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2022 | Book

Introduction Read chapter Read first chapter

Accelerating Economic Growth

Lessons From 200,000 Years of Technological Progress and Human Development

Author: Jakub Growiec

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Book Series : Frontiers in Economic History

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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About this book

What made it possible for the human species to conquer the world, build a global digital economy, and still want more? What drives technological progress and economic growth in the long run and on a global scale? And how will technological progress, economic growth, and the overall prosperity of human civilization unfold in the future?

This book sheds new light on these big questions by incorporating findings from physics, anthropology, psychology, history, philosophy, and computer science in a brand-new theory of economic growth. Looking back across the millennia, it identifies five major technological revolutions which have transformed humankind’s capacity to process energy and information—the cognitive, agricultural, scientific, industrial, and digital revolutions—and characterizes the new avenues of economic development which they have opened while also exponentially accelerating growth.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. Introduction
Abstract
What drives technological progress and economic growth over the long run and at the global scale? What made it possible for the single human species to conquer the world, build a global digital economy and still want more? And how will technological progress, economic growth and the overall prosperity of human civilization unfold in the future? This chapter sets the stage for the narrative and analysis presented throughout the book. It specifies the contributions of the book to the scholarly literature and its main messages for the general readership. It also discusses how the processes of economic growth, technological progress and human development over the millennia of human history can be intuitively organized as five eras, initiated by five respective technological revolutions: the hunter–gatherer era, the agricultural era, the enlightenment era, the industrial era and the digital era.
Jakub Growiec

The Drive for Development

Frontmatter
Chapter 2. Enter Local Control
Abstract
Looking back at all the impressive achievements of humankind begs the question: Why did we achieve it? What was the driving force behind these developments? This chapter looks for a factual answer to the question, what are the key goals pursued in human life? It invokes the instrumental convergence thesis, originating from the research on artificial intelligence, and argues that this thesis can also be applied broadly to biological life and specifically to humans. The thesis claims that for a variety of final goals, the same four instrumental goals will also be followed: self-preservation, efficiency, creativity and resource acquisition. The union of these four goals can be called local control maximization. It is argued that the development of human civilization has begun once humans, as the first species on Earth, crossed the threshold of net positive cumulative knowledge accumulation. This allowed our ancestors to conquer territory, improve technology and gradually improve their capacity to maximize local control.
Jakub Growiec
Chapter 3. The Force Unleashed
Abstract
Was the rise of humankind inevitable? This chapter discusses a sequence of filters that the human civilization has passed to achieve the current level of development. It emphasizes the importance of crossing the threshold of net positive cumulative knowledge accumulation, underlying the rise of the homo sapiens as the dominant species on Earth. Human local control maximization is an emergent sub-routine of the grand process of species evolution which got out of evolutions hand. The chapter also speculates whether artificial general intelligence (AGI) will become the next filter for our civilization. There are at least two reasons why it may be. First, the orthogonality thesis: any level of intelligence can be coupled with more or less any final goal. Second, the sheer power that comes with intelligence. The AGI optimization process, a sub-routine of human local control maximization, may get out of hand just like human local control maximization got out of evolutions hand—through its pace, recursive self-improvement and greed for resources.
Jakub Growiec

The Growth Mechanism

Frontmatter
Chapter 4. Hardware and Software
Abstract
The humankind pursues local control maximization by performing premeditated actions, the sum of which sets the course of development of the human civilization. The macroeconomic way of looking at it assumes an aggregate production function, describing how inputs are transformed into aggregate output. This chapter introduces the hardware–software framework, which assumes that producing output requires (i) physical action and (ii) code, a set of instructions describing the action. Physical action is performed by hardware while the code is provided by the software. Hardware and software are mutually complementary and each of them is essential for production. The chapter proceeds to characterize hardware and software inputs used across human history and offers a typology of final outputs. It elucidates how the accumulation of hardware and software inputs and their cumulative technological improvements propelled accelerating economic growth over the millennia, and how artificial intelligence may carry this process into the future.
Jakub Growiec
Chapter 5. Mechanization, Automation and the Labor Market
Abstract
What is the future of human work? Will robots take all our jobs? The hardware–software framework organizes the past evidence on long-run employment trends and offers interesting predictions for the future. The key dichotomy present in the framework underscores that very different implications should be expected whether machines replace human brawn (hardware) or brains (software), i.e., whether we are discussing mechanization of physical tasks or automation of cognitive tasks. Given that modern production processes are highly complex, it is also important whether automation is partial or full. Under partial automation, essential non-automated cognitive tasks are becoming scarce, boosting employment and wages in jobs that perform these tasks. Under full automation, in contrast, human cognitive work becomes substitutable with machines. Automation may gradually enter into all job categories, including also the jobs in research and development, potentially causing technological unemployment and increasing income inequality, while also potentially accelerating technological progress and economic growth.
Jakub Growiec
Chapter 6. Scale of Operations
Abstract
An important factor that contributed to the long-run success of the human species in furthering its local control, conquering the world and building a global economy, is increasing returns to scale (IRS) in production and research and development. IRS means that proportional increases in inputs yield more than proportional increases in output. This chapter explains Paul Romer’s observation that technological ideas are a source of IRS because they are non-rivalrous. Then it proceeds to illustrate how the scale of operations increased after every technological revolution in software: the cognitive, scientific and digital revolution, leading to the gradual development of the global research network and the global economy. It is technological progress, not institutions, which underlies lasting economic growth. The causality from institutions to technology and economic growth is observed only when the institutions are blatantly bad. Finally, the chapter also provides a case for development of better global institutions for pursuing digital policy, needed in the current digital era.
Jakub Growiec

