100 people produce 100 units of resources (1 per person). For every 10 units of resources, they’re able to create 1 more duplicate (this is just capturing the idea that duplicates are “costly” to create). And the 100 people have 5 new ideas, leading to 5% productivity growth.
Here’s year 2:
Now each person produces 1.05 widgets instead of 1, thanks to the productivity growth. And there’s another 5% productivity growth.
This dynamic takes some time to “take off,” but take off it does:
The #NUM!’s at the bottom signify Google Sheets choking on the large numbers.
My spreadsheet includes a version with simply exponentially increasing population; that one goes on for ~1000 years without challenging Google Sheets. So the population dynamic is key here.
1. For example, Star Trek’s Captain Kirk first takes over the Enterprise in the mid-2200s. I think we could easily see a much more advanced, changed world than that of Star Trek, before 2100.
7. A faster-growing population doesn’t necessarily mean faster technological advancement. There could be “diminishing returns”: the first few ideas are easier to find than the next few, so even as the effort put into finding new ideas goes up, new ideas are found more slowly. (Are Ideas Getting Harder To Find? is a well-known paper on this topic.) More population = faster technological progress if the population is growing faster than the difficulty of finding new ideas is growing. This dynamic is portrayed in a simplified way in the graphic: initially people have ideas leading to doubling of corn output, but later the ideas only lead to a 1.5x’ing of corn output.
8. It’s crucial to include the “more output → more people” step, which is often not there by default, and doesn’t describe today’s world (but could describe a world with The Duplicator). It’s standard for growth models to incorporate the other parts of the feedback loop: more people --> more ideas --> more output.
11. As noted above, there is an open debate on whether past economic growth actually follows the pattern described in Modeling the Human Trajectory. I discuss how the debate could change my conclusions here; I think there is a case either way for explosive growth this century.
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5. Biologist who co-invented CRISPR and won a Nobel Prize in 2020.
10. We’ll start with this economy:
100 people produce 100 units of resources (1 per person). For every 10 units of resources, they’re able to create 1 more duplicate (this is just capturing the idea that duplicates are “costly” to create). And the 100 people have 5 new ideas, leading to 5% productivity growth.
Here’s year 2:
Now each person produces 1.05 widgets instead of 1, thanks to the productivity growth. And there’s another 5% productivity growth.
This dynamic takes some time to “take off,” but take off it does:
The #NUM!’s at the bottom signify Google Sheets choking on the large numbers.
My spreadsheet includes a version with simply exponentially increasing population; that one goes on for ~1000 years without challenging Google Sheets. So the population dynamic is key here.
1. For example, Star Trek’s Captain Kirk first takes over the Enterprise in the mid-2200s. I think we could easily see a much more advanced, changed world than that of Star Trek, before 2100.
2. Example.
3. This isn’t quite how it works in the comic, but it’s how it’ll work here.
4. The one in the comic burns out after a few copies, but that one’s just a prototype.
6. Each idea doubled the amount of corn.
7. A faster-growing population doesn’t necessarily mean faster technological advancement. There could be “diminishing returns”: the first few ideas are easier to find than the next few, so even as the effort put into finding new ideas goes up, new ideas are found more slowly. (Are Ideas Getting Harder To Find? is a well-known paper on this topic.) More population = faster technological progress if the population is growing faster than the difficulty of finding new ideas is growing. This dynamic is portrayed in a simplified way in the graphic: initially people have ideas leading to doubling of corn output, but later the ideas only lead to a 1.5x’ing of corn output.
8. It’s crucial to include the “more output → more people” step, which is often not there by default, and doesn’t describe today’s world (but could describe a world with The Duplicator). It’s standard for growth models to incorporate the other parts of the feedback loop: more people --> more ideas --> more output.
9. This claim is defended in detail in Could Advanced AI Drive Explosive Economic Growth?
11. As noted above, there is an open debate on whether past economic growth actually follows the pattern described in Modeling the Human Trajectory. I discuss how the debate could change my conclusions here; I think there is a case either way for explosive growth this century.
12. TBH, I’ve never been able to figure out why these are better than regular guns.
13. Or of some sort of entity that’s properly described as a “descendant” of people, as I’ll discuss in the piece on digital people.