Economics Nobel Prize Winner Sees No Singularity on the Horizon

The two economists who today were awarded the Nobel Prize have both written extensively on the role that technology plays in economic growth, and one of them has even investigated what enthusiasts in Silicon Valley call the Singularity. We called it "the rapture of the geeks" in our special issue on the topic 10 years ago, because it envisages not merely an explosive increase in computational prowess that would greatly increase economic output but also the uploading of human minds into a kind of cosmic cloud. Thus embodied, our intellects would expand and our life spans would become godlike. That's heady stuff for an engineering culture that still can't get a smartphone battery to last all day. Of the two winners of what is technically known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, William Nordhaus was honored for research in environmental economics and Paul Romer for his work on economic growth. But though the Singularity is the ultimate in economic growth, it was Nordhaus who tackled it (although "in this area his work intersects with Romer's quite closely," writes economist Tyler Cowen, in a blog post this morning).