This question is quite loaded, so maybe it’s good to figure out which part of the economic or technological growth is potentially too fast. For example, would the rate of the Moore’s law matching the rate of the economic growth, say, 4-5% annual, instead of exceeding it by an order of magnitude, make a difference?
Offhand I’d think a world like that would have a much higher chance of survival. Their initial hardware would be much weaker and use much better algorithms. They’d stand a vastly better change of getting intelligence amplification before AI. Advances in neuroscience would have a long lag time before translating into UFAI. Moore’s Law is not like vanilla econ growth—I felt really relieved when I realized that Moore’s Law for serial speeds had definitively broken down. I am much less ambiguous about that being good news than I am about the Great Stagnation or Great Recession being disguised good news.
How bad is an advance (e.g., a better programming language) that increases the complexity and sophistication of the projects that a team of programmers can successfully complete?
My guess is that it is much worse than an advance picked at random that generates the same amount of economic value, and about half or 2 thirds as bad as an improvement in general-purpose computing hardware that generates an equal amount of economic value.
This question is quite loaded, so maybe it’s good to figure out which part of the economic or technological growth is potentially too fast. For example, would the rate of the Moore’s law matching the rate of the economic growth, say, 4-5% annual, instead of exceeding it by an order of magnitude, make a difference?
Offhand I’d think a world like that would have a much higher chance of survival. Their initial hardware would be much weaker and use much better algorithms. They’d stand a vastly better change of getting intelligence amplification before AI. Advances in neuroscience would have a long lag time before translating into UFAI. Moore’s Law is not like vanilla econ growth—I felt really relieved when I realized that Moore’s Law for serial speeds had definitively broken down. I am much less ambiguous about that being good news than I am about the Great Stagnation or Great Recession being disguised good news.
How bad is an advance (e.g., a better programming language) that increases the complexity and sophistication of the projects that a team of programmers can successfully complete?
My guess is that it is much worse than an advance picked at random that generates the same amount of economic value, and about half or 2 thirds as bad as an improvement in general-purpose computing hardware that generates an equal amount of economic value.