Further to this point—there is something a little strange about calling a fast takeoff from AGI and whatever was driving superexponential growth throughout all of history the same phenomenon—if true there is some huge cosmic coincidence that causes there to always be superexponential growth—so as soon as population growth + growth in wealth per capita or whatever was driving it until now runs out in the great stagnation (which is visible as a tiny blip on the RHS of the double-log plot), AGI takes over and pushes us up the same trend line. That’s clearly not possible, so there would have to be some factor responsible for both if AGI is what takes us up the rest of that trend line.
In general, there are three categories of evidence that things are likely to become very weird over the next century, or that we live at the hinge of history in some sense:
1) Specific mechanisms around AGI—possibility of rapid capability gain
3) Anthropic and Fermi arguments suggesting that we live at some extremely unusual time
All of these are also arguments for the more general claim that we live at the hinge of history. 1) is because a superintelligent AGI takeoff is just a specific example for how the hinge occurs, and it is plausible for much more specific reasons. 3) is already directly arguing for that, but how does 2) fit in with 1) and 3)? For AGI to be the driver of the rest of that growth curve, there has to be a single causal mechanism that keeps us on the same trend and includes AGI as its final step—if we say we are agnostic about what that mechanism is, we can still call 2) evidence for us living at the hinge point, though we have to note that there is a huge blank spot in need of explanation—what phenomenon causes the right technologies to appear to continue the superexponential trend all the way from 10,000 BCE to the arrival of AGI?
Further to this point—there is something a little strange about calling a fast takeoff from AGI and whatever was driving superexponential growth throughout all of history the same phenomenon—if true there is some huge cosmic coincidence that causes there to always be superexponential growth—so as soon as population growth + growth in wealth per capita or whatever was driving it until now runs out in the great stagnation (which is visible as a tiny blip on the RHS of the double-log plot), AGI takes over and pushes us up the same trend line. That’s clearly not possible, so there would have to be some factor responsible for both if AGI is what takes us up the rest of that trend line.
In general, there are three categories of evidence that things are likely to become very weird over the next century, or that we live at the hinge of history in some sense:
1) Specific mechanisms around AGI—possibility of rapid capability gain
2) Economic and technological trend-fitting predicting a singularity around 2050
3) Anthropic and Fermi arguments suggesting that we live at some extremely unusual time
All of these are also arguments for the more general claim that we live at the hinge of history. 1) is because a superintelligent AGI takeoff is just a specific example for how the hinge occurs, and it is plausible for much more specific reasons. 3) is already directly arguing for that, but how does 2) fit in with 1) and 3)? For AGI to be the driver of the rest of that growth curve, there has to be a single causal mechanism that keeps us on the same trend and includes AGI as its final step—if we say we are agnostic about what that mechanism is, we can still call 2) evidence for us living at the hinge point, though we have to note that there is a huge blank spot in need of explanation—what phenomenon causes the right technologies to appear to continue the superexponential trend all the way from 10,000 BCE to the arrival of AGI?