Blog/2025-10-11/There Is A Tide In The Affairs Of Men
There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at its flood, leads on to sustainable 1.9% year on year GDP growth. The Dallas Fed has released a little article arguing that AI advances will lead to an increase in human productivity and living standards[1]. I am inclined to believe this is the case. While at its initial inception, the technology could have gone anywhere the possibilities have annealed and it's likely that it will be an improvement in human productivity on the scale of The Internet, and perhaps exceeding The Smartphone.
Paradigm Shifts are Boring Progress[edit]
I'm sure people will consider this AI scepticism, but I think otherwise. An oft repeated aphorism is that success comes from consistent repeated effort, from Aristotle's "moral virtue comes about as a result of habit"[2] to every other LinkedIn blogpost about how some businessman's success comes entirely from his habit of "showing up every day". The latter category of example often describes how "all you have to do" is show up every day or something of the sort, but perhaps at a civilizational level that is actually exceptional. Civilizations have grown and fallen (like Rome), or been domesticated by a successor (as Britain has been by America), but none have truly endured continuous success. And perhaps the reason for this is that "showing up every day" doesn't actually look like the plodding approach the LinkedIn posts take them to be. At a civilization level, showing up every day may actually look like the constant search for the thing that will provide the extra 30 basis points of growth: the semiconductor, the Internet, AI.
Failure Won't Look Catastrophic[edit]
The failure of this so-far maintained effort won't be a collective concrete agreement we all make. We may not simply choose to die out. We might simply choose to not better ourselves, believing falsely that we are at some optimum. Even today the most primal form of growth, reproduction, fails humanity. It turns out that "showing up every day" is something that Mankind as a whole cannot do[3]. Once we reach a certain amount of prosperity, the desire to propagate no longer dominates. This particular growth instinct is written into us and we've still failed to maintain it. The other kinds of growth will be harder still. Already we see opposition to them with reactionary and conservative positions dominating across the political spectrum in the shape of the degrowther[4].
Growth Requires Constant Work[edit]
Degrowther rhetoric often includes the notion of "growth forever is a cancer". There are many things that are wrong with it[5] but the far more important thing is that "growth forever" is really really hard and so we're about as likely to accident into it as girls who go to the gym are to accident into becoming Arnold.
So each of these things that seem like the "actual foom thing, this time for real, no, honestly" are not, in fact, foom things but more likely to be the very next step required for us to maintain our long-term average of 1.9% growth. Considering how many civilizations we have seen fail at this, and the fact that we are on the precipice of doing so ourselves, these will all take work. The Great Filter may well be the unwillingness of civilizations to "show up every day". If no one else has managed it, I hope Humanity will be the first.
Notes[edit]
- ↑ Wynne, Mark A.; Derr, Lillian (June 2025). "Advances in AI will boost productivity, living standards over time". Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Retrieved 11 October 2025.
- ↑ Aristotle. "Book II". Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Ross, W. D. Retrieved 2025-10-11.
- ↑ This failure is not even from the classic resource depletion problem in a logistic + overshoot model of rabbits in a pasture. We have so much!
- ↑ Some classic examples from the US political spectrum are: anti-housing/energy/infrastructure and anti-research. Housing opposition is straightforward across full Marxists (the DSA Denver protected a golf course over housing), Liberals (California in its entirety), and Conservatives (who believe that Those People Should Not Live Here) though the last do so least of all. Energy and infrastructure opposition was once the preserve of the Left (on 'environmentalist' grounds far removed from reality) though political waves have made Right-Wing activists the peak enemies of solar power and the like. Neither side wants infrastructure in the form of ship-building. As for research, everyone seems to oppose the kind of genomic research that enabled me to select an embryo that would be more likely to yield a healthy child.
- ↑ Chief among the fact being that we're nowhere near Earth's carrying capacity, so whatever this finite limit is, we're not close to it.
