Imagine you’ve landed on an alien planet and are building larger and larger automated factories, like in Factorio. Imagine also on the planet there are some native critters but they aren’t very important. That’s the situation in a nutshell. Your ability to double your automated factories every month doesn’t depend on whether the unimportant native critters want your product.
Sometimes the native critters will be sitting on a pool of resources that you want for the factories. In that case you can give them some product in exchange. Or you can trick them somehow, or push them out, or kill them. The GDP grows either way.
They could have economic or military arms races with each other; there’s no limit to how expensive or destructive an arms race can get. Or they could want to remake the world to fit their ideology or religion; there’s no limit to how expensive or destructive a world-remaking project can get.
I feel these are very specific and different scenarios from a “vanilla” economic singularity. When people go “The economy will double every month!”, they don’t add “Because the solar system will be plastered with ever larger statues of the great leader”. I am aware that this kind of exponential growth would be technologically possible, and it’s also not difficult to come up with scenarios in which it would actually happen, I just don’t see how that is the normal extension of current economics.
Imagine you’ve landed on an alien planet and are building larger and larger automated factories, like in Factorio. Imagine also on the planet there are some native critters but they aren’t very important. That’s the situation in a nutshell. Your ability to double your automated factories every month doesn’t depend on whether the unimportant native critters want your product.
Sometimes the native critters will be sitting on a pool of resources that you want for the factories. In that case you can give them some product in exchange. Or you can trick them somehow, or push them out, or kill them. The GDP grows either way.
Sure, but I wrote “as long as humans keep control”. Is your model that those that control AI will just start building Dyson Spheres?
They could have economic or military arms races with each other; there’s no limit to how expensive or destructive an arms race can get. Or they could want to remake the world to fit their ideology or religion; there’s no limit to how expensive or destructive a world-remaking project can get.
I feel these are very specific and different scenarios from a “vanilla” economic singularity. When people go “The economy will double every month!”, they don’t add “Because the solar system will be plastered with ever larger statues of the great leader”. I am aware that this kind of exponential growth would be technologically possible, and it’s also not difficult to come up with scenarios in which it would actually happen, I just don’t see how that is the normal extension of current economics.