>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 b

>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.