At any given point in time, I expect that progress looks like “taking the low-hanging fruit”; the reason growth goes up over time anyway is because there’s a lot more effort looking for fruit as time goes on, and it turns out that effect dominates.
I think the empirical data suggests that that effect generally doesn’t dominate anymore, and that it hasn’t dominated in the economy as a whole for the last ~3 doublings. For example, US Total Factor Productivity growth has been weakly declining for several decades despite superlinear growth in the effective number of researchers.
I think the example of 0 AD is disanalogous because there wasn’t a zero-to-one growth along similarly significant and fundamental dimensions (e.g. hitting the ultimate limit in the speed of communication) followed by an unprecedented growth decline that further (weakly) supports that we’re past the inflection point, i.e. past peak growth rates.
I think the empirical data suggests that that effect generally doesn’t dominate anymore, and that it hasn’t dominated in the economy as a whole for the last ~3 doublings. For example, US Total Factor Productivity growth has been weakly declining for several decades despite superlinear growth in the effective number of researchers.
I think the example of 0 AD is disanalogous because there wasn’t a zero-to-one growth along similarly significant and fundamental dimensions (e.g. hitting the ultimate limit in the speed of communication) followed by an unprecedented growth decline that further (weakly) supports that we’re past the inflection point, i.e. past peak growth rates.