Re: poly: Modeling Economic Singularities

From: Nick Bostrom <bostrom@ndirect.co.uk>
Date: Sat Apr 11 1998 - 18:54:21 PDT

Robin says that on his model, one of the necessary
conditions for an economic singularity is that the population growth
remains less than the discount factor ~3%. But suppose that
population growth rate were to rise to, say, 5% for the next 50
years. If in 20 years we develop superintelligence plus full
Drexlerian nanotechnology, why should it make any difference whether
the average couple has 2.1 children or 2.4 children? This doesn't
look like the sort of thing that could stop the singularity from
happening. What am I missing?

_____________________________________________________
Nick Bostrom
Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method
London School of Economics
n.bostrom@lse.ac.uk
http://www.hedweb.com/nickb
Received on Sun Apr 12 01:00:47 1998

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