“Now look at the data for world product over the past 7,000 years, estimated by Bradford DeLong, an economic historian at the University of California, Berkeley. The data here tell a somewhat different story. For most of that time, growth proceeded at a relatively steady exponential rate, with a doubling of output about every 900 years. But within the past few centuries, something dramatic happened: output began doubling faster and faster, approaching a new steady doubling time of about 15 years. That’s about 60 times as fast as it had been in the previous seven millennia.
We call this transition the Industrial Revolution, but that does not mean we understand it well or even know precisely how and why it arose. But whatever the Industrial Revolution was, clearly it was an event worthy of the name “singularity.”
If we look further back, we see what appears to be at least one previous singularity—the transition to an economy based on agriculture. And slow as economic growth during the agricultural era may seem in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, it was actually lightning fast compared with that of the economic era that came before, which was based on hunting and gathering.
In the roughly 2 million years our ancestors lived as hunters and gatherers, the population rose from about 10 000 protohumans to about 4 million modern humans. If, as we believe, the growth pattern during this era was fairly steady, then the population must have doubled about every quarter million years, on average. Then, beginning about 10 000 years ago, a few of those 4 million humans began to settle down and live as farmers. The resulting communities grew so fast that they quickly accounted for most of the world population. From that time on, the farming population doubled about every 900 years—some 250 times as fast as before.”
Lees het complete artikel hier.
