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More people = more technological advancement is a really cool observation. And, more technological advancement creates the environment for more people to surviv

More people = more technological advancement is a really cool observation. And, more technological advancement creates the environment for more people to survive and thrive. Exponential growth, baby!

8organicbits 3y ago
The technology loss side of this is a little scary. Imagine a large war or disease that takes out a large portion of population and productivity. With so much interdependence between industries, like agriculture's dependence on computerized equipment, chemical fertilizers, and so on, a collapse of one industry could lead to further collapse. When building cloud infrastructure a practice I've seen used is to avoid creating dependency cycles between systems. Otherwise an outage of one can result in an unrecoverable situation for many systems. We don't avoid cyclic dependencies in our economy; I think we reward it.
- bbor 3y ago
  For anyone who thought this comment was interesting or scary, I highly recommend A Canticle For Lebowitz. It’s about nuclear war and its impact on technology, and I recommend you go into it knowing little more than that
  - NegativeLatency 3y ago
    Sounds a bit like a more compact version of Foundation
    - bbor 3y ago
      Yes, that is a great observation! I’ll have to think about that one… I see the core distinction between CFL and Foundation as pragmatic focused narrative vs idealistic grand narrative, but there’s also a very very interesting element of magical realism and religiosity in the former that I find far more interesting than the more empirical themes of Foundation dealing with institutional structures and their reciprocal relationship to historical developments. But I’ve only read the first book of Foundation, so might be wildly off. Tried to read the second, but accidentally bought the third and never got the time to fix the mistake! Who names their third book “second foundation”??

More people = more technological advancement is a really cool observation. And, more technological advancement creates the environment for more people to survive and thrive. Exponential growth, baby!

8organicbits 3y ago

The technology loss side of this is a little scary. Imagine a large war or disease that takes out a large portion of population and productivity. With so much interdependence between industries, like agriculture's dependence on computerized equipment, chemical fertilizers, and so on, a collapse of one industry could lead to further collapse. When building cloud infrastructure a practice I've seen used is to avoid creating dependency cycles between systems. Otherwise an outage of one can result in an unrecoverable situation for many systems. We don't avoid cyclic dependencies in our economy; I think we reward it.

bbor 3y ago
For anyone who thought this comment was interesting or scary, I highly recommend A Canticle For Lebowitz. It’s about nuclear war and its impact on technology, and I recommend you go into it knowing little more than that
- NegativeLatency 3y ago
  Sounds a bit like a more compact version of Foundation
  - bbor 3y ago
    Yes, that is a great observation! I’ll have to think about that one… I see the core distinction between CFL and Foundation as pragmatic focused narrative vs idealistic grand narrative, but there’s also a very very interesting element of magical realism and religiosity in the former that I find far more interesting than the more empirical themes of Foundation dealing with institutional structures and their reciprocal relationship to historical developments. But I’ve only read the first book of Foundation, so might be wildly off. Tried to read the second, but accidentally bought the third and never got the time to fix the mistake! Who names their third book “second foundation”??