The Great Leaps

Frontmatter
Chapter 7. Accelerating Growth in the Past
Abstract
The chapter documents the trajectory of accelerating global economic growth and technological progress across the entire human history. Against the backdrop of several existing aggregative measures of development, a two-level measurement approach is proposed, keeping aggregate human control as the unique overarching frame but also using era-specific measures of development. The proposed approach formalizes the idea that each technological revolution opens a new dimension of development, such as habitat capacity, ecosystem information, population, scientific knowledge, gross domestic product (GDP) and useful data. Next, the chapter documents the growth effects of technological revolutions in energy (hardware): the agricultural and industrial revolution, and in learning (software): the cognitive, scientific and digital revolution. After each revolution, growth accelerated by orders of magnitude. The global development picture is blurred, however, by the facts that technologies from consecutive eras may coincide in time and there are feedback loops across the eras (mechanization of agriculture, digitization of industry, etc.).
Jakub Growiec
Chapter 8. Accelerating Growth in the Future
Abstract
Will accelerating economic growth carry on into the future? For a better understanding of the current digital era as well as for pursuing informed digital policy, we need a global system of data accounts. Notwithstanding, highly suggestive evidence already exists that the digital revolution has opened a new data dimension in which growth is an order of magnitude faster than growth in GDP. With this in hand, the current chapter attempts to position the coming decades against two polar benchmarks: secular stagnation and technological singularity. Extrapolating past trends suggests that once global population plateaus, world GDP will probably slow down, too. Growth in the digital domain will likely continue, though, possibly producing another technological revolution in energy/hardware or creating artificial general intelligence (AGI). If the latter possibility materializes, it will almost certainly mark the arrival of technological singularity. The probability of a long-standing stagnation or decline is, by contrast, assessed as non-negligible but low.
Jakub Growiec

Lessons for the Digital Era

Frontmatter
Chapter 9. Side Effects of Growth
Abstract
One important lesson from past evidence is that accelerating economic growth, fueled by the unstoppable human drive to maximize local control, tends to have mounting unintended side effects. This chapter discusses an array of ecological and psychological consequences of human local control maximization. Both types of effects have existed throughout the entire human history but were not clearly visible until relatively recently. Ecological side effects began to be felt most strongly after the industrial revolution, and psychological side effects—after the digital revolution. The chapter also tackles the issue of information overflow, or cognitive bandwidth problem, which increasingly stands in the way of informed decision making, from everyday life to global policy, and reduces the productivity of scientific research.
Jakub Growiec
Chapter 10. Challenges of the Digital Era
Abstract
This chapter discusses four important challenges of the digital era: managing global inequality, augmenting democracy, addressing the scale mismatch between economy and policy and new moral challenges posed by automation and artificial intelligence. Technologies of the digital era, due to their non-rivalrous character, are a potent force of income divergence, contributing to “the rise of the global 1%”. Due to the cognitive bandwidth problem stemming from the associated information deluge, the digital era also poses a major challenge to representative democracy. Another problem is that while the economy has become global in the digital era, policy has remained at most national—a configuration that is likely unstable and subject to coordination failures. Finally, the chapter also addresses the emerging moral challenges. How to maintain a sense of purpose and a reasonable extent of local control among people who cannot contribute to the economy? And what will be the moral status of non-human forms of advanced intelligence?
Jakub Growiec
Chapter 11. Bracing for Artificial General Intelligence
Abstract
There are strong economic incentives to develop increasingly potent artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. This development process may culminate in superhuman artificial general intelligence (AGI), “the last invention we will ever make” (I. J. Good). The AGI is the ultimate knife-edge of the human civilization: both a promise of unimaginable prosperity and an existential threat. A nascent AGI may undergo an intelligence explosion, a cascade of cumulative improvements in cognitive capabilities, allowing it to dramatically improve its optimization power. There are meaningful differences between man-made AI algorithms and biological life which has developed through Darwinian evolution. These considerations have a bearing on the conditions for the doomsday scenario and the ones needed for the emergence of a friendly AGI. The current chapter also touches upon the related question of transhumanism, focusing specifically on human–AI integration. Finally, it briefly elaborates on alternative future scenarios in which AGI never comes into existence.
Jakub Growiec
Metadata
Title
Accelerating Economic Growth
Author
Jakub Growiec
Copyright Year
2022
Electronic ISBN
978-3-031-07195-9
Print ISBN
978-3-031-07194-2
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07195-9