Some background for last week's post, "Professor Nordhaus: "Are We Approaching an Economic Singularity? Information Technology and the Future of Economic Growth"" wherein the good professor thinks that, as of 2021, throwing artificial intelligence into the mix will bring us to those Churchillian "Broad sunlit uplands," just three years earlier he thought western economies were stuck, possibly game over.
From IEEE Spectrum, October 8, 2018:
Economics Nobel Prize Winner Sees No Singularity on the Horizon
William Nordhaus looked for leading indicators of a Singularity back in 2015 but couldn't find any
The two economists who today were awarded the Nobel Prize have both written extensively on the role that technology plays in economic growth, and one of them has even investigated what enthusiasts in Silicon Valley call the Singularity.
We called it “the rapture of the geeks” in our special issue on the topic 10 years ago, because it envisages not merely an explosive increase in computational prowess that would greatly increase economic output but also the uploading of human minds into a kind of cosmic cloud. Thus embodied, our intellects would expand and our life spans would become godlike. That’s heady stuff for an engineering culture that still can’t get a smartphone battery to last all day.
Of the two winners of what is technically known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, William Nordhaus was honored for research in environmental economics and Paul Romer for his work on economic growth. But though the Singularity is the ultimate in economic growth, it was Nordhaus who tackled it (although “in this area his work intersects with Romer’s quite closely,” writes economist Tyler Cowen, in a blog post this morning).
In a 2015 paper, Nordhaus reasoned that the Singularity would be necessarily preceded by ever greater technological progress that would accelerate the replacement of human labor by automation. More work would be accomplished with less labor, so the level of productivity would rise. But in actual fact, he noted, productivity has been in the doldrums for a long time, and there seems to be no systematic rise in unemployment....
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Are We Approaching an Economic Singularity? Information Technology and the Future of Economic Growth
Before he was awarded his own Nobel Prize I used to point out* that a bunch of his co-authors on various papers had picked up a tchotchke or two.
He's another of the Cowles Foundation worker bees who, along with the current overseer of the Foundation, Professor Shiller is among the dozen or so Cowles economists** who have received the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, thus keeping them close to the University of Chicago on the leader board....
