Metaculus "pro" predictors reject Tony Seba and Ray Kurzweil and agree with Robert Gordon! We will be condemned to wander the desert of technological stagnation instead of entering the promised land of the Singularity!
Introduction
I only posted this here because r/futurology doesn't allow one to post images in posts.
I recently found a collection of questions from Metaculus, a massive prediction aggregation engine, that concerns fundamental indicators of economic and social development throughout the world. The questions solicited estimates where a certain metric would be for the years 2023, 2025, 2032, 2052, and 2122. These questions are featured in the "Forecasting Our World in Data Tournament". What interested me is not aggregate predictions of the crowd on the platform, but rather the predictions of those who are designated as "pros" who are defined as the top 2 percent of predictors on the platform.
My Pessimism and Robert Gordon's Outlook
What interested me and gave me a small sense delectation is that the "pro" predictions largely align my with view of the world because they are usually more pessimistic than the mainstream. I was interested in the commercial development of self-driving cars since 2019, but I became crestfallen when I realized that the problem is much harder than I had thought and what the tech-bros presented it to be. I had underestimated the capabilities of deep-learning in being able to discern and make real-time decisions in complex environment. I then assessed the maturity and viability of other technologies, such as generation iv nuclear reactors, CRISPR used in the clinic, robots used in fruit-harvesting and food preparation, nuclear fusion, graphene and carbon nanotubes, perovskite solar cells, and solid-state batteries. I became further dejected when I realized that most of the aforementioned things are emerging technologies that would take several decades to mature and be commercialized. I am Moses who was denied inhabiting the Promised Land and condemned to wander the desert because I struck the rock instead of speaking to it (because I was born too early to see those mature).
I will assert that technological progress in the 2010s has been less impressive that the computation and telecommunication advancements in the late 90s and early 2000s. I was astounded that I can download Pokémon episodes in 2006 and store them on a 500 mb flash drive. I remember being pleased when finding the Pokémon Showdown website to play live simulated battles (in the OU tier) against real opponents in July 2013, and (the now defunct) Dueling Network in November 2014 [to play a Qliphort deck]. I feel that new apps and the Internet in 2023 have not been able to match that utility.
These are not subjective assessments, personal grousing, or fulminating against perceived ennui; I believe that I have been vindicated by the economic historiography of Robert J. Gordon as it concerns technological progress and productivity growth in the United States. For example:
This expert thinks robots aren't going to destroy many jobs. And that's a problem.
Peak America: Is Our Most Innovative Century Behind Us? A Long-read Q&A with Robert Gordon
Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds (2012 NBER paper)
Gordon's thesis is that "Industrial Revolution 3" of computers and telecommunications was unable to generate sustained the long-term productivity growth of "Industrial Revolution 2" (electricity, internal combustion engine, running water, indoor toilets, communications, entertainment, chemicals, petroleum) whose growth lasted nearly a century from 1891-1972 (Gordon 2012, pg. 13, figure 4). However, "Industrial Revolution 3" did manage to produce robust productivity growth for a decade (1996-2004). Gordon (2012, pg. 11) claims that the transition was practically complete by 2005 where cathode ray-tube monitors were being replaced with flat-screens, electronic databases were created and installed, and much of the broadband and telecommunications had been built. I would add that smartphones were fairly mature by 2013. Since it has been 10 years from 2013, mobile computing and "apps" already delivered whatever positive effect on productivity it would have, thus we do not need to wait for any lagging effects to manifest.
The forecast of the Metaculus pros seems to corroborate my pessimistic framework. There is no Solow's paradox concerning the anemic growth of the 2010s and 2020s; it is just that smartphones and generative AI are not capable of generating torrid economic and productivity growth.
Hence, unlike what Tony Seba and Ray Kurzweil predict, I doubt that the technological advances would "make the world new" (Revelation 21:5) and abolish death and cause the old order of things to pass away (verse 4).
I will assert that one of the few things that will definitively prove me wrong is Robert J. Gordon is losing his bet with Erik Brynjolfsson that total productivity growth in the US will not exceed 1.8 percent annual from 2020-2029. I will be too pessimistic and wrong about some things, but my major contention is that whatever advances occur would not have a profoundly positive macroeconomic impact in the foreseeable future. So far, "Private Nonfarm business productivity growth" (spreadsheet, row, 28) for 2020, 2021, and 2022 has been -1.2, 4.0, and -1.2, respectively, which multiples to 1.0152, not even sufficient to top the average rate of growth for one year.
