Nobel Prize winning economist William Nordhaus has written a paper called 'Are We Approaching an Economic Singularity? Information Technology and the Future of Economic Growth'. NBER here and 2021 published paper.
He discusses various tests of whether the singularity - a large trend break in economic growth - is near. He argues that the tests suggest that the singularity is not near, i.e. not before 2100. I would be interested to hear what people think about whether this is a good test of AI timeline predictions.
The relevant section is VII. Summarizing the six empirical tests:
I would group these into two basic classes of evidence:
I'd agree that these seem like two points of evidence against singularity-soon, and I think that if I were going on outside-view economic arguments I'd probably be <50% singularity by 2100. (Though I'd still have a meaningful probability soon, and even at 100 years the prospect of a singularity would be one of the most important facts about the basic shape of the future.)
There are some more detailed aspects of the model that I don't buy, e.g. the very high share of information capital and persistent slow growth of physical capital. But I don't think they really affect the bottom line.
Thanks for outlining the tests.
I'm not really sure what he thinks the probability of the singularity before 2100 is. My reading was that he probably doesn't think that given his tests, the singularity is (eg) >10% likely before 2100. 2 of the 7 tests suggest the singularity after 100 years and 5 of them fail. It might be worth someone asking him for his view on that
To what extent is this a repudiation of Roodman's outside-view projection? My guess is you'd say something like "This new paper is more detailed and trustworthy than Roodman's simple model, so I'm assigning it more weight, but still putting a decent amount of weight on Roodman's being roughly correct and that's why I said <50% instead of <10%."
(I agree with Max Daniel below that I don't think that Nordhaus' methodology is inherently more trustworthy. I think it's dealing with a relatively small amount of pretty short-term data, and is generally using a much more opinionated model of what technological change would look like.)
I don't think this would be a good reaction because:
As a matter of interest, where do papers such as this usually get discussed? Is it in personal conversation or in some particular online location?
I think in this case mostly informal personal conversations (which can include conversations e.g. within particular org's Slack groups or similar). It might also have been a slight overstatement that the paper was "widely discussed" - this impression might be due to a "selection effect" of me having noticed the paper early and being interested in such work.