From: Dani Eder (danielravennest@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Jul 24 2001 - 09:23:42 MDT
Note that infinite labor productivity is quite
possible given a robotic/automated manufacturing
economy. It just means the human labor divisor
in the formula ouptut/labor-hour = productivity
has gone to zero.
Okay, I don't really expect it to go completely
to zero, if only because there are people who
like making things for fun(I'm one of them).
So there will still be some labor input in the
economy as a whole. But the productivity of
the automated part of the economy can be arbitrarily
high given self-replicating robots and factories.
Neither nanotech nor transhuman AI are needed
to make this happen, just an extension of current
factory automation.
In response to the S-curve vs exponential growth
issue, while any given technology has an s-curve
in adoption (really a bell curve when you include
the de-adoption as it gets superceded), civilization
as a whole is following one huge s-curve where
the levelling off is caused by reaching the
fundamental limits of the universe (Planck's
constant, speed of light, etc.).
One definition of the Singularity is that time
horizon beyond which you can't make any useful
predictions because too many things will have
changed. Some folks think that will be shortly
after the first superintelligent AI is developed.
The definition I go by is a bit different: that
singular time in history when technology is
changing the fastest, just before physical
limits of the universe put a brake on further
improvements.
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