Robin Hanson says,

We’ve seen many, many decades of steady progress in automation. We’ve seen what the rate looks like. We’ve seen that it’s slow, methodical; it takes time to slowly chip away at the kinds of jobs humans do and get machines to do that. We’re not on any sort of sudden threshold where suddenly a vast flood’s coming over the gates. We are slowly chipping away and we’ll continue to slowly chip away

It is an interesting discussion throughout. Robin is arguing that even though computers may be getting smarter exponentially, their economic effects are merely linear. Maybe. But a long S-curve can look like a straight line for quite a while when you are near the bottom, but then the curvature starts to matter.

The title of this post comes from an e-book that is on my list of things to read.