Before any other readers post another comment about “overpopulation” and doomsday scenarios, I suggest they take a look at my colleague Donald McNeil’s excellent article on Malthusian mistakes. As he notes, the current forecasts of energy and food disasters sound just like the ones made during the 1970s. Similar apocalyptic forecasts were made in the 1940s (in books like “Our Plundered Planet”) and in other eras by prophets following in Malthus’ tradition.

These prophets have always claimed to be seeing the big picture, but they ignore thousands of years of history during which the prices of natural resources fell and the wellbeing of humans improved. Yes, there were sometimes shortages; yes, there were plagues and wars and natural disasters. But while empires came and went, humans overcame problems and gradually improved their lot.

You can see this trend nicely in an an article by Robin Hanson in the IEEE Spectrum’s special issue on the Singularity. Dr. Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, takes a long look at economic history and sees fairly steady growth punctuated by two “economic singularities”–the invention of agriculture and the Industrial Revolution–that caused dramatic accelerations in growth.

Dr. Hanson extrapolates from these trends to suggest that we’re due for another economic singularity sometime between now and 2075. He writes:

If a new transition were to show the same pattern as the past two, then growth would quickly speed up by between 60‑ and 250-fold. The world economy, which now doubles in 15 years or so, would soon double in somewhere from a week to a month. If the new transition were as gradual (in power-law terms) as the Industrial Revolution was, then within three years of a noticeable departure from typical fluctuations, it would begin to double annually, and within two more years, it might grow a million-fold. If the new transition were as rapid as the agricultural revolution seems to have been, change would be even more sudden. . . . What innovation could possibly induce so fabulous a speedup in economic growth? It is easier to say what could not. Because of diminishing returns, no change that improved just one small sector of the economy could do the trick. In advanced countries today, farming, mining, energy, communications, transportation, and construction each account for only a small percentage of economic activity. Even so extraordinary an innovation as radical nanotechnology would do no more than dramatically lower the cost of capital for manufacturing, which now makes up less than 10 percent of U.S. GDP. No, the next radical jump in economic growth seems more likely to come from something that has a profound effect on everything, because it addresses the one permanent shortage in our entire economy: human time and attention. They are by far the most productive components of today’s economy.

The innovation he’s envisioning, of course, is the rise of intelligent machines (or humans with artificially enhanced brains) capable of being far more productive than today’s humans. Dr. Hanson has some interesting notions of what kind of society might evolve — and it’s hardly a utopia. But it’s certainly nothing like the Malthusian visions of humans running out of energy and food.

Now, you could argue that his projections of artificial intelligence are as speculative and unprecedented as the Malthusian visions of resource depletion. But I’d bet on him over the Malthusians. Unlike Malthus, we can look around and see that we already have the energy and technology to feed a larger population than exists on Earth today. And we can look at Ray Kurzweil’s graphs showing exponential growth in computing power for more than a century, with no apparent end in sight.

Whom you would bet on: the Malthusians or the Singularitarians?