Fair point re: economic trends vs. technological trends, though I would stand by the outline of what I said: your post seems to be arguing that current trends don’t suggest a coming explosion, but not that they establish a super-high burden of proof for expecting one.
Re: “For example, the observation that new scientific insights per human have declined rapidly suggests that even getting digital people might not be enough to get us to a growth explosion, as most of the insights may have been plugged already.”
Note that the growth modeling analyses I draw on incorporate the “ideas are getting harder to find” dynamic and discuss it at length. So I think a more specific, quantitative argument needs to be made here—I didn’t argue for the plausibility of explosive growth based on non-declining insights per mind.
Re: “I think the observation mentioned in the second section of my post seems both highly relevant and overlooked, namely that if we take a nerd-dive into the data and look at doublings, we have actually seen an unprecedented deceleration (in terms of how the growth rate has changed across doublings). And while this does not by any means rule out a future growth explosion, I think it is an observation that should be taken into account, and it is perhaps the main reason to be skeptical of a future growth explosion at the level of long-run growth trends.”
I strongly agree with this, but feel that it’s been acknowledged both in the reports I draw on and in my pieces. E.g., I discuss the demographic transition and present the possible explosion as one possibility, rather than as a future strongly implied by the past (and this is something I made a deliberate effort to do).
To be clear, my claim here isn’t “The points you’re raising are unimportant.” I think they are quite important. In a world with linear insights per human and no deceleration, I would’ve written this series very differently; the declining returns and deceleration move me toward “The developments in question are plausible from (but not strongly implied) by the broad trends, and adding the AI-specific analysis moves me to above 50⁄50 this century, but not dramatically above.”
your post seems to be arguing that current trends don’t suggest a coming explosion, but not that they establish a super-high burden of proof for expecting one.
I’m not sure what you mean by a “super-high burden of proof”, but I think the reasons provided in that post represent fairly strong evidence against expecting a future growth explosion, and, if you will, a fairly high burden of proof against it. :)
Specifically, I think the points about the likely imminent end of Moore’s law (in the section “Moore’s law is coming to an end”) and the related point that hardware has already slowed down for years in a pattern that’s consistent with an imminent (further) slowdown (see e.g. the section “The growth of supercomputers has been slowing down for years”) count as fairly strong evidence against a future computer-driven growth explosion, beyond the broader economic trends, and I think they count as being among the main reasons to be skeptical.
Perhaps I can ask: What are your reasons for believing that we’ll see an unprecedented growth explosion in computer hardware in this century, despite the observed slowdown in Moore’s law and related metrics? Or do you think a future growth explosion would generally not require a hardware explosion?
(I suspect my main disagreement with your takes on likely future scenarios comes down to expectations about hardware. I don’t see why we should expect a hardware explosion, and I’m keen to see a strong case for why we should expect it.)
I strongly agree with this, but feel that it’s been acknowledged both in the reports I draw on and in my pieces.
At the risk of repeating myself, I’ll just clarify that my point isn’t merely that economic growth has declined significantly since the 1960s. That would be a fairly trivial and obvious point. :)
The key point I was gesturing at, and which I haven’t seen discussed anywhere else, is that when we look at doubling rates across the entire history of economic growth (and perhaps the history of life, cf. Hanson, 1998), we have seen a slowdown since the mid-20th century that’s unprecedentedin that entire history. To quote the key passage:
The global economy has seen three doublings since 1965, where the annual growth rate was around six percent, and yet the annual growth rate today is only a little over half — around 3 percent — of, and lies stably below, what it was those three doublings ago. In the entire history of economic growth, this seems unprecedented, suggesting that we may already be on the other side of the highest growth rates we will ever see. For up until this point, a three-time doubling of the economy has, rare fluctuations aside, led to an increase in the annual growth rate.
And this “past peak growth” hypothesis looks even stronger if we look at 1955, with a growth rate of a little less than six percent and a world product at 5,430 billion 1990 US dollars, which doubled four times gives just under 87,000 billion — about where we should expect today’s world product to be. Yet throughout the history of our economic development, four doublings have meant a clear increase in the annual growth rate, at least in terms of the underlying trend; not a stable decrease of almost 50 percent [I strongly encourage people to look at the estimates of past growth and see this for themselves]. This tentatively suggests that we should not expect to see growth rates significantly higher than those of today sustained in the future.
