My impression is that everyone agrees that the Industrial Revolution led to an increase in the growth rate, but that the Hyperbolic Growth Hypothesis (HGH) disagrees with the Series Of Exponentials Hypothesis on whether that increase in the growth rate was trend-breaking.
Put differently, the HGH says that as far as the growth rate is concerned, the Industrial Revolution wasn’t special—or if it was, then it must attribute this to noise. According to the HGH, the growth rate has been increasing all the time according to the same hyperbolic function, and the industrial revolution was just a part of this trend. I.e. only one “growth mode” for all of history, rather than the industrial revolution ushering in a new growth mode.
By contrast, on the Series Of Exponential view, the Industrial Revolution did break the previous trend—we had exponential growth both before and after, but with different doubling times.
I agree with this, but it seems irrelevant to Asya’s point? If it turned out to be the case that we would just resume the trend of accelerating growth, and AI was the cause of that, I would still call that transformative AI and I would still be worried about AI risks, to about the same degree as I would if that same acceleration was instead trend-breaking.
Yes, sorry, I think I was too quick to make a comment and should have paid more attention to the context. I think the claims in my comment are correct, but as you say it’s not clear what exactly they’re responding to, and in particular I agree it’s not relevant to Asya’s point on whether to use ‘explosive’.
My impression is that everyone agrees that the Industrial Revolution led to an increase in the growth rate, but that the Hyperbolic Growth Hypothesis (HGH) disagrees with the Series Of Exponentials Hypothesis on whether that increase in the growth rate was trend-breaking.
Put differently, the HGH says that as far as the growth rate is concerned, the Industrial Revolution wasn’t special—or if it was, then it must attribute this to noise. According to the HGH, the growth rate has been increasing all the time according to the same hyperbolic function, and the industrial revolution was just a part of this trend. I.e. only one “growth mode” for all of history, rather than the industrial revolution ushering in a new growth mode.
By contrast, on the Series Of Exponential view, the Industrial Revolution did break the previous trend—we had exponential growth both before and after, but with different doubling times.
I agree with this, but it seems irrelevant to Asya’s point? If it turned out to be the case that we would just resume the trend of accelerating growth, and AI was the cause of that, I would still call that transformative AI and I would still be worried about AI risks, to about the same degree as I would if that same acceleration was instead trend-breaking.
Yes, sorry, I think I was too quick to make a comment and should have paid more attention to the context. I think the claims in my comment are correct, but as you say it’s not clear what exactly they’re responding to, and in particular I agree it’s not relevant to Asya’s point on whether to use ‘explosive’.