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Most discussions of economic limits in the future don't account for thermodynamics or the planetary energy budget and this article is more of the same. On the

Most discussions of economic limits in the future don't account for thermodynamics or the planetary energy budget and this article is more of the same. On the sociology side, this article doesn't even question the assumption of "our belief in abundance", a thing that I doubt you'll find much of in places like Izmir, Dhaka and Guayaquil.

eru 3y ago
Thermodynamics doesn't pose a fundamental limit on economic value. The planetary energy budget is even less of an issue. For the latter, we have fission, fusion and we can grow into space. For the former: in principle you can create arbitrarily large economic value on arbitrarily small energy budgets (if you have enough time). Getting a bit philosophical and speculative: Assume computation is one way to create economic value. Eg either because computation is just useful for humans, like today, or because in the future you'll be able to simulate human beings (or other economic actors) directly via computation. Landauer's Principle [0] gives us a physical lower limit on the amount of energy we need to do a single bit operation: E >= k * T * ln 2 (where k is the Boltzmann constant). Stripping away all the constants, this tells us that as the universe expands and cools off, computation gets cheaper. The absolute minimum cost of computation is proportional to the ambient temperature of the universe. As a simple example, you can get an infinite amount of computation out of a single Joule, if you wait for the temperature to half between each operation. Of course, in practice we are far, far away from the Landauer limit being relevant. And we are far, far away from more conventional limits to economic activity. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle > On the sociology side, this article doesn't even question the assumption of "our belief in abundance", a thing that I doubt you'll find much of in places like Izmir, Dhaka and Guayaquil. İzmir is in Turkey which has seen an enormous increase in welfare over the past 200 years thanks to the Industrial Revolution. In about the last ten years mismanagement has damaged the economy of Turkey. Such a short episode in history might damage people's belief in abundance, but we can hardly blame people who are in dire straits at the moment for holding short-sighted beliefs. Many people in countries that are doing just fine, like eg the US, also like to engage in gloom and doom mongering.
- imtringued 3y ago
  >For the latter, we have fission, fusion and we can grow into space. Going to space and colonizing the milky way within the next 2000 years yields grow rates below 0.1% per year. That is far less than a capitalist society needs to maintain existing living standards (yes, in a system with growing inequality you need constant growth just for things to stay the same), let alone improve them. >Assume computation is one way to create economic value. Eg either because computation is just useful for humans, like today, or because in the future you'll be able to simulate human beings (or other economic actors) directly via computation. Landauer's Principle [0] gives us a physical lower limit on the amount of energy we need to do a single bit operation: You are ignoring something obvious. Since the brain contains the utility evaluation mechanism, any external aid to evaluate utility of an activity or object must be trusted by the human blindly, otherwise he would have to cross check the result and be bounded by his own cognitive resources. Thus we would need genetic engineering to increase our brain capacity just to interface with the external evaluator. If you can do this, why even bother and not simply engineer us to be as happy and perceive as much economic value as possible? The whole concept of absolute utility breaks down. Utility only exists in the context of a utility evaluator and if you change the evaluator you are missing the point. An equally valid solution would be to hunt down all humans and let them go extinct so that they can't be unhappy. If we keep the evaluator the same, there is still another way to cheat and that is to create an adversarial model with superior computational resources that creates an inverse model of the evaluator and abuses the lack of cognitive resources in the evaluator so that he rates low effort activities and products as having insanely high utility.
  - eru 3y ago
    > (yes, in a system with growing inequality you need constant growth just for things to stay the same) I'm not sure what you are talking about. Global inequality has decreased in the last few decades.
    - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
      What happened in 1971 1-Pixel Wealth
casefields 3y ago
The fertility of nearly all nations has slowed beyond replacement. Your concern would be valid if we were on pace to feed a quadrillion people but we aren’t.
- boondoggle16 3y ago
  Not in Africa. The plan is to have billions of Africans migrate to Europe to do the work instead, due to the climate crisis. When they get to Europe, they are going to expect the same quality of life that Europeans have historically enjoyed. So, just because Europeans aren't reproducing, doesn't mean that they aren't being superseded by a new group of materialist consumers.