Forecast of the Metaculus Pros
Why should I have credence in the Metaculus pros?
First, they have a successful track record. One may ask why should people trust the judgments of scientific experts, but an analogous question would be whether one should copy the homework of a top student. I would assume that the pros actually had did their research (or homework) and asked the appropriate questions in order to generate reliable inferences. Most likely they did not uncritically rely on the pronouncements of Ray Kurzweil and Tony Seba.
Second, their judgment largely corroborates my pessimistic framework.
Third, I do not have any special expertise that contravenes their judgments.
Here are some interesting predictions.
Numbers of chickens slaughtered in the world.
I agree with the 2052 pro-prediction and that cultured meat will not be widely available to affect the consumption of chickens.
I am largely dismissive of the viability of cultured meat because growing cultured meat seems to be far more difficult than growing blood cells from hematopoietic stem cells. It is preposterous to think cultured meat will become mainstream this decade or early next decade when there are still blood drives because the technology to produce blood cells at scale does not exist. Producing blood is an appropriate analogous process because both involve growing tissues from precursor cells in vitro as opposed to deriving the product, meat or blood, from a biological organism. Moreover, in order to have a disruptive effect on medicine or food consumption that it would eliminate the need for donated blood or massively curtail animal slaughter, these products would have to be mass produced.
This article goes into more depth about the problems of making lab-grown meat into a competitive commercial product. I think lab-grown meat will be like fusion power right now; it would not be a significant part of the world in the next 30 years, similar to how many people had thought many decades ago that fusion power would be viable by now.
World-wide carbon dioxide emissions.
Agree with the pros here for 2025 and 2032. It is interesting the the pro forecasters predict that carbon dioxide emissions would be higher in 2025 than in 2023; moreover, they predict a smaller drop in 2032 vs 2023. I don't think the world has peaked yet for carbon dioxide emissions. Maybe 2026 or 2027. Renewable energy will take longer to roll out than the optimists say so that it can eclipse the growth in demand in China and India and cause a net displacement of fossil fuel power sources.
The renewable energy transition is a slow transition in the 2020s, not a profound disruption!
Energy consumption per capita in the world per annum.
Discrepancies between pros and public for 2025 and 2033 are negligible. 80,000 kwh is the average energy consumption of the US. I think the world energy consumption in 2052 will be higher than the pros. I'll hazard to guess 35,000. Perhaps self-driving cars will increase energy used in travel due to higher volume of miles traveled, but electric vehicles uses less energy per mile. Massive desalination can boost energy consumption. Israel, for instance, uses 3,300 kwh (source, energy consumption per capita for Israel [https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use] and the statistic that Israel uses 10 percent of its energy on desalination for 20 percent of its water [https://www.energymonitor.ai/tech/can-desalination-save-a-drying-world ]. For Israel complete desalination would 16,500 kwh.)
Economic productivity per hour of labor in the US (in 2017 US dollars).
The pro forecast rather reflect Robert Gordon's views on productivity growth extended for the next 30 years.
Let's do some math to understand what the predictors are really predicting.
119.00/77.60 = 1.534
ln(1.534) = 0.428
0.428/30 = 0.0143 or 1.43 percent of growth per year.
Now, the public tournament forecasts double the growth as the pro-forecasters. So...
ln(2) = .7 (I didn't use a calculator, just the rule of 70)
.7/30 = .0233
Hence, the public forecasters expect an additional 2.3 percent growth per year for a geometric average of 0.0376. This seems incredible, since it is more than average economic growth of the most recent boom years of 1996-2004.
What can feasible fuel economic growth in the subsequent decades? Surely, advanced robotics and human-level AI can achieve sustained economic growth for decades by fundamentally transforming society in a manner that electricity and indoor plumbing did.
