The last angel

Brother, there are so many logical errors in your thinking.

Number 1, as people keep saying: exponential growth is limited. Unlimited growth is slow and unsteady. There is literally nothing in the whole of creation that has grown exponentially and continued to do so. That is not how anything works. Even theoretically, scenarios like ‘the more energy it receives, the more it gives out, so one day this one steam engine will power the world!’ and ‘the more people buy these stocks, the more popular and expensive they will get, which will lead to more people wanting to buy them, making them more popular, so buy now while they’re still £1000 a pop!’ still keep fooling people who get caught on the ‘logic’ of exponential growth and dont see, understand or remember those boring facts we learned in school: What goes up must, and will come down Every action has an equal and opposite reaction Every force is restrained by at least two opposing forces There are no exceptions.

Literally every week, somewhere in the world someone is convinced that this time they (or their guru of choice) has found the exception, the line that can only go upwards, the perpetual energy machine, the product that everyone is going to want if they buy it now, and it has never ever been true because nothing is exponential unless one factors in the countless opposing forces and reactions and pressures that will come with extra growth.

And so far, we haven’t even managed to find a way of calculating that.

Don’t assume that Usain Bolt smashing the world records for speed (which themselves smashed the previous records, which smashed the people who said it was physically impossible for a human to run a mile in 4 minutes) means the next big thing is going to be running gear that protects the wearer from the as-yet-uncalculated cardiac effects of breaking the speed of light. He’s fast, but not ‘breaks the laws of physics before anybody has even calculated a way for that to happen’ fast, and it’s unlikely that his children or grandchildren - or anyone - will be.

Also: bro, even if it grew exponentially and kept doing so, we can’t pretend that means it’ll obviously go in these directions that aren’t a part of it or its development.

Human intelligence has increased as we’ve evolved, and the brain has grown with it. You can chart the growth of both over the millennia. Now that doesn’t mean you can just continue the line to see how intelligent humans will be in 1000 years, because of the exponential growth problem, but it also doesn’t mean the skull sizes of proto and early humans mean we will soon live forever.

See, even if past performance was a reliable indicator of future results (hahaha), projected growth does not, and never can, include chains of causation. That’s just fiction.

So yes, as humans get more intelligent and our brains get bigger we’ll probably continue to understand medicine and biology and tools and nutrition which will continue to improve brain health and wisdom, which will > increased intelligence and brain size, > better understanding of medicine and biology and tools and nutrition > continue to improve brain health and wisdom, etc.

And yes, we do not currently have the intelligence or understanding or technology to enable us to live forever.

But that doesn’t mean that increased intelligence or brain size, or better medicine or tech or tools or nutrition, logically lead to ‘discovery of the secret to eternal life’. Y can only follow X, but X does not lead to Y. And exponential growth of AI does not magically mean it gains the ability to do random things it couldn’t do before, for the same reason.

Does that make sense? It’s the same as ‘she’s a successful model but she couldn’t be a supermodel because she’s only 5’3".’ It does not follow that her gaining 6 inches logically makes her a supermodel.

Many domestic cats are vicious, deranged little fuckers, but they aren’t a threat to humanity because they’re too small and generally prefer to live with humans. Removing those limitations does not create a threat to humanity. An absurdly large domestic cat with an attitude problem would (probably) not end mankind, but would (maybe) make it onto a few TV shows and get a meme. And AI is not a threat to humanity because it can’t think or operate independently. Even if you removed those limitations, it would no more spell the inevitable dominance of fascism (odd endpoint you chose there but hey ho) than a gigantic tabby cat who didn’t like his dinner. Because, again, logic doesn’t work like that.

TLDR: many thousands of people throughout history have got rich by convincing people to buy into Pot number 5 because obviously, 3 + 3 = 6 and as soon as the -1 happens, that’s where we’ll all be. The maths isn’t wrong. It’s the fact that the sums have nothing to do with reality, the future, or anything except the weird game of ‘Bet the Pot’ that nobody else is playing.