The greatest peak net worth in recorded history, adjusted for inflation, was Bill Gates’ $101 billion, which was ten years ago. No one since then has come close. A 10-fold increase in <6 years strikes me as unlikely.
In any case, your extrapolated curve points to 2116, not 2016.
I am increasingly convinced that your comments on this topic are made in less than good faith.
Yes, the last figure looks wrong to me too—hopefully I will revisit the issue.
Update 2011-05-30: yes: 2016 was a simple math mistake! I have updated the text I was quoting from to read “later this century”.
Anyway, the huge modern wealth inequalities are well established—and projecting them into the future doesn’t seem especially controversial. Today’s winners in IT are hugely rich—and tomorrow’s winners may well be even richer. People thinking something like they will “be on the inside track when the singularity happens” would not be very surprising.
Anyway, the huge modern wealth inequalities are well established—and projecting them into the future doesn’t seem especially controversial.
Projecting anything into a future with non-human intelligences is controversial. You have made an incredibly large assumption without realizing it. Please update.
If you actually want your questions answered, then money is society’s representation of utility—and I think there will probably be something like that in the future—no matter how far out you go. What you may not find further out is “people”. However, I wasn’t talking about any of that, really. I just meant while there are still money and people with bank accounts around.
We have been building intelligent machines for many decades now. If you are talking about something that doesn’t yet exist, I think you would be well advised to find another term for it.
Inflation.
The richest person on earth currently has a net worth of $53.5 billion.
The greatest peak net worth in recorded history, adjusted for inflation, was Bill Gates’ $101 billion, which was ten years ago. No one since then has come close. A 10-fold increase in <6 years strikes me as unlikely.
In any case, your extrapolated curve points to 2116, not 2016.
I am increasingly convinced that your comments on this topic are made in less than good faith.
Yes, the last figure looks wrong to me too—hopefully I will revisit the issue.
Update 2011-05-30: yes: 2016 was a simple math mistake! I have updated the text I was quoting from to read “later this century”.
Anyway, the huge modern wealth inequalities are well established—and projecting them into the future doesn’t seem especially controversial. Today’s winners in IT are hugely rich—and tomorrow’s winners may well be even richer. People thinking something like they will “be on the inside track when the singularity happens” would not be very surprising.
Projecting anything into a future with non-human intelligences is controversial. You have made an incredibly large assumption without realizing it. Please update.
If you actually want your questions answered, then money is society’s representation of utility—and I think there will probably be something like that in the future—no matter how far out you go. What you may not find further out is “people”. However, I wasn’t talking about any of that, really. I just meant while there are still money and people with bank accounts around.
A few levels up, you said,
My dispute is with the notion that people with bank accounts and machine intelligence will coexist for a non-trivial amount of time.
We have been building intelligent machines for many decades now. If you are talking about something that doesn’t yet exist, I think you would be well advised to find another term for it.
Apologies; I assumed you were using “machine intelligence” as a synonym for AI, as wikipedia does.
Machine intelligence *is—more-or-less—a synonym for artificial intelligence.
Neither term carries the implication of human-level intelligence.
We don’t really have a good canonical term for “AI or upload”.