This pattern seems overlooked in Hanson’s discussions of a future growth explosion (to be fair, the pattern was less clear when he wrote his 1998 paper, but it was clear when he wrote The Age of Em), and is relevant precisely because his analysis seems motivated by an inductive case for a new growth mode (which, to be clear, is by no means decisively undermined by the unprecedented slowdown we’ve seen since the mid-20th century, but this unique slowdown is highly relevant counterevidence that appears unduly neglected).
Fair point re: economic trends vs. technological trends, though I would stand by the outline of what I said: your post seems to be arguing that current trends don’t suggest a coming explosion, but not that they establish a super-high burden of proof for expecting one.
Re: “For example, the observation that new scientific insights per human have declined rapidly suggests that even getting digital people might not be enough to get us to a growth explosion, as most of the insights may have been plugged already.”
Note that the growth modeling analyses I draw on incorporate the “ideas are getting harder to find” dynamic and discuss it at length. So I think a more specific, quantitative argument needs to be made here—I didn’t argue for the plausibility of explosive growth based on non-declining insights per mind.
Re: “I think the observation mentioned in the second section of my post seems both highly relevant and overlooked, namely that if we take a nerd-dive into the data and look at doublings, we have actually seen an unprecedented deceleration (in terms of how the growth rate has changed across doublings). And while this does not by any means rule out a future growth explosion, I think it is an observation that should be taken into account, and it is perhaps the main reason to be skeptical of a future growth explosion at the level of long-run growth trends.”
I strongly agree with this, but feel that it’s been acknowledged both in the reports I draw on and in my pieces. E.g., I discuss the demographic transition and present the possible explosion as one possibility, rather than as a future strongly implied by the past (and this is something I made a deliberate effort to do).
To be clear, my claim here isn’t “The points you’re raising are unimportant.” I think they are quite important. In a world with linear insights per human and no deceleration, I would’ve written this series very differently; the declining returns and deceleration move me toward “The developments in question are plausible from (but not strongly implied) by the broad trends, and adding the AI-specific analysis moves me to above 50⁄50 this century, but not dramatically above.”
I’m not sure what you mean by a “super-high burden of proof”, but I think the reasons provided in that post represent fairly strong evidence against expecting a future growth explosion, and, if you will, a fairly high burden of proof against it. :)
Specifically, I think the points about the likely imminent end of Moore’s law (in the section “Moore’s law is coming to an end”) and the related point that hardware has already slowed down for years in a pattern that’s consistent with an imminent (further) slowdown (see e.g. the section “The growth of supercomputers has been slowing down for years”) count as fairly strong evidence against a future computer-driven growth explosion, beyond the broader economic trends, and I think they count as being among the main reasons to be skeptical.
Perhaps I can ask: What are your reasons for believing that we’ll see an unprecedented growth explosion in computer hardware in this century, despite the observed slowdown in Moore’s law and related metrics? Or do you think a future growth explosion would generally not require a hardware explosion?
(I suspect my main disagreement with your takes on likely future scenarios comes down to expectations about hardware. I don’t see why we should expect a hardware explosion, and I’m keen to see a strong case for why we should expect it.)
At the risk of repeating myself, I’ll just clarify that my point isn’t merely that economic growth has declined significantly since the 1960s. That would be a fairly trivial and obvious point. :)
The key point I was gesturing at, and which I haven’t seen discussed anywhere else, is that when we look at doubling rates across the entire history of economic growth (and perhaps the history of life, cf. Hanson, 1998), we have seen a slowdown since the mid-20th century that’s unprecedented in that entire history. To quote the key passage:
This pattern seems overlooked in Hanson’s discussions of a future growth explosion (to be fair, the pattern was less clear when he wrote his 1998 paper, but it was clear when he wrote The Age of Em), and is relevant precisely because his analysis seems motivated by an inductive case for a new growth mode (which, to be clear, is by no means decisively undermined by the unprecedented slowdown we’ve seen since the mid-20th century, but this unique slowdown is highly relevant counterevidence that appears unduly neglected).