There's no escape from physical reality - real wealth is energy and matter, not bits*. There's only one true development metric - the Kardashev's scale. Why -

There's no escape from physical reality - real wealth is energy and matter, not bits*. There's only one true development metric - the Kardashev's scale. Why - because no matter what any individual civilization values, once two civilizations meet, one that's sufficiently higher on the Kardashev's scale can effortlessly destroy the other, making it an objective value metric in the universe. Bits are of course necessary for organizing large-scale energy and matter manipulation - but efficiency can never go above 100%. Transport switched from manually planned transport routes to optimally solving the traveling salesman problem (NP completeness doesn't mean it can't be solved efficiently for real world problems, see eg. Gurobi) - significant gains from planning are over. Right now, global energy shortage is directly visible: coal shortage and electricity rationing in China. Total blackout in Lebanon. Gas shortage in Europe. Coal shortage in India. Without a massive increase in energy production, rest of 21st century is going to return to the pre-industrial norm of ~zero economic growth per capita. https://academic.oup.com/view-large/figure/108875635/hew020f05.tif https://academic.oup.com/view-large/figure/108875635/hew020f... from "Six centuries of British economic growth: a time-series perspective" https://academic.oup.com/ereh/article/21/2/141/3044162 https://academic.oup.com/ereh/article/21/2/141/3044162 * - without going into fundamentals of physics that make them all, eventually, equivalent