I. The search for discontinuities

We’ve been looking for historic cases of discontinuously fast technological progress, to help with reasoning about the likelihood and consequences of abrupt progress in AI capabilities. We recently finished expanding this investigation to 37 technological trends.¹ This blog post is a quick update on our findings. See the main page on the research and its outgoing links for more details.

We found ten events in history that abruptly and clearly contributed more to progress on some technological metric than another century would have seen on the previous trend.² Or as we say, we found ten events that produced ‘large’, ‘robust’ ‘discontinuities’.

How we measure the size of a discontinuity *(by Rick Korzekwa)*

Another five events caused robust discontinuities of between ten and a hundred years (‘moderate robust discontinuities’). And 48 more events caused some trend to depart from our best guess linear or exponential extrapolation of its past progress by at least ten years (and often a hundred), but did so in the context of such unclear past trends that this did not seem clearly remarkable.³ I call all of these departures ‘discontinuities’, and distinguish those that are clearly outside plausible extrapolations of the past trend, according to my judgment, as ‘robust discontinuities’.⁴

Much of the data involved in this project seems at least somewhat unreliable, and the methods involve many judgments, and much ignoring of minor issues. So I would not be surprised if more effort could produce numerous small changes. However I expect the broad outlines to be correct.⁵

II. The discontinuities

Large robust discontinuities

Here is a quick list of the robust 100-year discontinuous events, which I’ll describe in more detail beneath:

The Pyramid of Djoser, 2650BC (discontinuity in structure height trends)
The SS Great Eastern, 1858 (discontinuity in ship size trends)
The first telegraph, 1858 (discontinuity in speed of sending a 140 character message across the Atlantic Ocean)
The second telegraph, 1866 (discontinuity in speed of sending a 140 character message across the Atlantic Ocean)
The Paris Gun, 1918 (discontinuity in altitude reached by man-made means)
The first non-stop transatlantic flight, in a modified WWI bomber, 1919 (discontinuity in both speed of passenger travel ac

...

Robert Vroman

Robert Vroman