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Yep. Kurzweil's theories are very similar. Also the Drake Equation. Great for late-night BS sessions, and maybe a fine thing to put some faith in -- but it ain't science or logic.

"...I had this massive argument 10 years ago with a politically active friend..."

Reminds me of a similar story. Worked with a guy many years ago who was a double major, math and physics, I think. Brilliant guy. At the time, he assured me that now was the time to get in the market and bet on oil prices going higher. Peak oil was here! Shortages and chaos were upon us.

I pointed out that peak oil had been called many times over the years. It was doubtful we were on that exact spot. In fact, some economists have even said that anything you can dig out of the ground is bound to go down in prices as extraction technology continues to mature.

He countered by showing me a study from the U.S. Defense Department (I believe), it showed that yes, indeed, oil was going nowhere but up. I pointed out various examples of this type of thinking failing in the past. He pointed out that things can't continue on forever. Draw a trend line. There's no way that line can continue. Does this discussion sound familiar?

We agreed to disagree, and I promised him that I would wait a few years and email him. We would revisit this discussion.

Several years passed. Oil was not through the roof. In fact, IIRC, it was about in the same spot as it was before. So I emailed him. I asked him how he felt about his earlier assessment.

I did not get a reply.

Since then, of course, we have the advent of fracking, and the clear possibility that the U.S. is going to end up as a petroleum exporter, at least for a while.

Faith is a fine thing. Heck, I'm a singularian, although I think we're looking at 300-500 years. But it's very important to be cognizant of those things you take on faith. Otherwise you end up having these long discussions in which your main defense is just repeating something along the lines of "science!" or "math!" over and over again.

An interesting thing about Kurzweil's timeline is the 2045 singularity awakening date. It's conveniently scheduled around the end of his life, assuming medical technology extends life expectancy at his age to around 100 years.

That said, I think what Kurzweil does is interesting and valuable. In fact, being so stridently futurist and speculative makes it a lot more honest than a typical "think tank" economic scenario predictions. You go into it with a much more assumption challenging type of good skepticism and engage with the unknowns.

What makes you think 300-500 years?

If we're talking 300-500 years, I'm lost. Compare 2015 to 1515. Consider accelerating rate of change, I think 300-500 years takes us outside of any kind of timeline we can map historically.

I believe hard AI is going to be a lot more problematic to map out than we currently might think. I believe we're in for a push-back against overly-intrusive computer monitoring, which should slow down AI development. I also believe that "intelligent", "kind", "moral", and "useful" may also be much more mutually orthogonal than currently believed. Finally, mankind really needs to work through the period where mid-level AI could either exterminate us or love us into extinction. That's going to take some time to work out.

But it's all just guesses, of course.

If you spoke to your friend 10 - 20 years ago, then he was right. Perhaps he imagined faster and more catastrophic dynamics, but inflation-adjusted Oil has been going up since 1998 [0]. If you had taken his advice and invested in oil futures in 2009, you could have become rather wealthy :)

Of course, there have been impressive price fluctuation (One happening right now). But it's kind of expected in a highly complex system where technology, politics and financial crises interact in rather unpredictable ways. On average, I still think the trend is UP (and the "fracking miracle" will be a short lived spike). Peak Oil will happen (but predicting the date or dynamics inside a 20 year range is just as hard as predicting the timing and depth of a financial crisis).

[0] http://inflationdata.com/articles/charts/inflation-adjusted-...

That reminds me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager

The thing that makes GDP unsuitable in my view is that it measures destructive activity as being equal in value to constructive activity. You tear down a house, build an identical one in its place, and while nothing of value has been created, the GDP has received a sizable boost. Yes, people got paid for doing those things, but it would have been better had they been paid to produce something of value instead.

> nothing of value has been created

That's debatable, because no one tears down a house and rebuilds an identical one.

* Was the old house livable? If not, then you haven't really wasted anything.

* Is the new house up to more rigid environmental standards?

* Does the new house take up more (less) space?

* Is the new house wired/piped in a different way?

etc.

It's not an invalid example. It shows that GDP has some weirdness. It's just not a scenario likely to be common enough to cause problems. But, it does demonstrate the leaky abstraction.

There are also scenarios that break GDP but not homo economicus logic. What happens when a woman starts working and paying for childcare? Do you subtract the childcare she is no longer directly providing as negative GDP? Do you just add on this new service as growth, even though the kids are not getting and more hours of "childcare?" This is a real problem with data pre 1960s and post 1980s. GDP can't measure those.

