Self-recommending, until I get the 90 minutes to listen. I have heard Robin talk on this subject, and he is fascinating.
Self-recommending, until I get the 90 minutes to listen. I have heard Robin talk on this subject, and he is fascinating.
Jan 3 2011
There has been much discussion of late of a code of ethics for economists, with a focus on disclosing personal interests. I would go in a different direction. My code of ethics would consist of one line: Take into account the possibility that you may be wrong. If that one-line code of ethics becomes popular, call ...
Jan 3 2011
Social Security is widely believed to protect its recipients from inflation because benefits are indexed to the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W). However, the CPI-W may not accurately reflect the experience of retirees for two reasons. First, retirees generally have higher medica...
Jan 3 2011
Self-recommending, until I get the 90 minutes to listen. I have heard Robin talk on this subject, and he is fascinating.
READER COMMENTS
fructose
Jan 4 2011 at 2:43am
An excellent talk. One of the things I think Hanson should have mentioned earlier was the fact that early agriculturalists seem to have been poorer (shorter/more malnourished, etc) than hunter-gatherers, which demonstrates that a step “forward” can lead to actual declines in standard of living, by making reproduction faster.
Jeremy, Alabama
Jan 4 2011 at 2:47pm
I listened to an hour or so. I’m not sure who invented the Singularity concept, Hanson or Kurzweil or perhaps a group of people, but I find Kurzweil’s coverage more thorough and insightful.
If there is a difference, Hanson emphasizes the economic aspects (growth rate, employment) over the technology – whereas Kurzweil pursues the intersection of ultra-cheap computation, self-replicating nanotech, and biotech. E.g. nanotech blood corpuscles, nano-scale brain scans, brain wetware ‘rehosted’ on silicon running a million times faster, solving the speed of light problem, thermal limits to computation, and so-on.
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