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Information technology is an exception. Nothing in the world improves at that rate. It also doesn’t do much to satisfy our material needs for things like housin

Information technology is an exception. Nothing in the world improves at that rate. It also doesn’t do much to satisfy our material needs for things like housing, food and basic transportation. The effects of the computer on economic output are far smaller than electricity or the industrial revolution. You can make your car more fuel efficient but there cannot be a car that doesn’t use fuel. There are physical limits to efficiency and how much work can be extracted. Efficient isn’t infinite. We need to scale current high living standards 10x from 1.5 billion to 10 billion while having no discernible impact on the biosphere. Already 70 % of ice free land is shaped by humans for crops or grazing. Inspite of all this a billion people still living in crippling poverty often going hungry. The scale of the problem is seriously under estimated.

teruakohatu 6y ago
> Nothing in the world improves at that rate. This is a bit of a no true scotsman argument. Everything is improving. Look at the past 100 years. Agricultural output has been skyrocketing. Transport of people are cargo has become vastly more efficient, cheaper and safer. Healthcare is barley recognisable today than it did 100 years ago. Look at solar compared to 20 years ago. And while you discount IT, it has had a huge improvement on every single industry.
- thewarrior 6y ago
  It has skyrocketed because of increasing availability of energy. Energy is a conserved physical quantity. Hydrocarbons are basically a giant magic solar battery that was charged over tens of millions of years. We’re basically charging that down to zero in a few centuries like there’s no tommorow. It doesn’t take much energy to extract this energy. In the case of solar or nuclear it takes a lot more energy to extract it safely and at scale. You can read about the EROEI of shale, solar etc vs oil. We have fought against it using efficiency but efficiency too has limits. If we didn’t discover oil / coal none of these changes you mentioned would have happened. That there will be constant continuous and infinite improvement on a finite planet is far from clear. We can decline, or even go into stagnation for centuries until some major breakthrough. There was a time when progress was so quick that people assumed flying cars were around the corner and we would all be living in space like the Jetsons. Again energy costs come into play.
- tuatoru 6y ago
  > > Nothing in the world improves at that rate. > This is a bit of a no true scotsman argument. Everything is improving. Look at the past 100 years. No, it isn't. Computational efficiency has improved by more than 10 orders of magnitude since its inception (arbitrarily taken to be the early 1950s). Agricultural output: less than 1 OM. Transport efficiency: less than 3 OM. Healthcare: less than 1 OM. Solar (presumed PV; compared to electricity production from fossil fuels): less than 1 OM. Industrial gains from IT: the growth economist Robert Solow famously quipped "you can see computers everywhere except in the productivity statistics". That was a few decades ago, but we are still well short of 1 OM improvement. None of your examples comes within 8 orders of magnitude of the rate of improvement of computing efficiency since the 1950s. The comparison stands.
  - CryptoPunk 6y ago
    You don't need all industries to see 10 OM improvements to see a >8 OM improvement in total economic productivity. I imagine it's enough to improve how people coordinate resource usage by something like 10 OM to see that kind of improvement. Ride-sharing, house-sharing, computerized car-navigation, self-driving cars, online banking, online shopping, Wikipedia, online directories of product/service providers, etc are all existing or emerging technologies that didn't exist 30 years and massively increase how effectively people can collectively utilize existing resources.
rorykoehler 6y ago
Hunger is a logistics problem not a production one.
- thewarrior 6y ago
  That’s like saying that going to Mars is a logistics problem. Everything involves a logistics problem because it involves profitably using energy to move things around . There’s plenty of fresh water too it’s just a logistics problem of transporting it from Siberia to all over the earth. It’s simply not feasible. Energy is not cheap enough to transport food to everywhere it’s needed while also not taking enough away from anyone else by force. That means we need to live in much more efficient denser setups with mass transport to reduce logistics costs in general. It also means some redistribution of energy and hence wealth.
  - rorykoehler 6y ago
    Agree on your conclusion. Regarding the prior it's messy with local politics, warlords, NGOs, governments etc and if there was the unanimous will there would be no hunger. Food production is a solved problem.
- tuatoru 6y ago
  > Hunger is a logistics problem No, it's a political problem. Much harder to solve.

teruakohatu 6y ago

> Nothing in the world improves at that rate. This is a bit of a no true scotsman argument. Everything is improving. Look at the past 100 years. Agricultural output has been skyrocketing. Transport of people are cargo has become vastly more efficient, cheaper and safer. Healthcare is barley recognisable today than it did 100 years ago. Look at solar compared to 20 years ago. And while you discount IT, it has had a huge improvement on every single industry.

thewarrior 6y ago
It has skyrocketed because of increasing availability of energy. Energy is a conserved physical quantity. Hydrocarbons are basically a giant magic solar battery that was charged over tens of millions of years. We’re basically charging that down to zero in a few centuries like there’s no tommorow. It doesn’t take much energy to extract this energy. In the case of solar or nuclear it takes a lot more energy to extract it safely and at scale. You can read about the EROEI of shale, solar etc vs oil. We have fought against it using efficiency but efficiency too has limits. If we didn’t discover oil / coal none of these changes you mentioned would have happened. That there will be constant continuous and infinite improvement on a finite planet is far from clear. We can decline, or even go into stagnation for centuries until some major breakthrough. There was a time when progress was so quick that people assumed flying cars were around the corner and we would all be living in space like the Jetsons. Again energy costs come into play.
tuatoru 6y ago
> > Nothing in the world improves at that rate. > This is a bit of a no true scotsman argument. Everything is improving. Look at the past 100 years. No, it isn't. Computational efficiency has improved by more than 10 orders of magnitude since its inception (arbitrarily taken to be the early 1950s). Agricultural output: less than 1 OM. Transport efficiency: less than 3 OM. Healthcare: less than 1 OM. Solar (presumed PV; compared to electricity production from fossil fuels): less than 1 OM. Industrial gains from IT: the growth economist Robert Solow famously quipped "you can see computers everywhere except in the productivity statistics". That was a few decades ago, but we are still well short of 1 OM improvement. None of your examples comes within 8 orders of magnitude of the rate of improvement of computing efficiency since the 1950s. The comparison stands.
- CryptoPunk 6y ago
  You don't need all industries to see 10 OM improvements to see a >8 OM improvement in total economic productivity. I imagine it's enough to improve how people coordinate resource usage by something like 10 OM to see that kind of improvement. Ride-sharing, house-sharing, computerized car-navigation, self-driving cars, online banking, online shopping, Wikipedia, online directories of product/service providers, etc are all existing or emerging technologies that didn't exist 30 years and massively increase how effectively people can collectively utilize existing resources.

rorykoehler 6y ago

Hunger is a logistics problem not a production one.

thewarrior 6y ago
That’s like saying that going to Mars is a logistics problem. Everything involves a logistics problem because it involves profitably using energy to move things around . There’s plenty of fresh water too it’s just a logistics problem of transporting it from Siberia to all over the earth. It’s simply not feasible. Energy is not cheap enough to transport food to everywhere it’s needed while also not taking enough away from anyone else by force. That means we need to live in much more efficient denser setups with mass transport to reduce logistics costs in general. It also means some redistribution of energy and hence wealth.
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  Agree on your conclusion. Regarding the prior it's messy with local politics, warlords, NGOs, governments etc and if there was the unanimous will there would be no hunger. Food production is a solved problem.
tuatoru 6y ago
> Hunger is a logistics problem No, it's a political problem. Much harder to solve.