Has anyone looked at this? Nordhaus claims current trends suggest the singularity is not near, though I wouldn’t expect current trends outside AI to be very informative. He does seem to acknowledge x-risk in section Xf, which I don’t think I’ve seen from other top economists.
Nordhaus seems to miss the point here, indeed. He does statistics purely on historic macro-economic data. In these, there could not be even a hint of the singularity we’d here talk about—and that also he seems to refer to in his abstract (imho). This core singularity effect of self-accelerating, nearly infinitely fast intelligence improvement, once a threshold is crossed, is almost by definition invisible in present data: Only after this singularity, we expect things to get weird, and visible in economic data.
Bit sad to see the paper as is. Nordhaus has written seminal contributions in integrated environmental-economic modelling in the resources/climate domain. And also for singularity questions, good economic analysis modelling explicitly substitutabilities between different types of productive capital, resources, labor, information processing, could be insightful, I believe, and at least I have not yet stumbled upon much in that regard. There is a difficulty to imagine a post-singularity world at all; but interesting scenarios could probably be created, trying to formalize more casual discussions.
Are We Approaching an Economic Singularity? Information Technology and the Future of Economic Growth (William D. Nordhaus)
Has anyone looked at this? Nordhaus claims current trends suggest the singularity is not near, though I wouldn’t expect current trends outside AI to be very informative. He does seem to acknowledge x-risk in section Xf, which I don’t think I’ve seen from other top economists.
Nordhaus seems to miss the point here, indeed. He does statistics purely on historic macro-economic data. In these, there could not be even a hint of the singularity we’d here talk about—and that also he seems to refer to in his abstract (imho). This core singularity effect of self-accelerating, nearly infinitely fast intelligence improvement, once a threshold is crossed, is almost by definition invisible in present data: Only after this singularity, we expect things to get weird, and visible in economic data.
Bit sad to see the paper as is. Nordhaus has written seminal contributions in integrated environmental-economic modelling in the resources/climate domain. And also for singularity questions, good economic analysis modelling explicitly substitutabilities between different types of productive capital, resources, labor, information processing, could be insightful, I believe, and at least I have not yet stumbled upon much in that regard. There is a difficulty to imagine a post-singularity world at all; but interesting scenarios could probably be created, trying to formalize more casual discussions.