I wonder how he (or anybody else) measures growth of knowledge. Are there any sensible metrics beside amount of paper created? I understand that published pages is a measure as is number of patents but I don’t think these are useful proxies for knowledge.
What other measures might be used?
Complexity measures of the created knowledge: Depth of the gratph of citations between papers (assuming each citation adds something; might be weithed by the number of outgoing refs)
Complexity of the created artifacts (programs, machines). E.g. number of abstraction layers. Or other standard complexity measures thereof.
Speedup achieved by the methods when applying them to optimize tasks. (Exponential speedups in this domain could result from self-optimization and are dangerous and I really hope that those are not implied by the OP).
Ability of the research work (persons or software) to acurately describe/model real-world phenomena of a given (and exponentially growing) size. This I think is the most likely candidate.
More simple quantities: Number of researchers in a field, number of conferences, number of mails exchanged about a topic
And of course subjective complexity. I guess we are bound to label anything exponential that grows faster than we can keep track of.
I wonder how he (or anybody else) measures growth of knowledge. Are there any sensible metrics beside amount of paper created? I understand that published pages is a measure as is number of patents but I don’t think these are useful proxies for knowledge.
What other measures might be used?
Complexity measures of the created knowledge: Depth of the gratph of citations between papers (assuming each citation adds something; might be weithed by the number of outgoing refs)
Complexity of the created artifacts (programs, machines). E.g. number of abstraction layers. Or other standard complexity measures thereof.
Speedup achieved by the methods when applying them to optimize tasks. (Exponential speedups in this domain could result from self-optimization and are dangerous and I really hope that those are not implied by the OP).
Ability of the research work (persons or software) to acurately describe/model real-world phenomena of a given (and exponentially growing) size. This I think is the most likely candidate.
More simple quantities: Number of researchers in a field, number of conferences, number of mails exchanged about a topic
And of course subjective complexity. I guess we are bound to label anything exponential that grows faster than we can keep track of.