Why the Singularity Makes Me a Rational Optimist

Ray Galkowski, CFA — Tue, 29 Jul 2014 22:44:44 +0000

The main reason that I am a rational optimist in the long run, like Matt Ridley, is that technology is expanding exponentially; it is growing at a growing rate. Kurzweil in his book, The Singularity is Near, discusses how difficult it is for us to perceive the exponential growth. Compare it to standing on earth and looking out to the horizon; the ground looks flat near us, but it actually curves so substantially that it eventually ends up behind us.

It is the same with the exponential growth in technology; near us in time it doesn’t look like much is happening, but not long from now it will increase dramatically. For a hint of that, look at all of the stories that hit Ray Kurzweil’s website every day, or try to remember what it was like to use dial up internet just twenty years ago or no internet thirty years ago. The gains in technology from 1900 to 1930 were substantial, but they pale in comparison with the gains from 1984 to 2014.

(Update 7-15-15: On last night’s MLB All-Star Game broadcast Fox referenced the record number of players who were under age 25 with a vignette showing those players holding up “ancient” technology that they had never seen or used before such as VCR players and rotary dial phones. It was pretty funny.)

Here, Ray Kurzweil talks about the rapid development of our brains in a TED Talk and explains that soon our brains will be connected directly to the internet. Can you imagine that? Like curved earth, it is difficult to imagine, but not impossible, especially when we are armed with information. It is likely to happen in the next thirty years.

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This is the Worst Recovery in the Post WWII Era

Ray Galkowski, CFA — Tue, 29 Jul 2014 20:13:25 +0000

I think my former Wall Street colleagues know this without the need to read a chart. I added Sufi and Mian’s blog to the economics blogroll on the right after seeing the CFA Institute’s webcast of Sufi’s presentation at a conference at the University of Chicago. Sufi also projected a slide showing that GDP growth has fallen far off trend and is getting worse, not better. Normally, GDP catches up to long-run trends after a few years of recovery.

I usually have a negative knee-jerk reaction to anyone who says “it’s different this time” and true to form, I disagree with Sufi’s argument that capital can replace labor completely. His is a Luddite argument that has been made since the industrial revolution and never materialized. Capital can only replace labor when (if?) we reach the Singularity and machines can reproduce themselves. (By machines, I mean both mechanical and electronic.) Until then, back-breaking labor will be replaced by machines that, in order to propagate, will need engineers and programmers and maintenance workers and chip makers, and entrepreneurs who can employ machines in purposeful activity, etc. That reminds me; I also added Ray Kurzweil’s website to the blogroll.

http://blogs.cfainstitute.org/investor/2014/07/23/debt-and-secular-stagnation-amir-sufi-discusses-the-us-recovery-video/

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Margin of Safety » Ray Kurzweil

Why the Singularity Makes Me a Rational Optimist

This is the Worst Recovery in the Post WWII Era