ARNOLD KLING
August 14, 2011
The Top Political Contributors
August 11, 2011
Gender and the New Commanding Heights
August 11, 2011
Jamie Galbraith Makes an Assumption
August 11, 2011
Macroeconometrics: The Science of Hubris
August 10, 2011
Real and Nominal Bond Yields
BRYAN CAPLAN
August 14, 2011
The Effect of Thumb Sucking on Income
August 12, 2011
The Voice of Cold, Hard Truth to All Would-Be Educators
August 12, 2011
Ability, Morality, and Prosperity: A Paper and a Report
August 11, 2011
The Theory of Time and Frittering
August 10, 2011
Male Variance and the Remnants of the Gender Gap
DAVID HENDERSON
August 9, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken", Part Two
August 8, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken"
August 5, 2011
James Bovard on the Peace Corps
August 4, 2011
Summers Way Off on FDR and 1941
August 3, 2011
The "Amazon" Tax


An excellent talk. One of the things I think Hanson should have mentioned earlier was the fact that early agriculturalists seem to have been poorer (shorter/more malnourished, etc) than hunter-gatherers, which demonstrates that a step "forward" can lead to actual declines in standard of living, by making reproduction faster.
I listened to an hour or so. I'm not sure who invented the Singularity concept, Hanson or Kurzweil or perhaps a group of people, but I find Kurzweil's coverage more thorough and insightful.
If there is a difference, Hanson emphasizes the economic aspects (growth rate, employment) over the technology - whereas Kurzweil pursues the intersection of ultra-cheap computation, self-replicating nanotech, and biotech. E.g. nanotech blood corpuscles, nano-scale brain scans, brain wetware 'rehosted' on silicon running a million times faster, solving the speed of light problem, thermal limits to computation, and so-on.