Chapter 2 of the ATOM e-book addresses the centuries-old accelerating trendline of economic growth. Recall that this was the topic of an article of mine almost exactly 9 years ago as well.
However, there may be more nuances to this concept than previously addressed. It may be that since GDP is a human construct, it only happens to be correlated to the accelerating rate of change by virtue of humans being the forefront of advancing intelligence. It could be that once artificial intelligence can advance without human assistance, most types of technology that improve human living standards may stagnate, since the grand goal of propagating AI into space is no longer bottlenecked by human progress. Humans are certainly not the final state of evolution, as evidenced by the much greater suitability of AI for space exploration (AI does not require air or water, etc.).
That is certainly something to think about. Human progress may only be on an accelerating curve until a handoff to AI is completed. After that, metrics quite different than GDP may be the best to measure progress, as the AI perhaps only cares about computational density, TERAFLOPs, etc.
We could upload our conscience into AI and evolve with it. Perhaps even achieving 100% growth every trimester -- by the end of the century.
Oh what am I saying. Pundits tell me that the world by century's end will be about the same as today -- except warmer! Better go out and do some activism.
Posted by: T.S. | July 09, 2016 at 01:46 AM