π Faster, Please! Week in Review #41
Exponential growth, space elevators, the productivity promise of generative AI, and much more!
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Melior Mundus
In This Issue
Essay Highlights:
β ChatGPT: The rise of generative AI and (again) the rise of fears about technological unemployment
β What's so funny 'bout peace, love, and exponential economic growth?
β From stagnation to acceleration: Can AI chatbots really boost worker productivity?Best of 5QQ
β 5 Quick Questions for β¦ Kevin Cannon on space mining
β 5 Quick Questions for β¦ chronicler of techno-pessimism Louis Anslowβ 5 Quick Questions for β¦ economist Veronique de Rugy on the importance of economic growth
Best of the Pod
β A conversation with physicist Stephen Cohen on the engineering challenges of building a space elevator
Essay Highlights
π€ ChatGPT: The rise of generative AI and (again) the rise of fears about technological unemployment
It has been my concern since at least the late 2010s that the same societal impulse driving trade protectionism might also give rise to a strong neo-Luddite backlash against AI and robotics. The GOP turn against Big Tech and Big Business has only reinforced my baseline concern. Yet I would like to think that β at some point β economic reality will provide some inconvenient and unavoidable truths that only the most craven politicians and pundits will ignore. For example: We donβt hear as much about the trucker automation issue as we did a few years ago because autonomous driving has been a trickier problem than expected. Iβm sure the rise of generative AI such as ChatGPT and DALL-E will open the floodgate for lawmakers suggesting all sorts of limits. The sort of policymaker debate weβve seen over social media, especially an almost complete misunderstanding of the basic technology involved, makes me skeptical about a new wave of government intervention. That, even with the best of intentions. But too often those intentions have little to do with optimal economic outcomes.
‴ What's so funny 'bout peace, love, and exponential economic growth?
In a recent essay for The Wall Street Journal, βTech Progress Is Slowing Down,β excerpted from his new book Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure, Vaclav Smil raises some intriguing questions about exponential growth. Smil does something Iβm not sure Iβve ever seen before. He points to the downside of Mooreβs Law. He writes, βNothing has affected, and warped, modern thinking about the pace of technological invention more than the rapid exponential advances of solid-state electronics. β¦ The problem is that the post-1970 ascent of electronic architecture and performance has no counterpart in other aspects of our lives.β My take is this: We can have a healthier future of vast material abundance that is widely shared without a Mooreβs Law for Everything. A sci-fi future without sci-fi economics. If the US economy were able to repeat its dot-com era growth, it would have a $55 trillion economy in 2052 rather than a $33 trillion economy. No easy task, but doable given both recent technological advances and the potential to fix some really bad economic policy in areas such as immigration, science investment, and trade.
π€ From stagnation to acceleration: Can AI chatbots really boost worker productivity?
For my part, what weβre seeing now with generative AI models (including Bing AI, ChatGPT, Dall-E, and Midjourney) qualifies as dazzling. But will they make us more productive? A new study finds that βChatGPT substantially raises average productivity.β Now let me put that context in context: Rich countries experienced a slowdown in productivity growth after 2007, a slowdown that remains ongoing. And while it would be comforting to blame the slowdown on the one-time shock of the Global Financial Crisis or Great Recession, that doesnβt seem to be the case. Rich economies fully extracted the big productivity gains from what I hope is only the first wave of the ICT Revolution. Much of my hope for an eventual 2020s economic boom is based on AI-machine learning becoming a significant General Purpose Technology that represents the second phase of the ICT Revolution. If so, we need a lot more data points across a broad range of sectors showing workers can performs tasks more quickly, better, or find themselves doing new tasks created by AI. Faster, please!
Best of 5QQ
π‘ 5 Quick Questions for β¦ Kevin Cannon on space mining
I didnβt want my recent podcast chat on space mining with Kevin Cannon, a professor of space resources and geology and geological engineering at Colorado School of Mines, to slip by my dear readers. (Cannon is also author of the Planetary Intelligence newsletter on Substack.)
