michael_nielsen

Nothing intrinsically wrong with this. But we're at a time in history where the socially beneficial act isn't driving down operating costs while maintaining revenue. It's producing marvellous new tools, increasing access, etc. Current market structure isn't supporting this well

Brokenness 3: The lack of growth models for the best new ideas. An example is the arXiv preprint server. It's one of humanity's great achievements of the past 30 years. Just in economic terms, over the long run it will generate trillions of dollars in social utility for humanity

Remember seeing this tweet a few months ago and it just popped back into my head. Pretty interested - how sure are you it’ll be trillions?

Sure? It depends on the exact meaning of the statement - one could formalize it in different ways. But in what seem the most reasonable interpretation it seems extremely likely.

Put the preprint server in 1800 and ask what effect it would have on the development of electromagnetism. It's quite plausible it speeds up the development of entire industries by many years. So just that one instance can plausibly be associated with ~ 10^9 dollars, IMO.

And, of course, EM is far from the only example one could use. The most likely rebuttal seems like an argument that the preprint server actually slows things down. Which is sorta fun to argue for.

I think I might back off "extremely likely" and just go for "likely".

In specifics, I can't imagine a reasonable calculation in which the role of the preprint server for this paper https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9707021 … isn't many billions of dollars. My best model would place it much higher.