Exponential growth and Humans
Samuel W. Safahi
Humans aren’t designed to do one task, and one task well, over prolong periods of time. They’re designed to be able to adapt quickly to their circumstance and surroundings, which involves learning — potentially at a rapid pace — and being creative. Creative enough to survive. The aforementioned skills aided our ancestors greatly in overcoming the numerous obstacles that plagued them during their lifespans, and the ability to learn, specifically the passing down of knowledge from one generation to another in various forms, led to the exponential rise of civilization. In a few thousand years, what was once nothing became all encompassing.
As mentioned above, the reason for this sudden advancement can be largely attributed to the harnessing of the power offered by exponential growth.
Exponential growth can be viewed as the effect of compound growth over a long period of time. Your initial sum is added to by the amount of increase in terms of percent (%), resulting in the ending sum, which is in turn again added to by the amount of increase in terms of %. However, this time the addition is greater than before as the sum being added to is larger due to the previous addition. This cycle loops over and over, and is referred to as compounding, the building block of one of the (unofficial) wonders of the world: exponential growth. In common places we use this power and may not even realize it, such as in finance, where it’s generally well known that compounding your investment, such as with DRIP, creates exponential returns. How humans achieved the ability to harness this power will be detailed below. With this harnessed power humans went from habitating caves, to walking on the moon. All within a timeframe those in the past could never have predicted.
What most researchers and developers, often employed at major tech companies, try adamantly to create now is something similar to that; a robot or a program that is capable of exponential growth, of replicating a humans greatest attributes but without it’s flaws. A crucial aspect of achieving this revolves around the ability (or lack thereof) in making errors, faults, or mistakes. If one isn’t capable of making mistakes, one cannot effectively learn from it, and growth is greatly stifled.
Humans taught, and still do, their children what they had learned, saving time for future generations and allowing them to build on what had already been built. Over time and many generations this led to increases in the progression of growth of humanity. As the human mind isn’t capable of fathoming the power of exponential growth in its full, the progress attained today couldn’t have been pictured by those in the past. Tools were created which allowed for faster and more efficient construction, testing, deployment, and research. Mistakes that were made in the previous generations were studied and learned from, and continuously built upon. Centuries of what could be described as “trial and error” provided ample data and lessons for those who would follow in the future. Add time to the previous equation, and soon civilization had reached the industrial age; Great factories were billowing plumes of smoke and ash into the air, churning out innovative machines capable of leading humanity to new heights; and further still increasing efficiency, productivity, and fueling new innovations.
As you most likely have gathered, all of these advancements which made life and work easier for many, and yet still allowed for an increase in production, resulted in a chart similar to the one showed here. The results were spectacular, and of which we can see today everywhere we look; from mile high skyscrapers, to advanced computing technology. The rate of progression is still ever increasing, continuously compounding on itself.
During the industrial age these factories were a system, created by and composed of people, themselves a smaller system. What they had done, as millions of their predecessors had done for centuries beforehand (in various applications — societal is an example), was collected and organized themselves to form a new and larger system. In this case, the created system had different motives, aligned with producing profits and resources for the manager of the system, in charge of all of the moving parts associated with the organism. Like a human system, this one allocates resources towards a centralized organ “the brain”, in this case “the CEO”, in exchange for an increased chance of survival, reproduction, and prosperity. Note that reproduction in a corporate system can mean many things, simplest would be expansion into new markets, development of pioneering products, and key acquisitions that expand the company. These early humans “workers” initially had low productivity and their output was quite low compared to their required inputs. They were treated very poorly (paid a relatively low amount, nothing depending on the timeframe), had virtually no purchasing power, a low quality of life (possessing a few pieces of clothing, eating bread and potatoes, etc) and so on.
However, this soon began to change. As mentioned earlier the advancement of new technologies that enabled humans to achieve more with less led to gradual, then exponential increases in productivity, development, and research. If we were to extrapolate this across the human timeline, notable milestones for this would include: Discovering and harnessing the use of fire, creating tools such as the hammer which in turn would be use to build, and developing complex societal structures to effectively manage and organize labor and resources. I could go on, but the list would be nearly endless and continues to this day. I may sound like a broken record, but these discoveries and creations were passed on and built upon by others, a process that kept repeating itself. It’s important to understand that these are human made improvements that directly enabled humans to achieve more.
