“Horn 1” of the dilemma is a Limits to Growth style crisis. It’s perfectly possible that such a limits-crisis arrives before the technology needed to expand the limits shows up to save us. (The early signs would be a major recession which never seems to end, and funding for speculative ideas like nano-machines doesn’t last.) Or another analogy would be crossing a desert with a small, leaky bottle of water and an ever-growing thirst. On the edge of the desert there is a huge lake, and the traveller reaching it will never be thirsty again. But it’s still possible to die before reaching the lake.
I see you think that the technology will arrive in time, which is a legitimate view, but then that also creates big risks of a catastrophe (we reach the lake, and it is poisonous… oops). This is “Horn 2”.
My own experience with exciting new technologies is a bit jaded, and my probability assessment for Horn 1 has been moving upward over the years. Radically-new technology always take much longer to deploy than first expected, development never proceeds at the preferred pace of the engineers, and there can be maddeningly-long delays in getting anyone to deploy, even when the tech has been proven to work. The people who provide the money usually have their own agenda and it slows everything down. Space technology is one example here. Nanotechnology looks like another (huge excitement and major funding, but almost none of it going into development of true nano-machines along Drexler’s lines.)
“Horn 1” of the dilemma is a Limits to Growth style crisis. It’s perfectly possible that such a limits-crisis arrives before the technology needed to expand the limits shows up to save us. (The early signs would be a major recession which never seems to end, and funding for speculative ideas like nano-machines doesn’t last.) Or another analogy would be crossing a desert with a small, leaky bottle of water and an ever-growing thirst. On the edge of the desert there is a huge lake, and the traveller reaching it will never be thirsty again. But it’s still possible to die before reaching the lake.
I see you think that the technology will arrive in time, which is a legitimate view, but then that also creates big risks of a catastrophe (we reach the lake, and it is poisonous… oops). This is “Horn 2”.
My own experience with exciting new technologies is a bit jaded, and my probability assessment for Horn 1 has been moving upward over the years. Radically-new technology always take much longer to deploy than first expected, development never proceeds at the preferred pace of the engineers, and there can be maddeningly-long delays in getting anyone to deploy, even when the tech has been proven to work. The people who provide the money usually have their own agenda and it slows everything down. Space technology is one example here. Nanotechnology looks like another (huge excitement and major funding, but almost none of it going into development of true nano-machines along Drexler’s lines.)