where you think the effect of exponentially improving AI might have linear results in the real world?
Seems you are saying that some kinds of abstractions, eg scaling laws in manufacturing, are trustworthy even into strange future where many things change, but that other kinds of abstractions, eg growth theory that says growth booms when labor substitutes can be made in factories, are less trustworthy, and can't be relied on in strange futures. This seems close to simple favoritism of the disciplines you were trained in, relative to others.
There are trends (e.g. Productivity of manufacturing) and scaling laws that let us readily imagine a major takeoff in the coming century. Something a lot like the computing takeoff when the corporate computer center gave way to PCs. I don't see AI as providing a sudden foom in the process, though; something more like your log normal analysis is likely.
I'm not sure why we should trust such an intuition much. We don't know how much we'll be able to understand anything until we get into the details and try.
No; no; and it isn't. I'm just trying to give an intuitive feeling for the extent to which we can grok the future in its fullness, so to speak.
Doesn't that support the contention that the nearest rapid material increases will be space based? There aren't many rules governing space based manufacturing/mining. There eventually will be, but this is an area where I imagine governments moving slow works in favor of growth.
I would like to think that this could someday come true. But, realistically, a much larger limiting factor looms ahead: Government. It is the ultimate road block which prevents progress in almost every meaningful area of advancement: from self driving cars, to flying cars, to building height restrictions to innovations in building techniques to medical advancements, etc. Although government is necessary - it's also far too slow. Before anyone starts making the exponential jumps this article hopes for, you'll have to reform government - and that takes a long, long time.
I don't understand what you are saying. Are you suggesting that we should not try to foresee the next big change? That none of today's concepts arerelevant? You seem to think the concept of nanofactories is relevant; why is that concept more useful than the others I invoke?
This is something like trying to foresee the Internet in 1916 by thinking about pneumatic message tubes (which quite a few SF writers actually did). Robin is one of the best at avoiding Failure of Nerve, but no one can avoid Failure of the Imagination. Remember that latter 21st century nanotech could most likely produce fully-formed, fully educated, adult humans in factories.
Really what I'm saying is that we are currently limited more by our economic and political system than we are by technology in terms of what and how much we are producing. We live in a world where paradoxically the big economic problem is a "demand shortfall" while at the same time there is a huge amount of incredibly useful stuff going undone. The easy solution of having the state play the role of 'demander of last resort' and putting the unused capacity to use for something is ideologically opposed by our ruling elite, and hence our current pickle. I don't know if much more efficient consumer good production would really change that equation much.
There are several emerging technologies which could substantially substitute for current labor force participation: quickly reprogrammable and cheap robot arms, autonomous vehicles, automated and online checkout, and 3d printing. Looking at BLS industry data (http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_t..., I'd say those technologies could substantially replace construction, mining, manufacturing, wholesale and retail trade, and transportation and warehousing. Together those account for about a third of the labor force. There is also likely to be some if less innovation in finance, professional services, and leisure. Education and health care seem to be a current bottleneck due to government regulation. Finance appears to be a bottleneck due to market irrationality. Actively managed funds still represent about 75% of the market (http://www.wsj.com/articles... although index funds and ETFs are slowly making gains. We might hit a market growth acceleration well before AGI arrives. I think an innovation in how information is exchanged over the internet could also happen at any moment, and could present a major leap forward.