alt Hacker NewsThe concept of the "end of the exponential" sounds like a tech version of Fukuyama's much mocked "End of History". Amodei seems to think we’ll solve all the "useful" problems and then hit a ceiling of utility.
But if you’ve read David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity, Amodei’s view looks like a mistake. Knowledge creation is unbounded. Solving diseases/coding shouldn't result in a plateau, but rather unlock totally new, "better" problems we can't even conceive of yet.
It's the begining of Inifinity, no end in sight!
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Not infinity. Only the path to make steady returns in a few short years. Take disease research. Pharmaceutical companies are not interested in curing disease. They would like to treat disease. That means recurring revenue. They would like to focus on the diseases with the most patients to maximize the market for their product. This is why a dozen plus pharma companies are pursuing glp1 while cutting internal r and d jobs and offshoring everything not specifically bolted to this country by the FDA to India.
This is what depressed me as an early career scientist. Money to do the work to advance our species is not being distributed. Only money to generate more money for a sliver of the ownership class is distributed.
The incentives are broken. We aren’t getting Star Trek in our future. We are getting CHOAM.
Haven't watched the video, but the end of exponential growth isn't the end of growth. It means the percentage growth per year decreases. The Internet also went through an exponential growth phase at the beginning.