Moore's law is going to be obsolete by 2036. LLM's increasing computation to develop new capabilities appears to have nearly reached its end point. Vertical farming appears to be a partial replacement for contemporary farming rather than an upgrade over it. Cultured meat never outcompeted normal meat prices, but appears to have become its own luxury meat market. Self driving vehicles appear to be improving linearly rather than exponentially. Same for Robotics. We were hoping for robot nurses by 2030 but it looks like it will be decades more before a humanoid robot can move faster than a human child in an uncontrolled environment.
Everything appears to be moving at the speed of "you will notice the difference in 30 years time." Which is exceptionally slow compared to the pace of the past century.
For all intents and purposes, we appear to be reaching the end point of what is possible in a species scaled up into nation-states.
Where does humanity go from here? It's not like we are technologically in a position to colonize the moon. We at current levels at best have the tech to set up one or two functioning moon bases. Space mining is still generations away.
We are stalling. What is the solution to this problem? It's not just a numbers issue. Research Productivity has been halving every 14 years. We would need to double the number of researchers globally every 14 years to balance it out. A 5% manpower growth rate for researchers globally annually. The world is very obviously not able to keep up with such extreme demands.
The only remaining solution is to increase human intelligence, but even in that the global population is nearing its peak point. In the developed world IQ growth appears to have stalled. Meanwhile in the developing world, IQ appears to be still growing at a rate of 1-3 IQ points per decade. A growth we can expect to stall by the end of the century, based on historical trends in the west.
Currently, the smartest man alive who can add to human knowledge is Terence Tao, and even he is barely able to solve maybe one or two unsolved math problems per decade at his best, then too collaborating with others.
Humanity does not just want intelligent AI, it NEEDS intelligent AI, to continue the growth that humanity has reached the peak of and cannot go any further.
Humanity is once again stuck in competition with one another for resources, until it can figure out a way to continue growing once again. A golden age for the species is coming to an end, unless it figures out a way to revolutionize growth once again.
Industry 4.0 isn't enough. All it did for the developed world was to take it out of the 2008 financial crisis, and that too barely. If the world is to grow any further, it needs something truly world altering. Something that would explode in its reach, and would keep scaling up at that same rate across generations.
So what is that something?
It's not AI. It's not transistor chips. It's not industrial automation, because South Korea is the most heavily automated country in the world, and they are still slowing down. So what is it?
What is the secret to rapid economic growth in the 21st century? Is it to just throw all the technological know how to the developing world? After all, the developing world is all that is growing now. Even so, global growth is still going down.
There is the answer. A problem without a solution. So what's your suggestion?
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we don't know how to do that, and comparing iq across generations is basically nonsense since iq is normalized to a distribution...
a fully transparent society. we barely gotten started with the "information age" tbh. it's kinda silly to expect the best decision making when we don't even give everyone the best possible objective view of the world we can.
then we can move onto ultra-efficient cooperative economics. complexity will demand nothing less. we're gunna need it just to survive global warming, cause that's a thing that's gunna really start mattering in a few decades.
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Global warming already matters.
Ultra efficient cooperation only works if part of the cooperation is the management class competently only keeping you in office for exactly 6 hours or 8 hours a day five days a week.
Efficiency is a two way street.
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like supply chains start failing matters. like the methane time bomb is recognized for what it is: extinction waiting to happen.
there was a very interesting paper released last year. it was the first paper to do 3D modeling of dynamics systems within our climate during projections. up until now, we've been dividing up the earth into a 2D grid and projecting 1D effects as such, this just misses things.
this study has a various interesting conclusions: once a certain tipping point is hit (~20C from our point in the model)... the planet very rapidly transitions (within a few centuries) to a steam house planet with an average surface temperature upwards of boiling water (100C) : https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2023/12/aa46936-23/F1.html ... from there it takes millions of years to boil off the oceans, but our transition to venus would be all but certain.
even more interestingly... we found an example steamhouse planet within a 100 lightyears just last month, lookup exoplanet GJ 9827d
idk what ur trying to comment on with this statement. cooperation and efficiency are both a two-way streets.
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Aren't we already below 3C rise. 20C appears to be a very safe window in this context unless I am missing something.
I meant look at the example of Germany. Some of the shortest work hours in the world, but so well managed that they are still some of the highest GDP per capita countries in the world.
Point being, ultra efficiency in the work place both requires workers that are always on time and do their work properly, and management who are not so incompetent that they have to set up overtime work as the default.
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