In the most important century blog post series, Open Philanthropy’s co-CEO Holden Karnofsky says that there are basically three potential future trajectories for civilization:

The world can't just keep growing at this rate indefinitely. We should be ready for other possibilities: stagnation (growth slows or ends), explosion (growth accelerates even more, before hitting its limits), and collapse (some disaster levels the economy).

There’s a fourth possibility worth taking seriously: the simmer scenario, where growth slows down, but stays consistent and significant for the foreseeable future.

Here, growth slows to 0.2 - 0.5% a year (from today’s 2% annual growth rate) for the duration of time we are stuck in the Milky Way (25,000 years). After that, we grow as fast as we can expand to other galaxies.

In this post, I will argue that:

The simmer scenario is plausible and worth taking seriously.

In the simmer scenario, lock-in becomes much less likely. Even if economic growth slows to 0.2%, lots of stuff is changing all the time, and no century ends up being especially important.

To be clear, I’m not defending the following claim:

The simmer scenario is more likely that explosion, stagnation, and collapse. Making this argument would require you to resolve a whole bunch of specific questions that are beyond the means of a single post - about AI’s arrival date and power, the amount of energy and compute we can extract from our solar system and galaxy, how fast we can expect innovation to occur in the future, and much more.

Billions of Years of Growth

Holden Karnofsky argues that this can’t go on:

Let's say the world economy is currently getting 2% bigger each year. This implies that the economy would be doubling in size about every 35 years.
If this holds up, then 8200 years from now, the economy would be about 3*10^70 times its current size.
There are likely fewer than 10^70 atoms in our galaxy, which we would not be able to travel beyond within the 8200-year time frame.
So if the economy were 3*10^70 times as big as today's, and could only make use of 10^70 (or fewer) atoms, we'd need to be sustaining multiple economies as big as today's entire world economy per atom.

I agree with Holden that 2% growth for the next 8,200 seems unfeasibly high. But one of compound growth’s most counterintuitive features is that small changes in the growt...

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