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We already live in the sci-fi future
A popular meme draws world GDP over time as a line that shoots up at the very end. A speech bubble points at the tip of the graph: my life is pretty normal, and people thinking about AI and space travel are engaged in silly sci-fi speculation.
For about 3,000 years, most people were farmers who lived hard lives and died. A few elites taxed the farmers and lived nicely in fancy cloth. Nothing suggested that would ever change. Now ordinary people drive cars around, fly in planes, and talk to each other on phones, all of it outside what people in the past could imagine. A future with AI would be more of the same kind of change.
Why did living standards stay flat for millennia?
Economic historians describe a Malthusian trap: when output rose, populations grew to match, which pushed incomes back down. Gregory Clark argued in A Farewell to Alms, published in 2007, that living standards across most of recorded history before 1800 stayed roughly level.
How slowly did electricity reach ordinary homes?
Electric power was spreading through cities by the early 1900s, yet roughly nine in ten American farms still had none in the early 1930s. The US Rural Electrification Administration, founded in 1935, financed power lines to the countryside. By the early 1950s most American farms were connected.
Why did growth take off around 1800?
Explanations include a rise in scientific and engineering knowledge, coal and steam power, and institutions that protected property and rewarded invention. Historians still debate the weight of each. Angus Maddison's historical estimates show Western European income per person rising steadily from about 1820.
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