I love how you put it in one of your tweets. You wrote, βSpace resources are optional to gain a foothold in space, but necessary to gain a stronghold.β
If you look back at what we've done so far in human space exploration, we've landed 12 people on the Moon, they walked around for a few days, and then they came back. Since then, we've sent people up to low-Earth orbit to the International Space Station or the Chinese equivalent. They stay up there for a few months, and they come back. In those cases, it makes sense to bring everything that you need with you: all the food, all the water, all the oxygen. If we have greater ambitions than that, though β if we want to not just walk around on the Moon, but have a permanent installation, we want to start growing a city on Mars that becomes self-sufficient, we want to have these O'Neill cylinders β you simply just can't launch that material with you. And that's because we live in this deep gravity well. We can just barely get these small payloads off the surface with chemical rockets. It just economically, physically does not make sense to try to bring everything with you if you have these larger ambitions. The only way to enable that kind of future is to make use of the material that you find when you get to your destination.
π‘ 5 Quick Questions for β¦ chronicler of techno-pessimism Louis Anslow
Louis Anslow is a writer, technologist, and curator of Pessimists Archive: a project exploring technophobia throughout history.
How do fears about AI correspond with past fears about technology? Is this just a replay of old hysterics, or something new?
What is interesting is that 'Butlerian Jihad' of the Dune series, was named after Samuel Butler who in 1863 wrote a screed against thinking machines β what we now call AI. AI doomers hold this up as prescient, without realizing it shows just how old this line of thinking is. It also has a religious moral panic quality to it. Elon Musk has talked about it 'releasing the demon' β perhaps in a secular world this is the new evil sprits.Β Β
π‘ 5 Quick Questions for β¦ economist Veronique de Rugy on the importance of economic growth
Veronique de Rugy is a columnist and the George Gibbs Chair in Political Economy and Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center. She recently wrote βThe Greatness of Growthβ for Discourse.
What does a society of 5 percent growth, wherein GDP per person doubles every 14 years, look like? Might that kind of growth be destabilizing?
Yes, 5 percent growth could be destabilizing. But it would be awesome. It is the shock we need to shake offΒ sclerosis of legacy institutions and escape various transitional gains traps that contribute to the vetocracy by making it cheaper relatively to buy out incumbents. Moreover, it makes rent-seeking and political favors relatively less profitable.
In fact, we all better hope that our world will be destabilized by 5 percent growth because there is another source of destabilization and that is the one we seem to be heading towards; thatβs stagnation.
Contra the Doomersβ creed, things are good, though they could be much better. But you donβt achieve better with more government programs, larger benefits, more top-down intervention.Β They only way we get better (morally and economically) is through higher growth. The alternative to higher growth isnβt just unpleasant, itβs civilization suicide.
Best of the Pod
Stephen Cohen teaches physics at Vanier College in Montreal and has been working on space elevator concepts for almost 20 years. Recently, he wroteΒ βSpace Elevators Are Less Sci-Fi Than You Thinkβ for Scientific American. Stephen also has a new book, Getting Physics: Nature's Laws as a Guide to Life, which was released earlier this year.
It must be annoying that you can't find a super billionaire β they seem to be very interested in rockets. You need to find one who's interested in a space elevator. That would seem to be an important piece to the puzzle when you look at how things are going in space and rocketry.
Yeah, on the economic side of things, if you want return on investment, you probably need to work on steps to get there. So partial space elevator, that's something which is basically a larger space tether. Space tether on the order of thousands of kilometers. So it's an easier challenge, but the payoff isn't nearly as high. There need to be small aspects that are worked on that have return on investment that get you there. There are several that could be listed. If I could speak about the big investor of which you just mentioned, there's another project that really reminds me of the space elevator: something called Breakthrough Starshot that you haven't heard of it. It's an attempt to send something interstellar. To send to another star system a very small payload, on the order of grams, that we could then once we get there take a picture of, say, an exoplanet and send it back. And weβd get something way cooler than what our best satellites can do. That project also has a few major engineering challenges, but I wouldn't say science challenges. We're now at the point where there's a road to it. It's also probably decades away. It has spinoff technologies. They're really very similar. And the interesting thing is, there seem to be investors putting more money into that one than space elevators. That's my impression. Not boat loads of money.