Along the theme of “there should be more axes”, I think one additional axis is “how path-dependent do you think final world states are”. The negative side of this axis is “you can best model a system by figuring out where the stable equilibria are, and working backwards from there”. The positive side of this axis is “you can best model a system as having a current state and some forces pushing that state in a direction, and extrapolating forwards from there”.
If we define the axes as “tractable” / “possible” / “path-dependent”, and work through each octant one by one, we get the following worldviews
-1/-1/-1: Economic progress cannot continue forever, but even if population growth is slowing now, the sub-populations that are growing will become the majority eventually, so population growth will continue until we hit the actual carrying capacity of the planet. Malthus was right, he was just early.
-1/-1/+1: Currently, the economic and societal forces in the world are pushing for people to become wealthier and more educated, all while population growth slows. As always there are bubbles and fads—we had savings and loan, then the dotcom bubble, then the real estate bubble, then crypto, and now AI, and there will be more such fads, but none of them will really change much. The future will look like the present, but with more old people.
-1/+1/-1: The amount of effort to find further advances scales exponentially, but the benefit of those advances scales linearly. This pattern has happened over and over, so we shouldn’t expect this time to be different. Technology will continue to improve, but those improvements will be harder and harder won. Nothing in the laws of physics prevents Dyson spheres, but our tech level is on track to reach diminishing returns far far before that point. Also by Laplace we shouldn’t expect humanity to last more than a couple million more years.
-1/+1/+1: Something like a Dyson sphere is a large and risky project which would require worldwide buy-in. The trend now is, instead, for more and more decisions to be made by committee, and the number of parties with veto power will increase over time. We will not get Dyson spheres because they would ruin the character of the neighborhood.
In the meantime, we can’t even get global buy-in for the project of “let’s not cook ourself with global warming”. This is unlikely to change, so we are probably going to eventually end up with civilizational collapse due to something dumb like climate change or a pandemic, not a weird sci-fi disaster like a rogue superintelligence or gray goo.
+1/-1/-1: I have no idea what it would mean for things to be feasible but not physically possible. Maybe “simulation hypothesis”?
+1/-1/+1: Still have no idea what it means for something impossible to be feasible. “we all lose touch with reality and spend our time in video games, ready-player-one style”?
+1/+1/-1: Physics says that Dyson spheres are possible. The math says they’re feasible if you cover the surface of a planet with solar panels and use the power generated to disassemble the planet into more solar panels, which can be used to disassemble the planet even faster. Given that, the current state of the solar system is unstable. Eventually, something is going to come along and turn Mercury into a Dyson sphere. Unless that something is very well aligned with humans, that will not end well for humans. (FOOM)
+1/+1/+1: Arms races have led to the majority of improvements in the past. For example, humans are as smart as they are because a chimp having a larger brain let it predict other chimps better, and thus work better with allies and out-reproduce its competitors. The wonders and conveniences of the modern world come mainly from either the side-effects of military research, or from companies competing to better obtain peoples’ money. Even in AI, some of the most impressive results are things like StyleGAN (a generative adversarial network) and alphago (a network trained by self-play i.e. an arms-race against itself). Extrapolate forward, and you end up with an increasingly competitive world. This also probably does not end well for humans (whimper).
I expect people aren’t evenly distributed across this space. I think the FOOM debate is largely between +1/+1/-1 and +1/+1/+1 octants. Also I think you can find doomers in every octant (or at least every octant that has people in it, I’m still not sure what the +1/-1/* quadrant would even mean).
Along the theme of “there should be more axes”, I think one additional axis is “how path-dependent do you think final world states are”. The negative side of this axis is “you can best model a system by figuring out where the stable equilibria are, and working backwards from there”. The positive side of this axis is “you can best model a system as having a current state and some forces pushing that state in a direction, and extrapolating forwards from there”.
If we define the axes as “tractable” / “possible” / “path-dependent”, and work through each octant one by one, we get the following worldviews
-1/-1/-1: Economic progress cannot continue forever, but even if population growth is slowing now, the sub-populations that are growing will become the majority eventually, so population growth will continue until we hit the actual carrying capacity of the planet. Malthus was right, he was just early.-1/-1/+1: Currently, the economic and societal forces in the world are pushing for people to become wealthier and more educated, all while population growth slows. As always there are bubbles and fads—we had savings and loan, then the dotcom bubble, then the real estate bubble, then crypto, and now AI, and there will be more such fads, but none of them will really change much. The future will look like the present, but with more old people.-1/+1/-1: The amount of effort to find further advances scales exponentially, but the benefit of those advances scales linearly. This pattern has happened over and over, so we shouldn’t expect this time to be different. Technology will continue to improve, but those improvements will be harder and harder won. Nothing in the laws of physics prevents Dyson spheres, but our tech level is on track to reach diminishing returns far far before that point. Also by Laplace we shouldn’t expect humanity to last more than a couple million more years.-1/+1/+1: Something like a Dyson sphere is a large and risky project which would require worldwide buy-in. The trend now is, instead, for more and more decisions to be made by committee, and the number of parties with veto power will increase over time. We will not get Dyson spheres because they would ruin the character of the neighborhood.In the meantime, we can’t even get global buy-in for the project of “let’s not cook ourself with global warming”. This is unlikely to change, so we are probably going to eventually end up with civilizational collapse due to something dumb like climate change or a pandemic, not a weird sci-fi disaster like a rogue superintelligence or gray goo.
+1/-1/-1: I have no idea what it would mean for things to be feasible but not physically possible. Maybe “simulation hypothesis”?+1/-1/+1: Still have no idea what it means for something impossible to be feasible. “we all lose touch with reality and spend our time in video games, ready-player-one style”?+1/+1/-1: Physics says that Dyson spheres are possible. The math says they’re feasible if you cover the surface of a planet with solar panels and use the power generated to disassemble the planet into more solar panels, which can be used to disassemble the planet even faster. Given that, the current state of the solar system is unstable. Eventually, something is going to come along and turn Mercury into a Dyson sphere. Unless that something is very well aligned with humans, that will not end well for humans. (FOOM)+1/+1/+1: Arms races have led to the majority of improvements in the past. For example, humans are as smart as they are because a chimp having a larger brain let it predict other chimps better, and thus work better with allies and out-reproduce its competitors. The wonders and conveniences of the modern world come mainly from either the side-effects of military research, or from companies competing to better obtain peoples’ money. Even in AI, some of the most impressive results are things like StyleGAN (a generative adversarial network) and alphago (a network trained by self-play i.e. an arms-race against itself). Extrapolate forward, and you end up with an increasingly competitive world. This also probably does not end well for humans (whimper).I expect people aren’t evenly distributed across this space. I think the FOOM debate is largely between
+1/+1/-1and+1/+1/+1octants. Also I think you can find doomers in every octant (or at least every octant that has people in it, I’m still not sure what the+1/-1/*quadrant would even mean).