Combinatorial Innovation and Technological Progress in the Very Long Run

technology that’s more productive than the current best gets explosively harder over time. However, the range of options we have also grows explosively, and the two offset each other such that we end up with constant exponential technological progress. Which is a pretty close approximation to what we’ve observed over the last 100 years! (View Highlight)

If we were to take that as our measure of the number of possible combinations, then we’re talking about 10^45,181 possible combinations of technology. If you took every atom in the universe and stuffed another universe worth of atoms inside each atoms, and then did that again with every one of those new atoms, and then repeated that process in a nesting structure 500 levels deep, you would be getting in the ballpark of how many combinations there are to consider. Seems challenging? (View Highlight)