73. David Roodman - Economic history and the road to the singularity

There’s a minor mystery in economics that may suggest that things are about to get really, really weird for humanity.

And that mystery is this: many economic models predict that, at some point, human economic output will become infinite.

Now, infinities really don’t tend to happen in the real world. But when they’re predicted by otherwise sound theories, they tend to indicate a point at which the assumptions of these theories break down in some fundamental way. Often, that’s because of things like phase transitions: when gases condense or liquids evaporate, some of their thermodynamic parameters go to infinity — not because anything “infinite” is really happening, but because the equations that define a gas cease to apply when those gases become liquids and vice-versa.

So how should we think of economic models that tell us that human economic output will one day reach infinity? Is it reasonable to interpret them as predicting a phase transition in the human economy — and if so, what might that transition look like? These are hard questions to answer, but they’re questions that my guest David Roodman, a Senior Advisor at Open Philanthropy, has thought about a lot.

David has centered his investigations on what he considers to be a plausible culprit for a potential economic phase transition: the rise of transformative AI technology. His work explores a powerful way to think about how, and even when, transformative AI may change how the economy works in a fundamental way.