Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Discontinuous progress in history: an update, published by KatjaGrace on LessWrong. I. The search for discontinuities We’ve been looking for historic cases of discontinuously fast technological progress, to help with reasoning about the likelihood and consequences of abrupt progress in AI capabilities. We recently finished expanding this investigation to 37 technological trends.1 This blog post is a quick update on our findings. See the main page on the research and its outgoing links for more details. We found ten events in history that abruptly and clearly contributed more to progress on some technological metric than another century would have seen on the previous trend.2 Or as we say, we found ten events that produced ‘large’, ‘robust’ ‘discontinuities’. How we measure the size of a discontinuity (by Rick Korzekwa) Another five events caused robust discontinuities of between ten and a hundred years (‘moderate robust discontinuities’). And 48 more events caused some trend to depart from our best guess linear or exponential extrapolation of its past progress by at least ten years (and often a hundred), but did so in the context of such unclear past trends that this did not seem clearly remarkable.3 I call all of these departures ‘discontinuities’, and distinguish those that are clearly outside plausible extrapolations of the past trend, according to my judgment, as ‘robust discontinuities’.4 Much of the data involved in this project seems at least somewhat unreliable, and the methods involve many judgments, and much ignoring of minor issues. So I would not be surprised if more effort could produce numerous small changes. However I expect the broad outlines to be correct.5 II. The discontinuities Large robust discontinuities Here is a quick list of the robust 100-year discontinuous events, which I’ll describe in more detail beneath: The Pyramid of Djoser, 2650BC (discontinuity in structure height trends) The SS Great Eastern, 1858 (discontinuity in ship size trends) The first telegraph, 1858 (discontinuity in speed of sending a 140 character message across the Atlantic Ocean) The second telegraph, 1866 (discontinuity in speed of sending a 140 character message across the Atlantic Ocean) The Paris Gun, 1918 (discontinuity in altitude reached by man-made means) The first non-stop transatlantic flight, in a modified WWI bomber, 1919 (discontinuity in both speed of passenger travel across the Atlantic Ocean and speed of military payload travel across the Atlantic Ocean) The George Washington Bridge, 1931 (discontinuity in longest bridge span) The first nuclear weapons, 1945 (discontinuity in relative effectiveness of explosives) The first ICBM, 1958 (discontinuity in average speed of military payload crossing the Atlantic Ocean) YBa2Cu3O7 as a superconductor, 1987 (discontinuity in warmest temperature of superconduction) The Pyramid of Djoser, 2650BC Discontinuity in structure height trends6 The Pyramid of Djoser is considered to be ‘the earliest colossal stone structure’ in Egypt. According to Wikipedia’s data, it took seven thousand years for the tallest structures to go from five to thirteen meters tall7 and then suddenly the Egyptian pyramids shot up to a height of 146.5m over about a hundred years and five successively tallest pyramids. The Pyramid of Djoser, By Charles J Sharp – Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link The first of these five is the Pyramid of Djoser, standing 62.5m tall. The second one—Meidum Pyramid—is also a large discontinuity in structure height trends by our calculation, but I judge it not robust, since it is fairly unclear what the continuation of the trend should be after the first discontinuity. As is common, the more basic thing going on seems to be a change in the growth rate, and the discontinuity of the P...