A good rebuttal. However it rests on an assumption because broad based stagnation did occur during the Industrial Revolution. www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/users/Alle

A good rebuttal. However it rests on an assumption because broad based stagnation did occur during the Industrial Revolution. www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/users/Allen/unpublished/pessimism-6.pdf There was a period of about 50 years when wages didn't change and when countless cottage industries with skilled labour disappeared. The standard of living did not increase for most people at this time. Today this has been conveniently forgotten. The standard narrative that life improved for most people is only true if you examine economic history on a timescale of centuries. One question that comes to mind is: are you going to be alive when a technology such as biotech brings home the bacon? Eroom's Law suggests life longevity escape velocity (as hypothesized by Audrey with SENS) is very unlikely. In my former post there is a link to a youtube video made in 1969 by the Ford Corporation. Our grandparents expected a lot of substantive changes that have not yet occurred. I consider those reasonable projections still. I would like most of us put them conservatively at 50 years hence. Yet that would imply it took a century from our grandparent's original projections. I make the claim that it is perfectly possible we won't have any significant results from biotechnology for hundreds of years. Furthermore it is not crazy to speculate that if we enter a long term stagnation there is the possibility we enter a new dark age. This is not taken seriously by most men of intelligence today, and I consider that highly unfortunate because it too, is a genuine possibility, an outlier that becomes more likely with each year of broad stagnation that passes. I would like to remind the reader that by some metrics our production levels only exceeded that of the Roman Empire in the 18th century. That is 1000 years later. tldr; More of us should be more worried. There should be far more urgency about innovation than there is today.