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Alsadius comments on Dr. Jubjub predicts a crisis - Less Wrong Discussion
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Agreed that we should treat the chances of a non-singularity future as being significant, but even with no singularity technological advance is a normal part of our society. Bandersnatch can be right even if Jabberwock is wrong.
Depends what time scale you're talking about.
And on what you mean by 'advance'.
The time frames mentioned in the post were 50, 120, 200, 300 and 500 years. Over all of those scales I would expect significant technological advance.
Take any 500-year window that contains the year 2014. How typical would you say it is of all 500-year intervals during which tool-using humans existed?
How typical does it need to be? We generally discount data more the further away from the present it is, for exactly this reason.
The current 500-year window needs to be be VERY typical if it's the main evidence in support of the statement that "even with no singularity technological advance is a normal part of our society".
This is like someone in the 1990s saying that constantly increasing share price "is a normal part of Microsoft".
I think technological progress is desirable and hope that it will continue for a long time. All I'm saying is that being overconfident about future rates of technological progress is one of this community's most glaring weaknesses.
The sheer number of ways the last 500 years are atypical in ways that will never be repeated does boggle the imagination.
Microsoft quit growing because of market saturation and legal challenges. The former seems unlikely with regards to technology, and the latter nearly impossible. It is possible for tech to stop growing, yes, but the cause of it would need to be either a massive cultural shift across most of the world, or a civilization-collapsing event. It took a very long time to develop a technological mindset, even with its obvious superiority, so I would expect it to take even longer to eliminate it.
I fully agree.