I think the outside view argument for acceleration deserves more weight. Namely:
Many measures of “output” track each other reasonably closely: how much energy we can harness, how many people we can feed, GDP in modern times, etc.
Output has grown 7-8 orders of magnitude over human history.
The rate of growth has itself accelerated by 3-4 orders of magnitude. (And even early human populations would have seemed to grow very fast to an observer watching the prior billion years of life.)
It’s pretty likely that growth will accelerate by another order of magnitude at some point, given that it’s happened 3-4 times before and faster growth seems possible.
If growth accelerated by another order of magnitude, a hundred years would be enough time for 9 orders of magnitude of growth (more than has occurred in all of human history).
Periods of time with more growth seem to have more economic or technological milestones, even if they are less calendar time.
Heuristics like “the next X years are very short relative to history, so probably not much will happen” seem to have a very bad historical track record when X is enough time for lots of growth to occur, and so it seems like a mistake to call them the “outside view.”
If we go a century without doubling of growth rates, it will be (by far) the most that output has ever grown without significant acceleration.
Data is noisy and data modeling is hard, but it is difficult to construct a model of historical growth that doesn’t have a significant probability of massive growth within a century.
I think the models that are most conservative about future growth are those where stable growth is punctuated by rapid acceleration during “revolutions” (with the agricultural acceleration around 10,000 years ago and the industrial revolution causing continuous acceleration from 1600-1900).
On that model human history has had two revolutions, with about two orders of magnitude of growth between them, each of which led to >10x speedup of growth. It seems like we should have a significant probability (certainly >10%) of another revolution occurring within the next order of magnitude of growth, i.e. within the next century.
I think the outside view argument for acceleration deserves more weight. Namely:
Many measures of “output” track each other reasonably closely: how much energy we can harness, how many people we can feed, GDP in modern times, etc.
Output has grown 7-8 orders of magnitude over human history.
The rate of growth has itself accelerated by 3-4 orders of magnitude. (And even early human populations would have seemed to grow very fast to an observer watching the prior billion years of life.)
It’s pretty likely that growth will accelerate by another order of magnitude at some point, given that it’s happened 3-4 times before and faster growth seems possible.
If growth accelerated by another order of magnitude, a hundred years would be enough time for 9 orders of magnitude of growth (more than has occurred in all of human history).
Periods of time with more growth seem to have more economic or technological milestones, even if they are less calendar time.
Heuristics like “the next X years are very short relative to history, so probably not much will happen” seem to have a very bad historical track record when X is enough time for lots of growth to occur, and so it seems like a mistake to call them the “outside view.”
If we go a century without doubling of growth rates, it will be (by far) the most that output has ever grown without significant acceleration.
Data is noisy and data modeling is hard, but it is difficult to construct a model of historical growth that doesn’t have a significant probability of massive growth within a century.
I think the models that are most conservative about future growth are those where stable growth is punctuated by rapid acceleration during “revolutions” (with the agricultural acceleration around 10,000 years ago and the industrial revolution causing continuous acceleration from 1600-1900).
On that model human history has had two revolutions, with about two orders of magnitude of growth between them, each of which led to >10x speedup of growth. It seems like we should have a significant probability (certainly >10%) of another revolution occurring within the next order of magnitude of growth, i.e. within the next century.