Rob Wiblin

Birth rates have been going down rather than going up, despite us being richer.

So it's been the first two factors that have been playing off against one another.

Advances getting harder to make.

science advancing, giving us better tools to do it.

These two things have been roughly canceling out, and over the medium term, growth has been about 3% a year, maybe going down in recent times.

Zooming out much further, all three factors were in play.

Before the Malthusian era ended, as we got richer, we drove

much, almost all of those resources into additional people as well.

But that faded out after 1800.

And that was leading to hyperbolic growth.

That was leading to increasing rates of growth while it was true.

Now, applying this to the AI case, that means to figure out which situation we're in,

This model, this mental model, puts a huge emphasis on, are we coming up with better tools to do science?

Or are we plowing our gains back into more researchers to do science and to have more people thinking up better ideas or new ideas?

You can see why it gets a bit confusing here when we're talking about AI doing the research, because AI is both a tool, but we're thinking it's going to basically converge and become people or become scientific researchers itself.

So it becomes a difficult conceptual empirical question.

At what point do they cross over from being largely a tool that is assisting humans in doing their work to being the researcher itself that isn't really just assisting people, it's doing the whole process.

or at least we should no longer be just considering it as a scientific instrument that's allowing us to do better work.

And I think you wanna say people are being a bit sloppy about, they talk about indicators that really are a sign that we've developed better tools for humans to use to do their work.

And they kind of conflate that with, we've developed autonomous AI R&D that barely even needs people at all and really should be considered as a population increase.