[extropy-chat] Inside Vs. Outside Forecasts

Alejandro Dubrovsky alito at organicrobot.com
Wed Oct 12 03:44:47 UTC 2005


On Tue, 2005-10-11 at 17:34 -0400, Robin Hanson wrote:
> It seems to me that change has not really accelerated in the twentieth
> century.  In many ways change was faster in the first half of last century.
> There is an academic literature on economic growth and technical change and
> it seems to me that the standard views in those literatures is of roughly
> steady, not accelerating, growth.  Yes, over billions of years change has
> accelerated, but not continuously.  Instead, growth rates have remained
> steady until they reached transition points where they then jumped by two
> orders of magnitude (http://hanson.gmu.edu/longgrow.pdf).
> 

I don't see that big a discrepancy.  "Steady" growth is exponential
growth, so the whackos predict as much change in the next 15 years as in
the whole of the last century, and the boring conservatives predict as
much GDP increase in the next 15 years (from your pdf) as in the whole
human history.




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