I have a theory about why there will be no technological singularity and I want to know what you think of it.

So you know how there is the square cube law where its like we cannot have things keep getting bigger their volume increase far faster than their surface area. Like a guy who is twice at tall is going to be way more than twice as heavy.

I think the case for progress and improving things is similar. That there is some square cube law equivalent for progress or improving things where for every doubling of performance, you need 10x or some other random higher times the resources to get there, in the combination of raw resources/ time/ expenses/ manpower, etc.

So for example you figured out how to build an axe, and it took you a month to figure it out, then it should take you about 10 months to figure out how to make that axe twice as good. Then 100 months to figure out how to make that axe 4 times as good as the first iteration of the axe.

This is why I believe that a technological singularity is impossible, because the resource input requirement will always scale up faster than the quality of output produced. That's why a system like AI will always hit the wall, because at some the input requirement is higher than all the resources that mankind can produce. Produce an AI smarter than humans? Maybe. Produce an AI that will keep getting smarter into infinity? Lol no.

It is also why the current and previous century of technological advancement is so miraculous, because we managed to keep increasing the levels of input for centuries to get double the output each time.

It is also why the current technological boom is pretty much guaranteed to end one day soon, because nothing can grow into infinity, and we are reaching the limits of what gifts can be produced within a lifetime when billions of humans cooperate and are on the same page as to increasing output.

Around 12,000 years ago the Paleolithic came to an end and during the Paleolithic the average human lifespan was around 22-33 years. It took humanity nearly 12,000 years and their production capabilities improving thousands of times for life expectancy to finally go beyond double in current times.

That is to say, the input requirements being far higher than the improvements in output produced seems to hold throughout nature.

Now some might look at technology and say that is not always true, but in the case of technology the input requirements have scaled up far faster as well, in terms of total hours of research, the amount of patents working together to create a better product, the number of people required to work together to make a better product, and the size of corporations needed to make the product profitable and spread it across the world. Altogether for every doubling of improvements in technology, new knowledge at far vaster scales had to be generated to do so again.

That is how we know that 330 million Americans will never be enough people to grow towards infinity, because there will always be a higher manpower requirement over time to build something greater within a single lifetime. That is also how we know that AI would not cause everybody to become unemployed, because there will always be more positions opening up across the entire job sector that requires more manpower to grow the system further.

In the end there is no singularity, there is no utopia, there is no unlimited rapid growth that never ends, because in the end, the amount of input required to take another step, will always grow faster than the amount of output produced by the next step.

Conclusion:

It would take a 1,00,000 times the resources in money, time, and effort to create twice the man that exists today. Real change to humanity will always occur in the span of millennia and eons and the current time period and the century before that are the true outliers in our history. Even the idea of accelerating returns and moving towards the singularity may be discounted by the fact that it is counting the amount of input scaling up exponentially to provide twice the improvement in quality of life on all metrics.

Utopia isn't arriving within our lifetime or our children's life time or their children's lifetime. Live life accounting for this fact.