Why the Industrial Revolution Is a Bad Precedent for AI-Driven 10x Growth
Is the Industrial Revolution a good precedent for explosive growth today?
A common argument for explosive AI-driven growth cites the Industrial Revolution, when UK per-capita GDP growth accelerated ~15x. But this post shows that 10x-above-average growth was already common in pre-industrial Britain, occurring in ~46% of years, while today such acceleration is vanishingly rare. Using standard-deviation analysis, the author argues an IR-style acceleration would lift frontier growth to only ~2.8% per year—not the 20%+ often claimed. The strongest analogue is early industrializers like South Korea, not today's frontier economies.
A person living in the 1700s would have been asked to envision good years becoming much more common—a rate they had already experienced many times. A person today is being asked to envision a qualitatively different kind of economic dynamics, one that falls several standard deviations outside norm for the world today.