We can say very little about the long-run outlook of technological change, and even less about the exact form such change might take. But a certain class of models of innovation - models of combinatorial innovation - does provide some insight about how technological progress may look over very long time frames. Let’s have a look.
This podcast is an audio read through of the (initial version of the) article Combinatorial Innovation and Progress in the Very Long Run, published on New Things Under the Sun.
Articles mentioned:
Weitzman, Martin L. 1998. Recombinant Growth. Quarterly Journal of Economics 113(2): 331-360. https://doi.org/10.1162/003355398555595
Koppl, Roger, Abigail Devereaux, James Herriot, and Stuart Kauffman. 2019. The Industrial Revolution as a Combinatorial Explosion. Working paper. (Earlier version - arXiv:1811.04502)
Jones, Charles. 2021. Recipes and Economic Growth: A Combinatorial March Down an Exponential Tail. NBER Working Paper 28340. https://doi.org/10.3386/w28340
Poincaré, Henri. 1910. Mathematical Creation. The Monist 321-335. https://doi.org/10.1093/monist/20.3.321
Agrawal, Ajay, John McHale, and Alex Oettl. 2019. Finding Needles in Haystacks: Artificial Intelligence and Recombinant Growth. Chapter in The Economics of Artificial Intelligence, eds. Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pgs. 149-174. https://doi.org/10.7208/9780226613475-007