Self-driving technology is advancing and will soon(ish) allow us to move cars without humans being directly involved, except in terms of maintenance and management. This will be a major boon because it will partially remove humans from the equation- the bottleneck is partially removed. This has no real bearing on the title statement- I even remark about this in my post.
The “universality” here is trivial- here is a copy-paste of part of my response to a similar comment:
For everyone to become richer without working harder, we must develop technologies that allow more work to be done per man-hour. Aside from working out distribution inefficiencies and similar, this is the unique limit on prosperity. This is what I mean by “humans are the universal bottleneck”- we only have so many man-hours, so any growth is going to be of the form “With the same amount of hours, we do more”.
Imagine if every area of economic activity was automated- humans were fully removed. This would look very sci-fi: think of von Neumann probes. In this situation there is no practical limit- the probes will expand and convert our entire light cone. Assuming constant population, per capita wealth would approach 50 billion stars, I guess.
Self-driving technology is advancing and will soon(ish) allow us to move cars without humans being directly involved, except in terms of maintenance and management. This will be a major boon because it will partially remove humans from the equation- the bottleneck is partially removed. This has no real bearing on the title statement- I even remark about this in my post.
The “universality” here is trivial- here is a copy-paste of part of my response to a similar comment:
Imagine if every area of economic activity was automated- humans were fully removed. This would look very sci-fi: think of von Neumann probes. In this situation there is no practical limit- the probes will expand and convert our entire light cone. Assuming constant population, per capita wealth would approach 50 billion stars, I guess.