This Can Go On – Pt 2: Against intuitions about crazy growth
Why a current-world economy per atom may be more plausible than you think
In Part 1, I laid out the simmer scenario as an alternative to explosion, stagnation, and collapse, in which growth in the coming millennia slows down but remains significant. In this post, I want to suggest that when our intuitions contradict the plausibility of large growth rates for thousands of years, that’s so much the worse for our intuitions.
A large rate of compound economic growth means that pretty soon, we’ll have to support multiple current-world-economies per atom in the galaxy. Holden explains why he thinks this implausible:
What would it mean, though, to value a single experience 10^71 times as much as today’s entire world economy? One way of thinking about it might be:
- “A 1 in 10^71 chance of this thing being experienced would be as valuable as all of today’s world economy.”
- Or to make it a bit easier to intuit (while needing to oversimplify), “If I were risk-neutral, I’d be thrilled to accept a gamble where I would die immediately, with near certainty, in exchange for a 1 in 10^71 chance of getting to have this experience.”
- How near-certain would death be? Well, for starters, if all the people who have ever lived to date accepted this gamble, it would be approximately certain that they would all lose and end up with immediate death.
- So to personally take a gamble with those kinds of odds … the experience had better be REALLY good to compensate.
- We’re not talking about “the best experience you’ve ever had” level here – it wouldn’t be sensible to value that more than an entire life, and the idea that it’s worth as much as today’s world economy seems pretty clearly wrong.
- We’re talking about something just unfathomably beyond anything any human has ever experienced.
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Πηγή: dwarkeshpatel.com
