[FRIAM] 1960: The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled

[uǝlƃ ☣]

Given the recent mentions of the "adjacent possible" and older mentions of the singularity, automation, universal income, and how 10% of programmers produce 50% of the work (Price's Law?), I thought this post might be interesting:

1960: The Year The Singularity Was Cancelled
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/04/22/1960-the-year-the-singularity-was-cancelled/

> But the industrial growth mode had one major disadvantage over the Malthusian mode: tractors can’t invent things. The population wasn’t just there to grow the population, it was there to increase the rate of technological advance and thus population growth. When we shifted (in part) from making people to making tractors, that process broke down, and growth (in people and tractors) became sub-hyperbolic.
> 
> If the population stays the same (and by “the same”, I just mean “not growing hyperbolically”) we should expect the growth rate to stay the same too, instead of increasing the way it did for thousands of years of increasing population, modulo other concerns.
> 
> In other words, the singularity got cancelled because we no longer have a surefire way to convert money into researchers. The old way was more money = more food = more population = more researchers. The new way is just more money = send more people to college, and screw all that.
> 
> But AI potentially offers a way to convert money into researchers. Money = build more AIs = more research.


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