There are ways of doing things that improve faster, but usually they start off worse. Then they get better, and at some point they overtake the slower-improving alternatives, after which subsequent progress is faster at least for a while.
I don’t see how the faster-improving technology starting off worse doesn’t simply strengthen the case for fast takeoff. While it’s worse, fewer resources will be invested into it relative to the current best thing, which leaves more room for rapid improvement once a paradigm shift finally occurs and people start switching resources over.
This seems to basically be what happened with automobiles v horses; yes if you specifically look at a Wikipedia article titled “history of the automobile” you will find crappy historical precedents to the (modern) automobile, but the point is precisely that those crappy precedents received comparatively little attention, and therefore did not obsolete horses, until suddenly they became not-so-crappy and… well, did.
I’m not exactly sure what the line of reasoning is here that leads you to look at the existence of crappy historical precedents and conclude, “oh, I guess the fact that these existed means progress wasn’t so discontinuous after all!” instead of, “hm, these crappy historical precedents existed and did basically nothing for a long time, which certainly implies a discontinuity at the point where they suddenly took over”; but from the perspective of someone invested in (what gwern described as) the “horse economy”, the latter would probably be a much more relevant takeaway than the former.
Sometimes there are exceptions where once something is possible it is necessarily much better than the predecessors (e.g. if there is a fixed cost equal to a significant percentage of GDP, and you can’t trade off fixed costs vs marginal costs). But this doesn’t happen very much, which isn’t so surprising on paper.
I don’t think any of this leads to a fast takeoff in theory. Also the view “>30% of progress is stuff from left field that jumps over the competition” doesn’t seem at all plausible to me.
I don’t disagree with any of what you say here; it just doesn’t seem very relevant to me. As you say, something new coming from left field and jumping over the competition is a rare occurrence; certainly not anywhere near 30%. The problem is that the impact distribution of new technologies is heavy-tailed, meaning that you don’t need a >30% proportion of new technologies that do the whole “obsoleting” thing, to get a hugelyoutsized impact from the few that do. Like, it seems to me that the quoted argument could have been made almost word-for-word by someone invested in the “horse economy” in the late 1800s, and it would have nonetheless done nothing to prevent them from being blindsided by the automobile economy.
Which brings me back to the point about needing positive knowledge about the new technology in question, if you want to have any hope of not being blindsided. Without positive knowledge, you’re reduced to guessing based on base rates, which again puts you in the position of the horse investor. Fundamentally I don’t see an escape to this: you can’t draw conclusions about the “physics” of new technologies by looking at GDP curves on graphs; those curves don’t (and can’t) reflect phenomena that haven’t been discovered yet.
I don’t see how the faster-improving technology starting off worse doesn’t simply strengthen the case for fast takeoff. While it’s worse, fewer resources will be invested into it relative to the current best thing, which leaves more room for rapid improvement once a paradigm shift finally occurs and people start switching resources over.
This seems to basically be what happened with automobiles v horses; yes if you specifically look at a Wikipedia article titled “history of the automobile” you will find crappy historical precedents to the (modern) automobile, but the point is precisely that those crappy precedents received comparatively little attention, and therefore did not obsolete horses, until suddenly they became not-so-crappy and… well, did.
I’m not exactly sure what the line of reasoning is here that leads you to look at the existence of crappy historical precedents and conclude, “oh, I guess the fact that these existed means progress wasn’t so discontinuous after all!” instead of, “hm, these crappy historical precedents existed and did basically nothing for a long time, which certainly implies a discontinuity at the point where they suddenly took over”; but from the perspective of someone invested in (what gwern described as) the “horse economy”, the latter would probably be a much more relevant takeaway than the former.
I don’t disagree with any of what you say here; it just doesn’t seem very relevant to me. As you say, something new coming from left field and jumping over the competition is a rare occurrence; certainly not anywhere near 30%. The problem is that the impact distribution of new technologies is heavy-tailed, meaning that you don’t need a >30% proportion of new technologies that do the whole “obsoleting” thing, to get a hugely outsized impact from the few that do. Like, it seems to me that the quoted argument could have been made almost word-for-word by someone invested in the “horse economy” in the late 1800s, and it would have nonetheless done nothing to prevent them from being blindsided by the automobile economy.
Which brings me back to the point about needing positive knowledge about the new technology in question, if you want to have any hope of not being blindsided. Without positive knowledge, you’re reduced to guessing based on base rates, which again puts you in the position of the horse investor. Fundamentally I don’t see an escape to this: you can’t draw conclusions about the “physics” of new technologies by looking at GDP curves on graphs; those curves don’t (and can’t) reflect phenomena that haven’t been discovered yet.