[ExI] My review of Eliezer Yudkowsky's new book

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sat, Oct 4, 2025 at 8:08 AM John Clark via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> 9 years?! We are now living in the age of AI and 9 years is a virtual geological age. I don't feel comfortable making an economic prediction about what things will be like in 9 months, never mind 9 years.
>
> I take that back, I do feel comfortable making one economic prediction, in 9 years the total productivity of this planet will be ENORMOUSLY greater than it is now. But I make no prediction about what will be controlling that astronomically huge newly generated wealth, I hope not but it's entirely possible that in 9 years events will have proven that Eliezer was right.

If I cared to wager any significant amount of money (I do not), I
would bet that the total, inflation-adjusted GDP of humanity and its
creations (including all revenue generation in our solar system) in
2034 will be less than 100 times what it was in 2024, as measured by
the World Bank or similar worldwide financial institutions.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-gdp-over-the-long-run?time=1960..latest
shows that 2004-2014 had a roughly 1.4x increase in world GDP, and
another approximately 1.4x (actually, just above 1.35x) 2014-2024
(granted, that includes COVID's downturn).
https://tradingeconomics.com/world/gdp-ppp-us-dollar-wb-data.html says
2014-2024 was closer to 1.8x.

So...another 1.4x or 1.8x?  Quite probably, though the rise in
authoritarianism might derail that.

2x?  Sure, it could happen.

But 100x?  No, even with AI accelerating things, the data does not
suggest that is likely.  Depending on what you count as "true" AI,
we've had AI for at least a few years now, and it has yet to radically
increase the slope of increased productivity, though it has arguably
sustained that slope.

Which is not to say the Singularity isn't going to happen someday, but
it will likely be heralded by an increase in that slope, which we've
yet to see.  The Singularity won't be tomorrow.