It could seem fanciful to suppose that the world could be radically transformed and humanity deposed from its position as apex cogitator over the course of an hour or two. No change of such moment has ever occurred in human history, and its nearest parallels—the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions—played out over much longer timescales (centuries to millennia in the former case, decades to centuries in the latter). So the base rate for the kind of transition entailed by a fast or medium takeoff scenario, in terms of the speed and magnitude of the postulated change, is zero: it lacks
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