“To review: population growth increases technological growth, which feeds back into the population growth rate in a cycle that reaches infinity in finite time.

But since population can’t grow infinitely fast, this pattern breaks off after a while.

The Industrial Revolution tried hard to compensate for the “missing” population; it invented machines. [… But …] tractors can’t invent things.

[…]

AI potentially offers a way to convert money into researchers. Money = build more AIs = more research.

If this were true, then once AI comes around – even if it isn’t much smarter than humans – then as long as the computational power you can invest into researching a given field increases with the amount of money you have, hyperbolic growth is back on.”