The Physical Constraints of Growth
And what AI futures overcome them
The Industrial Explosion
This post was inspired by this LessWrong piece about how an industrial explosion (a rapid increase in manufacturing capacity) would look like. TLDR the maximum speed would be a one time 10x increase in physical production from AI’s perfecting existing companies, an acceleration from robot autonomous factories doubling every 6 years, and the rate itself doubling (ie to 3 years) every 6-30 years. Finally an exponential almost biological growth from nanotechnology.
On the whole the premise of physical growth just strikes me as wrong. My thesis is:
output industrial minerals (copper, lithium, rare earths) etc cannot increase easily
plus as societies become more economically advanced, they are less likely to allow resource exploitation that damages the environment
therefore both the physical capacity to increase production of these resources will not be built in time for the early parts of the industrial explosion to take place
Instead, the physical …
