I disagree, strongly. Not only do I believe this line of reasoning to be wrong, I believe it to be dangerously wrong. I believe downplaying and/or underestimating the role of energy in our economic system is part of why we find ourselves in the mess we’re in today.
To reference Nate Hagens (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xr9rIQxwj4) We use the equivalent of 100 billion barrels of oil a year. Each barrel of oil can do the amount of work it would take 5 humans to do. There are 500 billion ‘ghost’ labourers in our society today.
(Back to me)
You cannot eat ideas. You cannot treat sewage with them. You cannot heat your home with them. You cannot build your home with them. You cannot travel across an ocean on them.
1000x0 is 0. Technology is a powerful multiplier, but 0 is 0.
You cannot build cold fusion power plants with ideas. You cannot conjure up the material resources or the skilled labour and energy inputs necessary to build them with ideas. (once again Nate Hagens—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0pt3ioQuNc)
.… aaaand then there’s the whole topic of renewables and the hidden costs and limitations thereof.
The only idea I have encountered that nullifies this reality is a superintelligent AI. The thing we’re all so scared of, but simultaneously the only technology powerful enough to both harvest and utilize energy on scales beyond human ability. And also powerful enough to coordinate human activity such that Jeavons Paradox doesn’t nullify the benefits (and, more generally, such that we don’t waste such an insane amount of energy on stupid things).
tl;dr Yes, Malthus was ‘wrong’. He was wrong because it turned out that women with access to education and opportunity choose to have less children (there are exceptions, but not too many). Technology/ideas didn’t save us from exponential population growth, it was a natural (i.e. not consciously considered, organized, enacted) change in behaviour.
I disagree, strongly. Not only do I believe this line of reasoning to be wrong, I believe it to be dangerously wrong. I believe downplaying and/or underestimating the role of energy in our economic system is part of why we find ourselves in the mess we’re in today.
To reference Nate Hagens (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xr9rIQxwj4)
We use the equivalent of 100 billion barrels of oil a year. Each barrel of oil can do the amount of work it would take 5 humans to do. There are 500 billion ‘ghost’ labourers in our society today.
(Back to me)
You cannot eat ideas. You cannot treat sewage with them. You cannot heat your home with them. You cannot build your home with them. You cannot travel across an ocean on them.
1000x0 is 0. Technology is a powerful multiplier, but 0 is 0.
You cannot build cold fusion power plants with ideas. You cannot conjure up the material resources or the skilled labour and energy inputs necessary to build them with ideas. (once again Nate Hagens—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0pt3ioQuNc)
.… aaaand then there’s the whole topic of renewables and the hidden costs and limitations thereof.
The only idea I have encountered that nullifies this reality is a superintelligent AI. The thing we’re all so scared of, but simultaneously the only technology powerful enough to both harvest and utilize energy on scales beyond human ability. And also powerful enough to coordinate human activity such that Jeavons Paradox doesn’t nullify the benefits (and, more generally, such that we don’t waste such an insane amount of energy on stupid things).
And finally, re population:
Demographics, read about them—https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40697556-the-human-tide
tl;dr Yes, Malthus was ‘wrong’. He was wrong because it turned out that women with access to education and opportunity choose to have less children (there are exceptions, but not too many). Technology/ideas didn’t save us from exponential population growth, it was a natural (i.e. not consciously considered, organized, enacted) change in behaviour.
I would like to think about this more, but thank you for posting this and switching my mind from System I to System II