Can Economic Growth Last?

Re:Can Economic Growth Last? by netcan on Monday September 14, 2015 @07:28AM (#10214576)

An interesting thing about Kurzweil's timeline is the 2045 singularity awakening date. It's conveniently scheduled around the end of his life, assuming medical technology extends life expectancy at his age to around 100 years.

That said, I think what Kurzweil does is interesting and valuable. In fact, being so stridently futurist and speculative makes it a lot more honest than a typical "think tank" economic scenario predictions. You go into it with a much more assumption challenging type of good skepticism and engage with the unknowns.

What makes you think 300-500 years?

If we're talking 300-500 years, I'm lost. Compare 2015 to 1515. Consider accelerating rate of change, I think 300-500 years takes us outside of any kind of timeline we can map historically.

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Re:Can Economic Growth Last? by DanielBMarkham on Monday September 14, 2015 @08:00AM (#10214659)

I believe hard AI is going to be a lot more problematic to map out than we currently might think. I believe we're in for a push-back against overly-intrusive computer monitoring, which should slow down AI development. I also believe that "intelligent", "kind", "moral", and "useful" may also be much more mutually orthogonal than currently believed. Finally, mankind really needs to work through the period where mid-level AI could either exterminate us or love us into extinction. That's going to take some time to work out.

But it's all just guesses, of course.

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