Rohin Shah
speaker
1,071 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 2 Jun
Rohin Shah’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Another effect is that ideas get harder to find as time goes on because you pluck the low hanging fruit.
And, you know, initially you discover phosphorus by, I think Scott put this well again, by like looking at your own pee.
And then later you have to like discover element 110 by like, you know, shipping samples from one country to another to be studied in the one laboratory in the world that can do it.
Obviously that's much harder.
Yeah.
And I think basically in the current setting where we see this like constant exponential growth in GDP and similar things in various areas of technology like Moore's law being a good example.
the argument would be roughly that like ideas are getting harder to find, but also we have exponentially increasing numbers of researchers that, and together those two things balance out in order to create the sort of constant progress.
Then, but if you look sufficiently far back historically, it actually looks like growth has been increasing substantially over time.
So what is this secret third effect that we haven't taken into account so far?
The argument is that the rate of growth of technology increases partly with more technology because you get microscopes and they help you do things better.
but also increases with respect to the population, because as the population grows, there are more people who can have ideas.
And ideas are, once you have them, you can copy them freely, they can diffuse very quickly, and those two can increase technology.
And so technology is modeled as increasing...
its rate of growth is modeled as being proportional to both technology, or plus sometimes technology raised to some constant, as well as population.
And this then predicts basically hyperbolic growth in both population and technology.
And the argument is like, well, for the last however many years,
The population part no longer applies because instead of reinvesting all of our output back into more kids, we're now reinvesting them into quality of life improvements.
And that's why we see a hyperbolic up until, who knows, 1800, 1900.
I forget the exact point.
And then since then, exponential growth.
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