Agreed on population. to a first approximation it’s directly proportional to the supply of labor, supply of new ideas, quantity of total societal wealth, and market size for any particular good or service. That last one also means that with a larger population, the economic value of new innovations goes up, meaning we can profitably invest more resources in developing harder-to-invent things.
I really don’t know how that impact (more minds) will compare to the improved capabilities of those minds. We’ve also never had a single individual with as much ‘human capital’ as a single AI can plausibly achieve, even if its each capability is only around human level, and polymaths are very much overrepresented among the people most likely to have impactful new ideas.
Agreed on population. to a first approximation it’s directly proportional to the supply of labor, supply of new ideas, quantity of total societal wealth, and market size for any particular good or service. That last one also means that with a larger population, the economic value of new innovations goes up, meaning we can profitably invest more resources in developing harder-to-invent things.
I really don’t know how that impact (more minds) will compare to the improved capabilities of those minds. We’ve also never had a single individual with as much ‘human capital’ as a single AI can plausibly achieve, even if its each capability is only around human level, and polymaths are very much overrepresented among the people most likely to have impactful new ideas.