That's the economic equivalent of bulldozing a house and building a new one. There's a surplus, economic or otherwise but there is an unmeasured destruction too, parenting hours are reduced. We only count paid work so when one increases at the expense of another, the GDP abstraction leaks.

What happens if important new products and services are free, like Wikipedia, Khan Academy, etc? What happens when you can buy a £500 android phone for £200? Do you do an inflation adjustment that counts the value of all £200 iphones produced @ £500?

The real world mixes these up in ways that GDP can't really handle.

If one looks at this more broadly, the examples you bring up have to do with the fact that not everything can be reduced to monetary or market exchange (a distressing thought to some libertarians). This is more of the underlying problem than GDP itself which is "just" an accounting equation... Which is hard to use when there is nothing to account.

The question for society is , does this even really matter? We never used to subject ourselves to economics and markets as the totalizing sphere of human achievement, it was one of several areas of social organization alongside community, politics, family, religion, etc. We only start caring about this stuff when we want to compute dubious universal ultility functions and the like.

This is a little unfair to (intelligent) libertarians. A similar argument could be made for socialists or welfarists. They all rely on "economics" in the sense that they are quantifying and describing the dynamics of economic activity. Thoughtful libertarians know that these measures and models are representations of reality, not reality.

In fact, a fairly important figure in "neoliberal" thought is Hayek. Hayek (and Hayekians) argue that not only is the economy difficult to quantify and describe formally, it is impossible. In his frameworks price and choice are conveyors for knowledge.

I would even say that the most serious hubris in this vein has been the Stalinist and Maoist "5 year plan" which aimed to quantify economies in accounting terms.

I agree with some of your points: it was a little unfair, and Stalin and Mao certainly had great hubris. I tend to view libertarianism as the next desired grand social experiment: the Marxism of the Right. This leaks out via dry attempts at humor. Perhaps it won't be a disaster; I also admit I should be more respectful in a debating forum.

As for Hayek, I don't think he is unique in the view that price is about knowledge. While Hayek was the more readable and reasonable one between him and Von Mises, I'm aware the Austrians don't really believe one can scientifically study the economy, but I also think there is plenty of evidence that has refuted this: we can quantify and describe a large subset of the economy with predictive power.

It's well-known that GDP is susceptible to the broken window fallacy because it doesn't measure destruction of capital. Consequently, it dramatically overstates the GDP of resource-rich nations. When Saudi sells a barrel of oil, that $75 is counted towards its GDP. But the actual value-add is $75 minus the value of oil in the ground, which is a much smaller number.

So why do we bother with it?

Perhaps more clearly, GDP doesn't distinguish between productive and unproductive activity.

The government could pay people to dig ditches and fill them back in, and that would contribute to the GDP even though it was a complete waste of effort and a net negative considering the opportunity costs.

I think a better example would be: paying to have a house built and then paying to tear it down.

Another good example could be: think about the cost spent every year for lawyers to write EULAs or liability waivers that nobody reads, or to file tax returns that comply with our super complicated tax code. If the underlying legal system was simpler and/or less friendly to these liability lawsuits, the same effect could be had without needing any of those legal/professional billable hours.

Here's a good (but long) resource for anyone who wants to understand how and why we have come to use the conventional measurements of economic growth that we do:

http://www.oecd.org/std/41746710.pdf

Giovannini (former OECD Chief Statistician) has this to say about the future of economic accounting:

Looking to the future, it is possible to identify certain trends in the demand for economic statistics that will presumably strengthen in the years to come. In the first place, demand will focus more and more on the services sector (which already accounts for over 70% of GDP in many developed countries), with new forms of production playing a more important part. The measurement of “intangible” activities will take on increased importance and this should bring about greater integration of economic statistics with social statistics: concepts such as those of human and social capital are already generating interest and becoming the subject of quantification, albeit still in embryonic form.

What then is a faithful measure of economic growth or the size of an economy? This should provide further insight into possible limits.

There just isn't one.

Trying to measure the size of the economy "faithfully" is not possible. You can create abstractions like GDP that are useful where they are useful, but you can't treat them as solid concepts.

When the "IQ" debate was hot and contentious, people often ended up with a tautological definition that measured IQ is whatever IQ measures. This is because "intelligence" is not a solid concept and the test is not a direct measure of this fuzzy concept anyway. That doesn't mean IQ is meaningless. It has predictive power. It can serve as a goal (unless you game it and make it useless).

