The Impact of AI Singularity on World Economy
A few million years ago our ancestors were still swinging from the branches in the vast African Jungles.
On a evolutionary timescale, the rise of Homo-Sapiens from our last common ancestor with the great apes happened swiftly. We developed upright posture, longer thumbs relative to fingers, and some major changes in our brain size and neurological organization that lead to a great leap in our cognitive ability. As a result, humans can think abstractly, communicate complex thoughts, and culturally accumulate information over the generations far better than any other species on Earth. These capabilities let humans develop increasingly efficient productive technologies that made possible our ancestors to migrate far away from African canopy to mainland. The adoption of agriculture had rose the population densities in these areas. More people meant more ideas and higher densities meant that the ideas could spread more easily and some intelligent individuals could devote themselves to develop specialized skills. These developments increased the rate of growth of economic productivity and technological capacity.
Later developments, related to industrial revolution brought a second but comparable step in rate of growth. These changes had a great role in the rate of growth. A few hundred thousand years ago, in early human prehistory, rate of growth was so slow that it took one million years for human productive capacity to increase it to such an extent that it can sustain an additional one million individuals. By 5000 BC, following the agricultural revolution, the rate of growth had increased to the point where the same amount of growth just took 200 years. Today, in the era of industrial revolution, the world economy grows on an average by that amount in every 90 minutes. Even by the present rate of growth it will produce an impressive results for a moderately long time. If the world economy will grow the way it has grown for the past 50 years the world economy will be 4.8 times richer by 2050 and 34 times richer by 2100 that it is today. Yet the prospect of continuing on a steady rate of growth for a long time fades as what would happen if the world were to experience yet another revolution that would change the rate of growth comparable to those associated with agriculture and industrial revolution.
history of the world economy looks like a flat line hugging the x-axis, until it
suddenly spikes vertically upward. (a) Even when we zoom in on the most
recent 10,000 years, the pattern remains essentially one of a single 90° angle.
(b) Only within the past 100 years or so does the curve lift perceptibly above
the zero-level.
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The economist Robin Hanson estimates, based on historical, economic and
population data has mentioned that in hunter gatherer society the world economy had doubled in every 224,000 years; for farming society it doubled in every 909 years and for industrial society it took 6.3 years. If another such transition to a different growth mode were to take place, and if it’s impact were of similar magnitude of the previous two, it would ignite a new growth in which the world economy will double in size in every two weeks. Such a revolution can make it possible for a person to see world economy to double multiple times within a single lifespan. This can be possible if we attain technological singularity that would lead to intelligence explosion in the market. Machines matching humans in general intelligence — that is, possessing common sense and an effective ability to learn, reason, and plan to meet complex information-processing challenges across a wide range of natural and abstract domains — have been expected since the invention of computers in the 1940s. It is expected that artificial general intelligence will be attained by 2062 and if it is attained we can shorten our economic doubling rate to a huge extent.
The singularity-related idea that interests us here is the possibility of an
intelligence explosion, particularly the prospect of machine super-intelligence. The world economy’s doubling time shortens to mere weeks that would not involve in the creation of minds that are much faster and more efficient rather it will depend on a Super-intelligent machine to do all such kind of work.
But before we turn to what lies ahead, it will be useful for us to create law’s that would control the application of Artificial Intelligence in destructive manners.
Thanks you!
Credit: “SuperIntelligence: Paths, Dangers & Strategies” book by Nick Bostrom.
