AI growth looks more like civilization's rise than any recent technology

From the conversation

But I think the closest analogy is actually the long run growth of human civilization itself and I know you had Holden Karnofsky from the open philanthropy project on earlier and discuss some of this research about the long run acceleration of human population and economic growth. Developing new technologies allowed the human population to expand and humans to occupy new habitats and new areas and then to invent agriculture to support the larger populations and then even more advanced agriculture in the modern industrial society. So there, the total technology and output allowed you to support more humans who then would discover more technology and continue the process. Now that was boosted because on top of expanding the population the share of human activity that was going into invention and innovation went up and that was a key part of the industrial revolution. There was no such thing as a corporate research lab or an engineering university prior to that. So you're both increasing the total human population and the share of it going in. But this population dynamic is pretty analogous. Humans invent farming, they can have more humans, they can invent industry and so on. Maybe somebody would be skeptical that with AI progress specifically, it’s not just a matter of some farmer figuring out crop rotation or some blacksmith figuring out how to do metallurgy better.…