GDP is a measure of transactions, ultimately. That tends to correlate with the size of an economy and can be used for comparison, if everything is structurally similar. You can compare France to Sweden. If you are trying to compare the economic output of Monaco to Zimbabwe, GDP is not as good. If you are trying to compare the economy of today to the economy of 1836 or 2065, you're also in trouble. If you want to compare the economy of an alien civilization to ours, GDP won't work.

Referencing GDP (or anything else, this is just an inherently hard problem) in these contexts is trying to squeeze some useful information out of a very limited and buggy tool. You need to understand the subtleties of it. What it does well and poorly.

Most importantly, accept that our tools and therefore knowledge is limited.

This would argue that economic growth is to a significant degree subjective, which would be consistent with the basic thrust of the original article. Economists once predicted that energy would be basically free, which turned out to be badly off base. Whether life can be made continuously better may be an open question, but the idea of essentially all major forms of scarcity disappearing due to never ending economic growth is cast into severe doubt.

One thing oft asserted in economics textbooks is price as an "information signal." That is, if we step back from its various origins that tie it to land, labor, and energy, pricing has similar utility to any other valuation method. A person using extremely expensive equipment that is owned by an institution cannot value it within their individual budget, even though it has a "price." The cost of access is the membership in that institution, which is not the same and may be priced in terms of service hours or political weight.

As our economy hits more extremes of abundance vs. scarcity, decoupling of value mechanisms is a likely future step. Mainstream economic theory already has some accomodations for types of goods and externalities - it's not too radical to imagine a theory that recontextualizes them.

I don't really have any strong opinions, but I tend towards the "no relevant natural barrier" to growth side.

I think free energy in the sense that Facebook is free, is still a possibility. But, I think what we previously failed to envision is the depth of our consumption ability. If by energy, you mean the energy needs of a home in 1915, that's an achievable goal. But, the goalposts moved. Energy has been a constraint though, not the best example since we have't had good progress relative to other things.

Consider food though, the basic consumption good. In pre-industrialized times, calories so cheap that they're free would have been a "singularity" like end goal. "Free food" in the form of a box of grains with sufficient calories would be perfectly doable if people wanted to do it, <$100 per year.

But of course, we consume far more that $100 per year of food. It's just that calories are not a good measure of food anymore.

Education, at whatever quality can be delivered without a teacher will be free. Housing isn't on any kind of virtuous curve, that's a resilient cost.

Computers are getting close to "free." A Rasberry Pi is (on the scale we're talking about) essentially the same as a Macbook Pro. Even a fully cased and packaged laptop is moving towards free, at least in the sense that thumb drives are free.

On one hand, I do think a lot of things can get so "abundant" that economic models ultimately break down entirely. Anything that is entertainment, information, education can be free. Anything that's a physical manufactured good like underpants or iphones can get so cheap it might as well be free.

On the other, some things (housing) might prove more resilient to to accelerating change. Others things will discover levels of demand for more "quality". A 1996 cell phone for free is a bad deal relative to the $300 alternative. Basically, there are things we will want that still cost money. Another way to put this is demand distancing itself from "need." We need some stuff (food, water). Some stuff is a matter of definition (education). Some stuff (game of thrones) is squarely in the "want" bucket, but the want bucket produces economically identical demand.

Does Wikipedia consumption have value if you don't use it to go and create something that has impact on GDP?

This question goes very deep. If you pursue it then at some point you end up asking very deep questions about value, ethics and meaning.

Unless you want to set a few boundaries to keep the debate about more prosaic matters then be prepared for a long night.

The question is actually based on the false premise that value can be objectively measured/quantified.

In fact, value is purely subjective. In other words, the value of 'Wikipedia consumption' is only what each individual places on it.

For example, someone may find Wikipedia valuable in pursuing his quest for greater knowledge, whereas someone else is completely uninterested in 'consuming' it (and doesn't see Wikipedia as valuable).

In a nutshell, the value of X is its subjectively perceived utility as a means towards an end.

See http://mises.org for more.

It adds to human capital, which we can't quantify as of now.

I'm not sure if we'll ever find a good proxy for how much information is worth as it is an extremely heterogeneous, intangible input that goes through a complex, unstructured, and not-fully-understood process (the human brain) in order to create value in the world that we can measure using money as a proxy - a company's revenue, for instance.