Futurism Is Always Extreme

Any rigorous thinking about the long-term future leads to extreme outcomes. It cannot, by construction, produce normal or mundane futures. “Rigorous thinking” means you have a model: a formalism for representing the state of the world, and a transition function to advance the state. You put the world into the formalism, and turn the crank to get successive states of the world. Models can be qualitative or quantitative. Most thinking about the future is qualitative and informal: people think in terms of trends over vague qualities like “intelligence”. For example, your model might be: Currently, humans are smarter than computers. Computers are getting smarter faster than humans are getting smarter. From this, you can derive: At some point in the future, computers will match human intelligence, and thereafter exceed it. In the limit, and given reasonable assumptions about at the physics of information processing, computers will vastly exceed human intelligence. But you can’t say when…