5 ms·
If you only look at the past it's nearly impossible to tell a sigmoid curve from an exponential.
by strken 3y ago
If you only look at the past it's nearly impossible to tell a sigmoid curve from an exponential.
- hallqv 3y agoWhy would we be approaching a plateau?
- MrPatan 3y agoEvery sigmoid not carrying me up is close to the plateau
- quickthrower2 3y agoI don’t think we are because the sun is still chucking out a shitload of low entropy energy, most of which we don’t use. So the curve steepness will depend on if we can figure out how to harness it. And we are working on brain augmentation already (AI).
- hallqv 3y agoI agree.
- ggm 3y agoThere are species which lie dormant for near prime years and then burst forth. Do you think from one visit by boat from Europe an explorer could know there are a million cicadas on the east coast? And, at the species level I'd argue boom-bust is a fine survival pattern, witness plagues of mice and locusts. Sigmoid or exponent to bust, doesn't have to mean life ends. Rome as a state existed for multiple tens of generations across plague and famine. 4 per century is normal, a thousand years is 40. Would anyone alive today be able to cast back 40 generations and say "life is hard" at scale? A thousand years ago we barely had discrete components let alone VLSI. Those monks were bespoke all day long. Machines had few moving parts. Radios weren't invented until the reformation, Linux came along in the age of enlightenment, and nuclear was invented by Victorian times? Wait.. wrong timeline.