eru 3y ago

Thermodynamics doesn't pose a fundamental limit on economic value. The planetary energy budget is even less of an issue. For the latter, we have fission, fusion and we can grow into space. For the former: in principle you can create arbitrarily large economic value on arbitrarily small energy budgets (if you have enough time). Getting a bit philosophical and speculative: Assume computation is one way to create economic value. Eg either because computation is just useful for humans, like today, or because in the future you'll be able to simulate human beings (or other economic actors) directly via computation. Landauer's Principle [0] gives us a physical lower limit on the amount of energy we need to do a single bit operation: E >= k * T * ln 2 (where k is the Boltzmann constant). Stripping away all the constants, this tells us that as the universe expands and cools off, computation gets cheaper. The absolute minimum cost of computation is proportional to the ambient temperature of the universe. As a simple example, you can get an infinite amount of computation out of a single Joule, if you wait for the temperature to half between each operation. Of course, in practice we are far, far away from the Landauer limit being relevant. And we are far, far away from more conventional limits to economic activity. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle > On the sociology side, this article doesn't even question the assumption of "our belief in abundance", a thing that I doubt you'll find much of in places like Izmir, Dhaka and Guayaquil. İzmir is in Turkey which has seen an enormous increase in welfare over the past 200 years thanks to the Industrial Revolution. In about the last ten years mismanagement has damaged the economy of Turkey. Such a short episode in history might damage people's belief in abundance, but we can hardly blame people who are in dire straits at the moment for holding short-sighted beliefs. Many people in countries that are doing just fine, like eg the US, also like to engage in gloom and doom mongering.

imtringued 3y ago
>For the latter, we have fission, fusion and we can grow into space. Going to space and colonizing the milky way within the next 2000 years yields grow rates below 0.1% per year. That is far less than a capitalist society needs to maintain existing living standards (yes, in a system with growing inequality you need constant growth just for things to stay the same), let alone improve them. >Assume computation is one way to create economic value. Eg either because computation is just useful for humans, like today, or because in the future you'll be able to simulate human beings (or other economic actors) directly via computation. Landauer's Principle [0] gives us a physical lower limit on the amount of energy we need to do a single bit operation: You are ignoring something obvious. Since the brain contains the utility evaluation mechanism, any external aid to evaluate utility of an activity or object must be trusted by the human blindly, otherwise he would have to cross check the result and be bounded by his own cognitive resources. Thus we would need genetic engineering to increase our brain capacity just to interface with the external evaluator. If you can do this, why even bother and not simply engineer us to be as happy and perceive as much economic value as possible? The whole concept of absolute utility breaks down. Utility only exists in the context of a utility evaluator and if you change the evaluator you are missing the point. An equally valid solution would be to hunt down all humans and let them go extinct so that they can't be unhappy. If we keep the evaluator the same, there is still another way to cheat and that is to create an adversarial model with superior computational resources that creates an inverse model of the evaluator and abuses the lack of cognitive resources in the evaluator so that he rates low effort activities and products as having insanely high utility.
- eru 3y ago
  > (yes, in a system with growing inequality you need constant growth just for things to stay the same) I'm not sure what you are talking about. Global inequality has decreased in the last few decades.
  - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    What happened in 1971 1-Pixel Wealth

casefields 3y ago

The fertility of nearly all nations has slowed beyond replacement. Your concern would be valid if we were on pace to feed a quadrillion people but we aren’t.

boondoggle16 3y ago
Not in Africa. The plan is to have billions of Africans migrate to Europe to do the work instead, due to the climate crisis. When they get to Europe, they are going to expect the same quality of life that Europeans have historically enjoyed. So, just because Europeans aren't reproducing, doesn't mean that they aren't being superseded by a new group of materialist consumers.