Machine intelligence

James D. Miller writes very perceptively on the rise of machine intelligence:

And, within 50 years machine intelligence will be so much vaster than human intelligence (unless we can somehow use Moore's Law to improve our brains) that it will dominate our economy and produce wealth beyond our current imagining. When this occurs we will achieve what has been described as a technological singularity.

The single greatest problem with the economics profession is its near total ignorance of the possibility of a technological singularity. To partially remedy this my soon to be published introductory microeconomics textbook concludes with a discussion of the singularity.

In his book The Singularity Is Near, Ray Kurzweil makes a similar argument about economics, in that the rise of artificial intelligence will create increases in productivity greater than the world has seen before.

In this paper, Robin Hanson writes of projected doubling times in world GDP growth rates of two weeks:

The suggestion is fantastic, namely of a transition to a doubling time of two weeks or less sometime within roughly the next century.

One might think this suggestion too fantastic to consider, were it not for the fact that similar predictions before previous transitions would have seemed similarly fantastic. We should also keep in mind that investors in U.S. stocks seem to be betting that a large change in the nature of the economy is likely soon. They may well be wrong, but this paper shows that the empirical case against such expectations is not as clear as one might expect from empirical analyzes looking at the last century or so. From a purely empirical point of view, very large changes are actually to be expected within the next century.

At the time of Hanson's paper, the internet bubble was in full swing, and its collapse has led many to pour scorn on the idea of fundamental changes to the economy. Yet these changes have kept chugging along, regardless of the stock market.

Huge changes in the economy are undoubtedly on the way. That is, if only we can keep the United Sates intact, something that the economics profession seems intent on preventing.