Given the recent mentions of the "adjacent possible" and older mentions of the singularity, automation, universal income, and how 10% of programmers produce 50% of the work (Price's Law?), I thought this post might be interesting:
1960: The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-singularity-was-cancelled/ > But the industrial growth mode had one major disadvantage over the Malthusian > mode: tractors can’t invent things. The population wasn’t just there to grow > the population, it was there to increase the rate of technological advance > and thus population growth. When we shifted (in part) from making people to > making tractors, that process broke down, and growth (in people and tractors) > became sub-hyperbolic. > > If the population stays the same (and by “the same”, I just mean “not growing > hyperbolically”) we should expect the growth rate to stay the same too, > instead of increasing the way it did for thousands of years of increasing > population, modulo other concerns. > > In other words, the singularity got cancelled because we no longer have a > surefire way to convert money into researchers. The old way was more money = > more food = more population = more researchers. The new way is just more > money = send more people to college, and screw all that. > > But AI potentially offers a way to convert money into researchers. Money = > build more AIs = more research. -- ☣ uǝlƃ ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