Overall, (and I’m sure you know this by now) this meant fewer people were needed to produce more things. Subsequently the overall quality of human life began to improve at a very rapid pace. This process continues to this day, where humans are increasingly found being replaced by robots and artificial intelligence systems that they themselves created in part or wholly. This replacement could mark, as some call it, the Exponential Age. This is where things go from fast to ludicrous. Really ludicrous.
Removing humans from the equation of production in exchange for the aforementioned systems results in an increase of production never seen before in human history. The effects will be/are gradual at first, hardly noticeable by most. Overtime, as exponential growth begins it’s upwards trajectory (picks up steam), more people will see it and begin to recognize it’s path and speculate on its course. This will still be a very small percent of the population. By the time most see it, it will have already consumed and altered nearly every aspect of their life in ways no one, including myself, could have imagined or foreseen.
This of course is very dependent on wether the researchers and developers mentioned earlier are able to successfully create a program or system (series of programs working together) that is capable of replicating the unique and special abilities humans possess. Specifically: A desire or some sense of curiosity, making (and learning from) mistakes, and teaching itself at least in part from these mistakes. If they succeed, the subsequent effect on humanity and its future would be enormous. Many strongly believe that they will, indeed, eventually succeed.
This passage began by stating the obvious, that humans aren’t very good at doing one task and doing it very well over continuous periods of time. Placing the same part on the same conveyor belt over and over again, day after day, month after month, for years — even decades sometimes — leads to the degradation of the human and a very substandard quality of life. Not to mention how inefficient and expensive it would be, allocating an invaluable human life to a task as simple as this. These and numerous other similar tasks were replaced or are currently being replaced by automation and robots. These are low hanging fruit. It’s quite simple for humans today to automate repetitive, simple, and non-cognitive based tasks. Those that don’t need the advanced concepts of society and ethics that humans possess (created even), the capacity to learn or improve, and that require nothing more and nothing less than a consistent output for every input. The next major milestone is the one outlined above. As the need for ever increasing efficiency and productivity (demanded and fueled by human curiosity and desire for more) necessitates, it’s only natural for it to be prioritized with much vigor. Particularly by major technology companies such as Google, Microsoft, Tesla, and Nvidia.
There will become a time when humans for the most part do not need to work, as the cost of goods produced by machines reaches prices incredibly low and most everyday tasks are automated. Most likely a universal basic income will be established (UBI), and people will spend more time on the arts and leisure. Work will be a choice.
I believe one can see the start of this in the economy today, especially in the equities markets. Stocks are are at an all time high, yet are still setting new records seemingly every other day. We may have periods where bouts of extreme inflation pop up, as we do today, but this will indeed likely be transitory. Jerome Powell, head of the federal reserve, is well known for echoing statements similar to this. His degree of conviction in this belief is unknown, but perhaps he can see what some others such as Cathie Wood at ARKK do. Personally, my thought on the matter is similar to his and others, this is transitory inflation. I didn’t always believe this though. In June of 2021, I thought that the policies enacted by President Biden and congress, among others, would lead to a disastrous level of inflation that would all but destroy the lower class or anyone that didn’t hold assets, and while today I can witness this as somewhat true, I also see that I was probably wrong, at least on the effects this inflation would have and what would come next. Elaborating on this subject would be a whole separate matter and involve composing many more pages, so I’ll leave it for another time, but in short I would hazard a guess that what will follow this inflationary spout we all are witnessing today is a deflationary bust followed by a deflationary boom. The same prediction commonly heard from Cathie Wood. The bottlenecks in the supply chain will rectify, innovation will render countless goods and services currently offered today by major indebted corporations unnecessary, or unwanted. The huge stockpiles they’ve amassed will quickly be on the way out and they will, fueled by need to service their debt, lower prices before they become worthless entirely from the unstoppable march of innovation.
I cannot ascertain a timeframe, or make any concrete assumptions. I also would like to say that none of this is intended as financial advice in any way, shape, or form. I assume everything I wrote is wrong, I’m just trying to be less wrong. What I can say however, is that the new few years of humanity will be some of the greatest ever, filled with the curing of major ailments and diseases, the lifting of millions — billions even — out of poverty, and major and exciting new developments at the frontiers of humanity, space. The pioneers today will be the leaders of tomorrow.
