An important point that I don’t think we’ve said yet is that information density is of course not the same as economic productivity.
What would the Gross Galactic Product be of a maximally-efficient galaxy economy that had reached the 4×10^106 bit information density limit? It would necessarily be close to $10^106 or close to 10^106 times greater than the size of today’s GWP, right?
Similarly, if annual GWP increases at 2%/​year, that does not necessarily mean that the economy’s information density (or perhaps more accurately, the information density of the system the economy is enclosed in) is increasing at close to 2%/​year, does it?
I avoided the ‘productivity’ or ‘economic value’ to focus on something physically tangible. Markets put an objective value on those, but there’s no physical laws to help here.
Generally you’d expect the marginal value of information to fall as more information is created. Aristotle’s works vs another youtube video or terrabytes of system logs. The information-density-value-efficiency gets lower as you get bigger. Our own hard drive’s content is a good additional example: probably <5% of the contents are high value, contrast to when we all had much smaller storage (e.g. 2.5 inch floppy drives).
That said, this is analogous to diminishing marginal value (or returns) to scale in economic activity.
Efficiency of any economic system with respect to fundamental resource usage (information, energy) probably is almost certainly declining in scale. Friction adds up.
An important point that I don’t think we’ve said yet is that information density is of course not the same as economic productivity.
What would the Gross Galactic Product be of a maximally-efficient galaxy economy that had reached the 4×10^106 bit information density limit? It would necessarily be close to $10^106 or close to 10^106 times greater than the size of today’s GWP, right?
Similarly, if annual GWP increases at 2%/​year, that does not necessarily mean that the economy’s information density (or perhaps more accurately, the information density of the system the economy is enclosed in) is increasing at close to 2%/​year, does it?
I avoided the ‘productivity’ or ‘economic value’ to focus on something physically tangible. Markets put an objective value on those, but there’s no physical laws to help here.
Generally you’d expect the marginal value of information to fall as more information is created. Aristotle’s works vs another youtube video or terrabytes of system logs. The information-density-value-efficiency gets lower as you get bigger. Our own hard drive’s content is a good additional example: probably <5% of the contents are high value, contrast to when we all had much smaller storage (e.g. 2.5 inch floppy drives).
That said, this is analogous to diminishing marginal value (or returns) to scale in economic activity.
Efficiency of any economic system with respect to fundamental resource usage (information, energy) probably is almost certainly declining in scale. Friction adds up.