All of postlibertarian's Comments + Replies
I have a lot of thoughts but not a lot of time, so apologies if this is a bit scatterbrained.
I've read your blog, Roodman's blog from last year and a lot of Roodman's report. I see this line of thinking in the following way:
Some EAs/rationalists/AI alignment groups believe that AI could be transformative because AI itself is unlike anything that has come before (I mostly share this view). Your and Roodman's line of inquiry is to do a check on this view from an "outside view" perspective, using long term economic growth to make sure that there i...
1
3y
This is an interesting idea. It wasn't a focus of my work, but my loose impression is that when economists have attempted to correct for these kinds of problems the resulting adjustment isn't nearly large enough to make Roodman's model consistent with the recent data. Firstly, measurements of growth in the 1700s and 1800s face the same problem, so it's far from clear that the adjustment would raise recent growth relative to old growth (which is what Roodman's model would need). Secondly, I think that when economists have tried to measure willingness to pay for 'free' goods like email and social media, the willingness is not high enough to make a huge difference to GDP growth.
1
3y
Thank you for this comment! I'll make reply to different points in different comments.
The most plausible models have diminishing returns to efforts to generate new ideas. In these models, you need an exponentially growing population to sustain exponential growth. So these models aren't surprised that growth hasn't increased since 1880.
At the same time, these same models imply that if increasing output causes the population to increase (more output -> more people), then there can be super-exponential growth. This is because the population can grow super-exponentially with this feedback loop.
So my overall opinion is that it's 100% consistent to think:
1. The increased population of the last 100 years didn't lead to faster growth
2. If AGI means that more output -> more people, growth will accelerate.
I don't follow your point about infosec. The RAND link summary seems to argue that the case against crypto is that it may not be widespread enough to be a good money laundering source, not that laundering won't work. Or maybe that's what you're saying? So sure, I agree the NSA will continue to target terrorist groups...but they can't do it through monero or zcash! There just isn't enough information leakage. But maybe your point is just that there are enough other attack surfaces that intelligence services will continue to target them?
(edit: ju... (read more)