Another reason for technological optimism is the prospect that renewable energy transition will create a disruptive, new paradigm of abundant and cheaper clean energy that would not only allow us to maintain our current living standards but change our attitudes towards energy from the mindset of scarcity into abundance. For the purpose of the argument, I will assume that the renewable energy transition will occur on a relatively quick time scale in order to interrogate the effect of cheap renewable energy on productivity. Because of the new mindset of abundance, one would need not feel guilty about setting an air conditioner at 68 degrees Fahrenheit because the energy powering it would be cheap and clean. As I mention before, higher energy can allow a higher volume of travel with self-driving cars and extensive desalination. According to the EIA, energy expenditures constituted 8% of US GDP in the early 2010s. What if that energy was actually free? We can assume that $0.08 were spent for every dollar invested in productivity. Thus, it would seem that free energy would result in a boost in GDP of 8.7 percent (from the reciprocal of .92). If there is an abundance of renewable energy, it would not significantly contribute to GDP since energy intensive products, such as water to grow lawns in the desert or solo robotaxi rides in a Hummer-like electric vehicle, would be relatively cheap. Abundant cheap energy would certainly have deflationary influence, but that is partially accounted for by measuring hourly productivity in 2017 US dollars. Furthermore, Baumol's cost disease suggests that other items and services would not deflate just because energy became much cheaper, since productivity improves from some technology may not be able affect productivity in other activities. A teacher, for instance, cannot teach more students effectively just because faster CPUs and advanced telecommunication technology exists.
FLOPS of the most powerful supercomputer
Lastly, I will provide a reason for optimism as the pro-forecasts agree that the world's fastest supercomputer would be exponentially faster in 2052, as oppose to prediction catastrophic stagnation due to an anticipate secession of Moore's law. Both groups predict supercomputers to be more than one million times faster that the fastest supercomputer in 2023. As for 2023, the appropriate prefix for 10^(18) scale computing is "exa-".
I think most scientific realists would acknowledge that atoms exist and have finite size as opposed to being infinitely divisible. Hence, transistors can no longer shrink further if they become a few atoms in width. Hopefully, Moore's law would continue on for several more decades if the computational substrate changes from the current silicon metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) to transitional metal dichalcogenides or carbon nanotubes. (See the slide from TSMC here.) The recent maturation of extreme ultraviolet lithography would enable Moore's law to continue on for perhaps another decade more.
I don't know if FLOPS specifically refers to FP32 or it can be FP16.
Conclusion
Going down the rabbit of futurism has ruined me. I see little to be optimistic about, but I do mainly myself for not thinking critically about the viability to artificial intelligence, generation iv reactors, and self-driving cars. It had left me broken because the false hope had been shattered. I regret that I am so deep down this rabbit hole that it hinders me from doing things that I enjoy such as playing Goat Format. My valedictory remarks will derive from the late coach Mike Leach:
**** you, f*** me, and f*** everybody. That is fucking b******t. (3:55)
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Introns:
ChatGPT and "generative AI" are particularly infuriating to me, since it seems like a pathetic picayune tchotchke compared to things that I enumerated. Generative AI seems like a pathetic consolation prize that I don't think will have a significant macroeconomic impact. It cannot even perform a mundane task such as pick a ripe strawberry! As Paul of Pokemon would say, "pathetic". I became infuriated that the video "Humans Need Not Apply" when it said in August 2014 that "self-driving cars aren't the future; they're here and they work" and "it is easy to see them being better than humans because they are already are". So it is not an emerging technology that will mature in some indeterminate point the future, but ready to hit the road right now.
I see technology progress and emerging technology to be similar to drug development where nothing is "real" until it has received an FDA approval. Mechanism of action doesn't really matter since molecular biology is an inscrutable enigma; what matters is to refute the null hypothesis that a pharmaceutical candidate has the same efficacy to a placebo or current standard of treatment. Large clinical (and expensive) trials that have enough statistical power to demonstrate a statistical significant (but often marginal) benefit are the only way to refute null hypothesis. Due to the low success rate in getting a drug that has enter phase I to a full approval, clinical trials are Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Eroom's law is a microcosm of all emerging technology.
The only pleasant surprises during the last decade was profound growth in utility solar power in California from 2012-2017, but that actually hit an (actual) inflection point in 2018 (where the second derivative of the trend turned negative). It may start to accelerate again in California (and elsewhere). Lithium-ion batteries have also fallen substantially, but not enough for electric vehicles to become majority options right now. I outlined other significant gains in the 2010s that I consider "significant" here.
I became sympathetic with redditor u/phoenix5869 because, while he significantly younger than me, shares a similarly assessment of technological progress:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/12acs5r/what_really_changed_between_2008_and_today/
https://www.reddit.com/r/GenZ/comments/139qthg/anyone_else_feel_like_technologically_2023_is/
Posted Sep 1, 2023, 1:27 PM UTC