I think “open to speed-ups” is about right. As I said in the quoted text, my conclusion was that contingent speed-ups “may be possible”. They are not an avenue for long-term change that I’m especially excited about. The main reason for including them here was to distinguish them from advancements (these two things are often run together) and because they fall out very natural as one of the kinds of natural marginal change to the trajectory whose value doesn’t depend on the details of the curve.
That said, it sounds like I think they are a bit more likely to be possible than you do. Here are some comments on that.
One thing is that it is easier to have a speed-up relative to another trajectory than to have one that is contingent — which wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Contingent speed-ups are the ones of most interest to longtermists, but those that are overdetermined to happen are still relevant to studying the value of the future and where it comes from. e.g. if the industrial revolution was going to happen anyway, then the counterfactual value of it happening in the UK in the late 1700s may be small, but it is still an extremely interesting event in terms of dramatically changing the rate of progress from then onwards compared to a world without an industrial revolution.
The more natural thought is that, at some point in time, we either hit a plateau, or hit some hard limit of how fast v(.) can grow (perhaps driven by cubic or quadratic growth as future people settle the stars).
Even if v(.) hits a plateau, you can still have a speed-up, it is just that it only has an impact on the value achieved before we would have hit the value anyway. That could be a large change (e.g. if the plateau isn’t reached in the first 1% of our lifetime), but even if it isn’t, that doesn’t stop this being a speed-up, it is just that changing the speed of some things isn’t very valuable, which is a result that is revealed by the framework.
Suppose v(.) stops growing exponentially with progress and most of its increase is then governed by growing cubically as a humanity’s descendants settle the cosmos. Expanding faster (e.g. by achieving a faster travel speed of 76%c instead of 75%c) could then count as a speed-up. That said, it is difficult for this to be a contingent speed-up, as it raises the question of why (when this was the main determinant of value) would this improvement not be implemented at a later date? And it is also difficult in this case to see how any actions now could produce such a speed-up.
Overall, I don’t see them as a promising avenue for current efforts to target, and more of a useful theoretical tool, but I also don’t think there are knockdown arguments against them being a practical avenue.
I think “open to speed-ups” is about right. As I said in the quoted text, my conclusion was that contingent speed-ups “may be possible”. They are not an avenue for long-term change that I’m especially excited about. The main reason for including them here was to distinguish them from advancements (these two things are often run together) and because they fall out very natural as one of the kinds of natural marginal change to the trajectory whose value doesn’t depend on the details of the curve.
That said, it sounds like I think they are a bit more likely to be possible than you do. Here are some comments on that.
One thing is that it is easier to have a speed-up relative to another trajectory than to have one that is contingent — which wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Contingent speed-ups are the ones of most interest to longtermists, but those that are overdetermined to happen are still relevant to studying the value of the future and where it comes from. e.g. if the industrial revolution was going to happen anyway, then the counterfactual value of it happening in the UK in the late 1700s may be small, but it is still an extremely interesting event in terms of dramatically changing the rate of progress from then onwards compared to a world without an industrial revolution.
Even if v(.) hits a plateau, you can still have a speed-up, it is just that it only has an impact on the value achieved before we would have hit the value anyway. That could be a large change (e.g. if the plateau isn’t reached in the first 1% of our lifetime), but even if it isn’t, that doesn’t stop this being a speed-up, it is just that changing the speed of some things isn’t very valuable, which is a result that is revealed by the framework.
Suppose v(.) stops growing exponentially with progress and most of its increase is then governed by growing cubically as a humanity’s descendants settle the cosmos. Expanding faster (e.g. by achieving a faster travel speed of 76%c instead of 75%c) could then count as a speed-up. That said, it is difficult for this to be a contingent speed-up, as it raises the question of why (when this was the main determinant of value) would this improvement not be implemented at a later date? And it is also difficult in this case to see how any actions now could produce such a speed-up.
Overall, I don’t see them as a promising avenue for current efforts to target, and more of a useful theoretical tool, but I also don’t think there are knockdown arguments against them being a practical avenue.