Well, within the constraints of human nature, some societies seem to have much higher levels of trust than others; in some communities you can leave your doors unlocked while you leave your home for a vacation, in others people take practically feudal levels of fortification to feel safe from their neighbors. Crank up the levels of trust and transparency and bring as much of the world as is sustainable to a first world standard of living and you may have the best we could do with present day technology.
Lack of transformative technologies pretty much precludes bringing the whole world to an industrial standard of living in the long term (or even keeping the current first world population living at that standard indefinitely,) but we might be able to stay within sustainable levels if in general our goods were designed to be as enduring as possible and geared towards reuse rather than recycling. Goods production would be lower, so the economy would have to be much more service oriented. This isn’t the sort of thing I generally bother with even back of the envelope feasibility calculations for though, since even if it turned out to be totally feasible in principle to build a sustainable global society at first world standards with present day technology, getting society to adopt the necessary changes would be practically impossible, so transformative technologies are a safer bet.
Also, I’d expect both gradual and dramatic improvement in technology. It took until the middle ages to figure out that people needed left and right shoes rather than an identical shoe for each foot. It took until very recently to figure out how to make reasonably cheap computers and that they should be linked through search engines.
There is no reason to think that we’re close to inventing all the possible cool stuff.
Well, within the constraints of human nature, some societies seem to have much higher levels of trust than others; in some communities you can leave your doors unlocked while you leave your home for a vacation, in others people take practically feudal levels of fortification to feel safe from their neighbors. Crank up the levels of trust and transparency and bring as much of the world as is sustainable to a first world standard of living and you may have the best we could do with present day technology.
Lack of transformative technologies pretty much precludes bringing the whole world to an industrial standard of living in the long term (or even keeping the current first world population living at that standard indefinitely,) but we might be able to stay within sustainable levels if in general our goods were designed to be as enduring as possible and geared towards reuse rather than recycling. Goods production would be lower, so the economy would have to be much more service oriented. This isn’t the sort of thing I generally bother with even back of the envelope feasibility calculations for though, since even if it turned out to be totally feasible in principle to build a sustainable global society at first world standards with present day technology, getting society to adopt the necessary changes would be practically impossible, so transformative technologies are a safer bet.
Also, I’d expect both gradual and dramatic improvement in technology. It took until the middle ages to figure out that people needed left and right shoes rather than an identical shoe for each foot. It took until very recently to figure out how to make reasonably cheap computers and that they should be linked through search engines.
There is no reason to think that we’re close to inventing all the possible cool stuff.