[ExI] mayan forecast

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2012-12-21 23:47, Mike Dougherty wrote:
> Economics follow a cycle too.  Most _want_ to believe indefinitely
> enduring growth.  Has anything ever delivered on that promise?

The expansion of the universe. Which is literally making more space.

The near-exponential economic growth over the past few thousand years - 
despite occasional collapses of empires, shifts in technology and market 
swings - is pretty strong evidence.

If you have a dynamical system where some variables can grow 
unboundedly, the system will generically become dominated by them. The 
other variables might approach static, periodic or chaotic attractors, 
but it will be the "big" variables and their interplay that determine 
where the system is going. And the generic pattern is stagnation, 
exponential growth or finite time singularity - with the latter more 
common in more complex systems.



-- 
Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford University