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I love that there's a "technology will fix things" model. This assumes we'll discover some magical bullet, that we haven't thought of, that will counteract eros

• pksebben 5y ago
  it's fundamentally confounding to me that more people don't seem to come to this conclusion. I would love to hear a reasonable argument from someone in this cohort, because I'm willing to accept that my intuition is flawed, and I just can't see how.
  • rewgs 5y ago
    Your intuition isn't flawed. People are both willfully dense, and typically unable to grasp extremely complex systems, and both are at play with regards to climate change and energy shortage. The one that always gets me is how people expect us to even develop those new technologies. With what energy? The ones we're running out of? The ones that are already more and more expensive to find? And the fact that we'll be doing that...during increasing droughts and extreme weather...water shortages...crop shortages or even widespread failures...the associated political instability...refugee crises far beyond what we've experienced in recent years...all while the population grows... And that doesn't even mention the fact that, just as when a privileged group of people lose that privilege and call it persecution, those of us in the developed world will see any drop in the standard of living as more extreme than it necessarily actually is. I fully expect right wing terrorism to increase; even now they're running around screaming about "Jews replacing them" -- what happens when their lives get very clearly worse? Who do you think they'll blame and how will they respond? I could go on. That's just, like, 1% of the different angles and interplaying variables involved. It's enormously complex, but all paths lead to serious instability, perhaps societal collapse.
    • 99_00 5y ago
      Why isn't nuclear power the answer to climate change and energy shortage?
      • adrianN 5y ago
        Because it's pretty expensive and time consuming to build and people really don't like to have a nuclear power plant near them.
        • choeger 5y ago
          This. Even France is not able to double its nuclear power output and go completely climate-neutral this way. Let alone India, China, or Indonesia.
        • DaedPsyker 5y ago
          While the time to build is certainly true, is the cost truly more expensive than that of effects of climate change? I suspect not.
          • spiralx 5y ago
            South Korea seems to manage building a nuclear power plant in six years or so, they don't have to take decades to get online.
          • adrianN 5y ago
            It might be more expensive than the alternative solution to climate change: renewable energy + storage.
      • Joeri 5y ago
        We would need to build thousands of nuclear plants, adapting each plant for its location (so you can’t mass-produce a single design), and we don’t have the skilled people to do that. In addition, they will take decades to build, we lack enough fuel for those plants, and we still haven’t solved the disposal problem. Solar panels, batteries, and wind mills are comparatively easy to produce at ridiculous volumes. They’re a cheaper, faster and cleaner solution.
  • native_samples 5y ago
    OK, I'll do so. To put it brutally it's because on Hacker News and probably your social circle, there are too many people whose social status and income depends on being clever, or at least the perception of being clever. This leads us to seriously over-index on things that look like science or data analysis, without even being able to see alternatives that in my experience easily occur to the less (over?) educated. Consider this article. It's actually a good case in point. The article can be summarized like this: 1. In the 1970s there were these modellers who predicted disaster. Lots of very influential and educated people took them uber-seriously and thought the Limits To Growth was proof positive that everything needed to change. 2. The model turned out to be useless and the disaster it predicted never happened, because the numbers it used for natural resource availability were garbage. 3. This major error did not reduce the modellers confidence in what they were doing (this seems to be a common theme with modellers). Instead they just doubled the number of natural resources and kept on going. That sounds rather arbitrary and not like a real fix to me, but alright. The new models indicated that nothing makes much of a difference for decades (until 2020), conveniently making the predictions unfalsifiable on any timeline that the original authors may have cared about. 4. Now a new researcher has published a new paper on these models, which also says nothing useful. We read that the models "aren't terribly enlightening" because we don't have any data past 2020 yet so which scenario we're supposedly in cannot be determined. 5. Despite all the above, the author concludes that "the most important takeaway from these models is that we need to take definitive action". Wrong! A rational person can conclude nothing from the evidence in the article. Given that we can only judge the models by prior performance, we should anticipate that the models are probably wrong again. Moreover, the model scenarios don't have any probabilities attached to them and are described in sufficiently vague terms that nobody would ever be able to conclude which scenario we actually followed, again, making it an exercise in stargazing, not science. Therefore, we cannot actually say we've "known for at least 50 years that our current pattern of consumption is not sustainable". We've known no such thing. The conclusions of the article and many of the commenters here seem like motivated reasoning as a consequence - or at least, it's certainly not Bayesian reasoning!
    • kokey 5y ago
      We use increasingly sophisticated models to make the same mistake they made 130 years ago when they projected the increase of horse manure.
• adnmcq999 5y ago
  I don’t know man, the human race makes great technological leaps, or rather leaps in understanding that allow new technology. And nobody can really predict that. It’s almost like your Einsteins, Newtons, Boltzmanns, Maxwells Paulis and Plancks had some kind 2-way channel with divinity. Even though we all stand on the shoulders of giants, sometimes a new giant appears out of the ether. And there’s no doubt we’re done. I saw a 60minutes where an air force pilot dead ass states that they saw a tic-tac lookin ufo churn water in the Pacific Ocean before basically teleporting away, only to be relocated 60 miles later. There’s more for us to know, even if that air force crew (there were more than 1 witnesses) were all just tripping on peyote.
  • bmitc 5y ago
    How does new technology help these things exactly? Isn't technology, along with the discovery of coal and oil, a major contributor to the scaling of the human population and the effects of that? The vast industrialization over the past 150 has not been good for humanity or the planet.
    • cjohnson318 5y ago
      I think they generally mean: optimal and sustainable farming, abundant clean energy, and world leaders that can think more than two years ahead.
      • bmitc 5y ago
        They specifically mentioned technological leaps, so that's what I went on, for better or worse. I think clean energy will not by itself solve much. We need to reduce and reorganize at the same time as bringing on clean energy production, but that won't happen. Look at China, who is the world leader in clean energy production. I worry if fusion ever happens, people will just be like "great, electrical energy is free now", which won't be good. I agree we need leaders thinking more than a few years ahead.
      • jhoechtl 5y ago
        > and world leaders that can think more than two years ahead They can do that. It's the electoral system which doesn't give an incentive to do so.
• bmitc 5y ago
  I agree with you and made a similar comment when the article talking about the report was posted here. COVID-19 is a perfect example of the folly in believing "technology will always save us". In the U.S., the general sentiment was that technology in the form of vaccines and entrepreneurship will rise to the occasion, so let's just ride it out until then. Well after more than a year of shit show after shit show and 600,000+ deaths in the U.S. alone along with countless reverberations in society (businesses failing, long term health effects of COVID-19, basically a year wasted of schooling across all ages, unemployment, shortages, etc.), people are still like "we got the vaccine, we did it everyone!" I still hear people saying they got COVID-19 like it was an inevitability and no big deal and also now that the vaccine is here no worries. I honestly doubt that climate change, agricultural exhaustion, ecosystem destruction, over population, etc. are anywhere near the public's or even government's serious thoughts. If they are, they're likely to be wholly short term. We can't even solve simple problems like destroying the dams and decreasing salmon farms in the Pacific northwest that are decimating wild salmon populations which has side effects like starving the resident orcas. I have zero hope humanity will solve these upcoming problems in any way shape or form. We'll end up just dealing with them and reacting to them once they're here, like we do with everything else (at best).
  • cjohnson318 5y ago
    Oh man, COVID-19 was a huge wake up call. I thought the response to Hurricane Katrina was bad, but the response to COVID-19 has been much worse. Scientists did a great job with rolling a vaccine out, but now every family's weird uncle refuses to get a vaccine. It just blows my mind.
    • premium-gecko 5y ago
      > every family's weird uncle refuses to get a vaccine Suppose I thought you should get some injections, and you researched it and concluded they almost certainly wouldn't benefit you, and might harm you. Would you be OK with being characterized as a weird uncle who refused to get a treatment?
  • logicchains 5y ago
• tanbog4 5y ago
  It's not that silly to model as historically that has also happened. To use the "peak oil" example this work also influenced, the technology of fossil oil reserves was a response in part to "peak whale" (not a joke). The main source much commercial 'oil' for things like Street lamps in the 1800s was whale blubber. As whales got overfished fossilised oil reserves were developed and not only took over those markets but created many many new ones. You can of course make the point fossilised oil is worse for global warming etc but from the point of view of the economy and population growth fossilised oil was much better than whale.
  • themodelplumber 5y ago
    Sure, sure...and someday they'll be paying households to provide the cities with electricity! :-)
  • zug_zug 5y ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but "peak whale" and "peak oil" are naturally self-correcting in a free-market, because as the resources become scarce their prices goes up hence leading to technological incentives to find alternative sources. This would also apply to topsoil erosion. However this isn't the case with carbon emissions for example, unless we had some financial feedback loop (e.g. some carbon tax).
    • tanbog4 5y ago
      I would generally agree, but i guess the point is, extrapolating about production/growth/pollution when fossil oil was introduced probably failed to account for technological change driving economic and industrial change. We can measure global warming, it is happening, and we know what drives it right now. We should at least try to model what kind of change would fix it. Including new technologies.
    • adrianN 5y ago
      Most markets aren't particularly "free". Agriculture for example is heavily subsidized.
• retrac 5y ago
  > we'll discover some magical bullet, that we haven't thought of Surely there are in fact, many technologies that we have thought of, that could help in a number of ways, if only we could realize them as practical and/or get them adopted in terms of politics and the economy.
  • adrianN 5y ago
    The "a technological solution" crowd isn't looking for something that requires lots of money to roll out, like renewable energy.
    • rbanffy 5y ago
      If you count the externalities of nuclear (eventually having to abandon a city every hundred years or so), gas (some pollution, catastrophic climate change), and coal (pollution, catastrophic climate change), wind and solar look really cheap. Hydro can also be useful by creating reservoirs of fresh water for managing drought cycles. The biggest issue is that we don’t monetize the externalities in the current state.
      • adrianN 5y ago
        The biggest issue is that the costs of not changing anything will have to be paid long after the next election, so why do something today?
        • rbanffy 5y ago
          I always assume humans want their offspring to survive, but COVID taught us that a lot of people will gladly work for our extinction.
• swman 5y ago
  I think technology will result in a great outcome for humanity as long as our greed is checked somehow. Most of the problems today are caused by our greed. I’m no MIT scholar nor as educated as most of you here, but from a anecdotal ground level I have seen it really seems some people at various positions from a office manager all the way to the highest political offices are driven by greed. Their greed usually results in negative outcomes for a lot of people. I’m not sure how we can solve that.
  • atomashpolskiy 5y ago
    Absolutely, most problems are caused by either of: - stupidity -fear -greed The problem is figuring out which instances of these are induced by society and civilization and which are inherent to human behavior in general. While we can try to address the former, the latter probably can't be fixed without significantly changing our definition/perception of what humans are.
  • hughrr 5y ago
    History shows us that greedy people end up with their heads on sticks. Even when they have armies to protect them. It doesn’t take a lot to regress to that again.
    • rytis 5y ago
      I think it's excessively greedy who end up on sticks. Moderately greedy are doing just fine...
      • taurath 5y ago
        One of the main properties of many of the communist revolutions of the 20th centuries was the mass killing or removal of property of the landed gentry in those countries - sometimes more directly violent than others. Cambodia, China, Vietnam, N Korea, etc. I think recent history has shown that simply killing the Bourgeoisie tends to just eventually create another in the form of whoever had the power to do the other killings, and not always to better ends for the people. That form of communism has been shown to not really work. Democratic socialism though seems to work out pretty well for people.
• ktzar 5y ago
  There's a number of technologies and traits that, if adopted en-masse, would definitely reduce our energy and material consumption and extend the sustainability of our planet. Stop eating meat, extended warranties in home products and designing goods in a way they can be easily repaired, led bulbs, better insulation for buildings, solar water heaters, heat pumps, bicycles... We could easily consume a fifth of the resources we use now and be as happy if twenty selected things were banned in the world. But we live in a capitalist world, there's only hope in people taking the initiative.
• jb775 5y ago
  But you're taking the already discovered "magic bullets" for granted...and are essentially acting like the next one is impossible even though they happen on a semi-regular basis. Science is simply an on-going collection of realizations where the latest realization is considered the end-all-be-all...until it isn't. The reason they are considered "magic bullets" is because they involve game-changing shifts in technology that couldn't easily be conceived beforehand. Just look at the traveling salesman problem for a sample as to how a handful of input options could output a massive amount of output combinations. Every so often, one of those output combinations turns into a game-changer...then we have people spewing a new version of the rhetoric stated here. I'd put my money on the game-changer.
  • tobr 5y ago
    It’s reasonable to assume there will be various kinds of game-changing new technologies, but it’s not a given that it will provide usable solutions to the specific problems we need to solve.
    • evgen 5y ago
      At the time these studies were being created the idea that PV solar would be cost-effective and that battery tech would progress to the point where it provided a viable path to grid-scale energy storage was deep into 'magic bullet' territory. There are a long list of technologies that have already started to bend the curve on several of those trend lines and the idea that we are simply done creating solutions seems unfathomably short-sighted.
      • cjohnson318 5y ago
        PV solar and battery technology are approaching the "diminishing returns" territory, if they're not already there. Battery energy density had been improving at about 5-8% over the last 100 years, but I don't think anyone seriously expects that to continue. IMHO, unfathomably short sighted is expecting the rate of technological progress over the last hundred years to be matched by the next 100 years. We went from the Wright Brothers in 1903, to Neil Armstrong walking on the moon in 1969, but by 2035 we'll still be using rockets similar to those we used in 1969. The 20th C was a very unique time in history, I don't think humanity will experience something like that again for... many centuries.
• ThomPete 5y ago
  This civilization IS different. Not in any magical way just simply in the fact that we are the first who through our combination of wealth and knowledge-creation and with the help of technology and science have the potential of solving the problems we encounter. It's not a guarantee but it's very different than previous civilizations (just as the challenges are). In general humans and our ansestors have gradually been turning an environment that was sheer hell in its inception, into a much more habitable environment.
  • hyperman1 5y ago
    It really isn't. History is littered with civilizations that were on top, got complacent, and were swallowed by up to that point irrelevant tiny neighbours. They all had the wealth, the power, the tech. They didn't have the tolerance for short term pain for greater future gains anymore. So they stood there watching how they went down, slowly but surely . And talking a lot. I would not be surprised if future historians mark the 1990’s as the peak of the US empire
    • ThomPete 5y ago
      History is not littered with civilizations that got universal computation and computers to execute them. Again there is no certainty in life, but to say that this civilization is not very different than others before it is in my view ahistorial.
      • robertlagrant 5y ago
        > History is not littered with civilizations that got universal computation and computers to execute them. All countries have this now. How's this relevant to the point that less complacent countries will eclipse more complacent ones?
        • ThomPete 5y ago
          almost a billion people dont have reliable access to energy a large part of them dont have any at all
• belorn 5y ago
  The problem which we already have the technology to fix is food. What people eat is cultural and is effected by cost and availability. There is much we currently discard or do not cultivate because it not what we traditionally see as food and because there is no cost incentive to encourage a change in culture. Changes can however occur given the right triggers, like how large portion of Europe went over to potatoes during the European 19th century population boom. We could see a similar change in food culture towards seaweed if topsoil issues became widespread, and there is plenty of space for technological improvements in aquaculture. Similar, fresh water is primarily a cost issue. Right now the only economical method to provide water at the lowest cost is to take naturally occurring fresh water. There are alternatives. It does not take a lot of solar, wind or nuclear power plants to supply a large city population with fresh water extracted from the ocean. The construction and operational costs would however be need to be taken from something else, reducing welfare and industrial output.
  • saurik 5y ago
    I do not believe that everyone deciding to eat something different is "fixing" the food scarcity problem in the same way that desalinization (ignoring all other issues with it as we assumed technology improved to solve them also) "fixes" water scarcity: if everyone is told tomorrow "all water will safely come from desal" we might breath a collective sigh of relief... "starting tomorrow, all food will be replaced by seaweed" a lot of people are going to be super super pissed, right? Maybe even more basic: making enough potatoes to technically satisfy everyone's calorie requirements (ignoring nutrition) might be a technological problem, but the "similar change in food culture" is kind of begging the question, as if we could just cause that change before all the food was gone maybe we could still enjoy the occasional potato (a luxury in our new era of food molded out of seaweed), and if we could get equivalent cultural shifts in how people use transportation (along with food changes, such as not eating meat) maybe we could stave off climate change without technological fixes: if you are relying on a cultural change it isn't a technological fix, and if the way the cultural change will happen is because no one will have a choice... well, then you didn't fix anything in the first place!
    • deleted 5y ago
• jug 5y ago
  I disagree with this take on why this model was there. I understood it as it being there to illustrate what it _would_ take to avoid a societal catastrophe. This is helpful, because it shows that we won’t avoid it!
• RandomLensman 5y ago
  It's probably a horizon thing. Over millenia BAU would have been totally off, 50 or 100 years - not clear to me. Should be historically testable, i.e. mean and median time between larger changes. I suspect that in the last 300 years it accelerated a lot on the tech AND social side.
• chiefalchemist 5y ago
  It's not counting on a magic bullet that concerning, it's the overconfidence we understand all the variables in the system(s). That is, we act as if there are no significant unknowns. Unprecedented, global scale, and unknowns all go hand in hand. Even in a Covid 19 aware world there's still a fair amount of denial about the complexity of the global economy. What happens if dissent - not co-operation - increases? It can certainly be argued that both invasions of Afghanistan were for resources. Suddened the gears will shift and world leaders are going to stick to peaceful cooperation? Put another way, as stress in the systems begin to surface it seems unlikely humans will remain rational and broadly organized. The social fabric will likely breakdown before anything else. Trying to predict the future is difficult enough. Add to that, human emotional / psychological response to extremes - real as well as perceived - and all the models / scenarios mentioned in the article could end badly.
• dd36 5y ago
  We already discovered it. It’s nuclear energy.
• naasking 5y ago
  > This assumes we'll discover some magical bullet, that we haven't thought of, that will counteract erosion of topsoil, water shortages, and climate change. Who says we haven't thought of it? There are plenty of candidates technologies, like moving food production into cities via vertical farms so top soil erosion is irrelevant. Lab grown is on the short-term horizon as well (5-10 years). Water shortages are a non-issue, as we have an abundance of water. Certainly desalinated water is more expensive than water from fresh lakes and rivers, but it's becoming more cost effective, and if water increases in price, they'll meet somewhere and level off. Climate change might be a challenge, but people will simply move away from the areas where it's no longer cost effective to live, at the very least because it's no longer cost effective to run businesses there due to insurance premiums. The "Comprehensive Tech" model isn't too far fetched. It requires some disruptive changes, but not too drastic. Errors bars are wide due to climate change though, since it's effects are still unpredictable.
  • cjohnson318 5y ago
    Regarding vertical farms in cities. You generally need about 1 acre of farm land per (American) person per year. A vertical farm can squeeze about 5 acres of horizontal farm land into one acre of vertical farm land. If NYC (proper) has 8.4M residents, then you need about 1.7M acres of vertical farms. For reference, NYC (proper) is about 200K acres right now. (The NYC metro area has 20M residents over 8.5M acres.) It's doable, but it will require an enormous expenditure in infrastructure, so good luck. Water shortage is totally an issue in the American West. When you build a development you need to prove that there is enough water for your development for the next 100 years before the city will authorize you for tap. This is becoming a real challenge for developers in Phoenix and other areas. Climate change is already effecting where people live, and it will likely get worse. Likely, the places that are unaffected by climate change are going to be so expensive that most of the people fleeing the effects of climate change will not be able to relocate there. The Comprehensive Tech model is far fetched because it requires planning, cooperation, commitment, and sacrificing short term gains for long term stability--basically all of the things humans are terrible at.
    • naasking 5y ago
• kiliantics 5y ago
  Which is why we should push for the stable world (SW) scenario, rather than gambling with our collective future on something that is not a sure bet. Why do all climate policies currently being adopted allow increased carbon emissions and assume we will have carbon capture technologies to negate them right in the nick of time? This is the kind of irresponsible behaviour that we usually see only in addicts or psychopaths. How are we allowing this?
  • adolph 5y ago
    > why we should push for the stable world (SW) scenario Alternatively, a push for antifragility acknowledges human's scale of environmental control and the tendency for unexpected things to happen simply because they are possible. Ergodicity expresses the idea that a point of a moving system, either a dynamical system or a stochastic process, will eventually visit all parts of the space that the system moves in, in a uniform and random sense. [0] Antifragility is a property of systems in which they increase in capability to thrive as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures. [1] 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodicity 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifragility
    • kiliantics 5y ago
      How do you propose making an antifragile system? The most antifragile system we know is the earth's biosphere and its component ecosystems. By reorganising it for our industrial processes, we have made it pretty fragile and we will be experiencing the results of that (in the form of more droughts, storms, temperature swings etc.) increasingly if we keep it up. Adopting the stable world scenario would be accepting that we need to limit our use of the world's resources and give back a lot of land and ocean use to the natural ecosystems that gave us those resources in the first place -- rewilding large portions of the earth. This is about the only reasonable suggesting for antifragility I could conceive of, making it basically the same thing as the SW option.
• agumonkey 5y ago
  I kinda believe about a few tech based `deii-ex machina` but to me the most potent tool for solving this is just stop following consumerism. If all urban dwellers stopped using cars, and spent more times doing simpler activities, you'd have less importations, less consumption.. maybe this time can be used on fixing house energy expenditures, renewing biosphere a bit. We're sitting on a 8Billions man hour bucket.