Video about accelerating progress

[Anderz]

Something I find missing in Leo's videos is the perspective of accelerating progress throughout human history and even through biological evolution. This is especially important today as technological progress really is starting accelerate leading to increased automation and the need for things like universal basic income.

Ray Kurzweil has something he calls the Law of Accelerating Returns:

Quote

"An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense “intuitive linear” view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate). The “returns,” such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There’s even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity — technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. ...

The Law of Accelerating Returns

We can organize these observations into what I call the law of accelerating returns as follows:

• Evolution applies positive feedback in that the more capable methods resulting from one stage of evolutionary progress are used to create the next stage. As a result, the
• rate of progress of an evolutionary process increases exponentially over time. Over time, the “order” of the information embedded in the evolutionary process (i.e., the measure of how well the information fits a purpose, which in evolution is survival) increases.
• A correlate of the above observation is that the “returns” of an evolutionary process (e.g., the speed, cost-effectiveness, or overall “power” of a process) increase exponentially over time.
• In another positive feedback loop, as a particular evolutionary process (e.g., computation) becomes more effective (e.g., cost effective), greater resources are deployed toward the further progress of that process. This results in a second level of exponential growth (i.e., the rate of exponential growth itself grows exponentially).
• Biological evolution is one such evolutionary process.
• Technological evolution is another such evolutionary process. Indeed, the emergence of the first technology creating species resulted in the new evolutionary process of technology. Therefore, technological evolution is an outgrowth of–and a continuation of–biological evolution.
• A specific paradigm (a method or approach to solving a problem, e.g., shrinking transistors on an integrated circuit as an approach to making more powerful computers) provides exponential growth until the method exhausts its potential. When this happens, a paradigm shift (i.e., a fundamental change in the approach) occurs, which enables exponential growth to continue.

If we apply these principles at the highest level of evolution on Earth, the first step, the creation of cells, introduced the paradigm of biology. The subsequent emergence of DNA provided a digital method to record the results of evolutionary experiments. Then, the evolution of a species who combined rational thought with an opposable appendage (i.e., the thumb) caused a fundamental paradigm shift from biology to technology. The upcoming primary paradigm shift will be from biological thinking to a hybrid combining biological and nonbiological thinking." - Kurzweil.net

 

[Anderz]

 

[Zigzag Idiot]

The topic made me think of Terence Mckenna's Time Wave theory (which didn't seem to pan out) and also this clip from the movie Waking Life.

[Anderz]

@Zigzag Idiot There is also Robert Anton Wilson's concept of Jumping Jesus and Carl Calleman has found that the Mayan calendar has 9 waves of accelerating development.

Evolution is not just about biological and material evolution. There is also evolution of consciousness such as described in Spiral Dynamics. And I even believe that evolution is a second order phenomenon, almost like a cosmic trick for the purpose of growth and development.

It's a huge topic and unless Leo has done some deep research into this already, it's too much to ask for a video about it, but anyway it's an important topic I believe, and needs to be taken into consideration when estimating what will happen even in the near future.

[Anderz]

As an example of importance of thinking of accelerating progress, take for example the choice of career for a person 100 years ago, and a woman says that she wants to become a telephone switch operator. Then a decade later the manual telephone switches are replaced by automatic switches. So much for that career choice.

Similarly today, where the progress is going even faster, someone might choose computer programmer as a career. Then a decade later AI has become so advanced that even children can program computers and create amazing software. So much for that career choice.

[Anderz]

Also, AI will probably render education obsolete. Leo's videos about education are about the industrial age basically. I don't mean that people will become uneducated. Instead the use of AI will boost the way we learn.

A decade from today as I wrote in my previous post is likely an exaggeration. Full automation, robotics and artificial general intelligence will probably take longer than that to develop. But say two decades from today things in society will have changed a lot. That's the power of accelerating progress in the age we live in.

[Anderz]

In the future we will laugh at how ridiculously mechanical and robotic our education is today with students sitting still the whole days like ducks in a row interrupted by a Pavlovian bell like in the factories in the early 20th century. We become indoctrinated and conditioned to follow the Gregorian calendar like machines. It's absurd.

[Zigzag Idiot]

 

[Anderz]

I think the material progress will be great, but as Eckhart Tolle has pointed out we also need to evolve consciousness along with the technological progress.

 

[Anderz]

Obama mentioned a risk of increasing wealth inequality caused by technological progress such as artificial intelligence (AI). There may be some government regulations necessary for that, but another opposite trend is also taking place. Ray Kurzweil explained how not only is the technological progress accelerating, the price/performance is also improving at an exponential rate! Meaning, services and products will become dirt cheap.

One example Kurzweil mentioned is how the first cell phones were clunky, didn't work very well and were so expensive that only the power elite could afford them. Today even the cheapest smartphones have way more capacity than the old cell phones. And this kind of trend is happening all across products and services, especially when they become digital. Even physical products will become digital Kurzweil said, such as with 3D printing. And there will be lots of free open source products and also commercial products, so a both/and scenario according to Kurzweil.

[Anderz]

I really like Leo's latest video about democracy and authoritarianism, but it's painfully linear thinking by Leo. Talking about the education system 50 or 100 years into future, and of corporations and politics, that's way too contemporary biased or what to call it.

Edited June 22, 2020 by Anderz

[Anderz]

I disagree with Ben Goertzel's ideas about the future in this video, but he makes Leo seem incredibly old-fashioned and conservative in comparison. And notice how wrong Leo's predictions about the future are if Ben is only the slightest correct when it comes to the amount of progress at least. It's hard to predict what will happen in the future, but the trend of accelerating progress is clear and as Ray Kurzweil said, actually inexorable. So to fail to take exponential progress into consideration and to believe that society will be structured similar to today 40 years from now is most likely wrong.