Foom Debate, Again
My ex-co-blogger Eliezer Yudkowsky last June: I worry about conversations that go into “But X is like Y, which does Z, so X should do reinterpreted-Z”. Usually, in my experience, that goes into what I...
View ArticleWhat Predicts Growth?
I just heard a fascinating talk by Enrico Spolaore of this paper on what predicts local growth rates over the very long run. He considers three periods: before the farming revolution, from farming to...
View ArticleWhy Do Algorithms Gain Like Chips?
Computer hardware has famously improved much faster than most other kinds of hardware, and most other useful things. Computer hardware is about a million times cheaper than four decades ago; what other...
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Connected-Task Cities Win
A new Journal of Regional Science paper (ungated here) has a fascinating thesis: what makes US cities big and growing lately is not computers, education, creativity, or socializing. Instead it is task...
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Failed Singularity Model
Noted Yale economist William Nordhaus has a new paper “Are We Approaching an Economic Singularity? Information Technology and the Future of Economic Growth”: Assume that labor is constant, that all...
View ArticleHow Different AGI Software?
My ex-co-blogger Eliezer Yudkowsky recently made a Facebook post saying that recent AI Go progress confirmed his predictions from our foom debate. He and I then discussed this there, and I thought I’d...
View ArticleThe Labor-From-Factories Explosion
As I’ve discussed before, including in my book, the history of humanity so far can be roughly summarized as a sequence of three exponential growth modes: foragers with culture started a few million...
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