So just how cancelled is the singularity? To review: population growth increases technological growth, which feeds back into the population growth rate in a cycle that reaches infinity in finite time. But since population can’t grow infinitely fast, this pattern breaks off after a while. The Industrial Revolution tried hard to compensate for the “missing” population; it invented machines. Using machines, an individual could do an increasing amount of work. We can imagine making eg tractors as an attempt to increase the effective population faster than the human uterus can manage. It partly worked.

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