"The carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by
industry's burning of coal and oil-—more than half of it
during the last generation—may have changed the atmosphere's composition sufficiently to account for a
general warming of the world by about one degree
Fahrenheit." (Page 512 / 666 / 9)
He was such a visionary and had such a way with words. This may be nostalgia talking, but I've struggled to find more contemporary writing on the level of Neumann's imagination. If anyone is aware of someone today doing similar work I'd love to hear about it.
He was also the originator of the term singularity in the sense of tech:
“The ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life give the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.”
He also thought we would soon be able to completely control the weather.
To me, his thoughts on the weather are some of his most interesting things to read just from the fact even someone with the brain power of Von Neuman could be utterly and completely wrong.
It is the ultimate lesson in the fallibility of what you believe to be true.
I would say his take on nuclear power is more obviously bad than his climate take. We just haven't been bothered enough/had the political will to try and intervene at the scale he imagined with regards to the weather. Whereas with nuclear the economics never worked out.
The one theme many of the prognosticators of the post Cold War boom failed to see was the democratization of tech. "A computer on every desk" has become an internet node in every pocket. Part of the fear wasn't just of a high priesthood that controlled knowledge, language and thought itself as everyday work and modern life became more machine-like. But of a New Religion: where Science becomes the last true God.
One measure of the progress of a civilization is efficiency with which ideas can be communicated. And the crux of what von Neumann perceives as danger is "runaway" technology. We attempt to solve one problem, like controlling the weather, by introducing remedies according to our current state of the art capabilities. And accidentally introduce cataclysms that cannot be reversed.
Now that capability is accelerating, the same fears arise anew. But it's a different world today. Tech is not developed in secret large scale government run labs of yore. Its too pricey. The culture has shifted as well. From ICBMs to private space enterprises. And it's that cultural feedback loop, that civilizing progress as ideas are shared instantly about the globe, that very few were able to foresee.
> failed to see was the democratization of tech. "A computer on every desk" has become an internet node in every pocket.
I find it harmful to equate mere proliferation with democratic participation. Sure, you have many terminals, but most of the information processing is still lopsided towards the centralized "server". When recommendation algorithms shove content down people's throats, only consequential participation expected from them is to engage with the ads, and they can't talk back to ads. The rest is almost as "democratic" as watching TV.
> One measure of the progress of a civilization is efficiency with which ideas can be communicated.
And it is a bad measure.
A psychotic person's mind also communicates tons of ideas back and forth, in fact too "efficiently". Propaganda posters from an airplane also communicates very efficiently. The idea that mere communication makes progress is what we've been thought by the engagement-maximization culture.
Real measure of progress is the extent those ideas converge towards the truth. How they can form a pattern of meaning that increasingly conforms to the reality. Current tech cares about none of those, and no wonder there is a crisis of meaning making and acceleration from departure from reality, just like a psychotic person.
> Now that capability is accelerating, the same fears arise anew. But it's a different world today. Tech is not developed in secret large scale government run labs of yore.
It is just developed in secret by large scale internet companies now. For most of the tech most of the people have the most screen time with, what content is recommended why, what data is processed how etc are the biggest secrets.
> Tech is not developed in secret large scale government run labs of yore.
Real technology (advancement of science vs software+marketing) is still very much developed by governments, because they are the only entities willing to spend billions on possible dead ends. Fusion reactors, CERN, nuclear technology, and those are the ones we know about because we're allowed to know. The US alone spends about 80-90 billion per year on "Special Access Programs." [1]
> From ICBMs to private space enterprises.
"China is building more than 100 new missile silos in its western desert, analysts say" [1]
I'm also trying to be an optimist about the future, but part of that is understanding where we actually are. Technology is still firmly in the control of governments and a handful of corporations.
I don't think John von Neumann would be particularly impressed by fusion reactors that don't really work after decades in development or papers with thousands of authors out of CERN.
"A large part of mathematics which becomes useful developed with absolutely no desire to be useful, and in a situation where nobody could possibly know in what area it would become useful; and there were no general indications that it ever would be so.”
― John von Neumann
Fusion research on one hand is much like a ceremonial money pit where we light a mountain of cash on fire every year.
Fusion power itself will likely not have much practical application anytime soon, because other power sources will be far more economical.
But if we consider fusion power to be a backdoor way to get funding to research superconductors, plasma physics, and so on, then there is something valuable in the manner of that von Neumann quote, even though their proximate goal is probably all but useless for now.
> "A computer on every desk" has become an internet node in every pocket.
That internet node not only isn't an equal peer in the global information network (thanks to simple things like NAT, but also more insidious problems like increased battery drain when P2P apps are active and the OS killing background apps "for your convenience"), but it is also a telescreen that you carry at all times and even pay for its upkeep.
You can keep this democratisation of technology, if that's what it looks like.
>progress of a civilization is efficiency with which ideas can be communicated
While I agree, isn’t the flip side of this that _bad_ ideas can be much more efficiently communicated as well? I know the counter is that the best remedy for bad information is better information but at least when poor ideas are amplified by human cognitive biases, is transmission efficiency a good measure of progress?
It calls for a bit of strategic thinking that may come off as reckless and nilhistic but logically sound.
* If iterations of will in the end come out "correct" then speeding it up will help progress in process up until a limit.
* Conversely if we cannot come across the "correct" answer eventually as a species we were already doomed and it isn't like we are making matters worse. (Putting aside the definitional issues of technically already being doomed in an entropic universe.)
I stick to binary outcomes here by design due to "optimal" being not only non-computable but non-definable.
There is a popular argument about "bad information traveling faster than good" but it doesn't quite convince me. The speed may also be its own undoing via overexposure undermining its credibility. There is a notable historic pattern seen in England, Boston, Ireland of theocrats getting in charge and so taxing everybody's patience they cause declines in religiousity athiests could only dream of. Respectively Cromwell and the puritans being so bad people went back to nobility, "Banned in Boston" censorship, and theocratic abuses including the Magdalyne Laundries.
> "A computer on every desk" has become an internet node in every pocket.
Running mainly a few apps/websites tightly controlled by a few companies strongly incentivised (by greed and their governments) to keep a tight leash in the type of content that can be consumed AND created. I think Orwell and Huxley foresaw many of these perfectly clear even before the term "cold war" existed.
Yes, I am old enough to remember how we were all sold the promise of the "information superhighway", a bright future of a fully open, inclusive network where people would share knowledge freely in an instant. Every passing year the Internet has become:
- More censored.
- More commercialized.
- Less open, more walled-gardened.
- More banal (For example, academics used to write long Usenet posts, then they started to write blogs, now they mostly bicker on twitter)
- Less sincere and personal, now people mostly use it as just another PR tool.If you dont conform, you will be cancelled, downvoted,banned, etc.
Now, before someone comes to accuse me of "Old-man-yelling-at-the-clouds syndrome", I fully accept that in absolute terms we have more good things now, but the signal/noise ratio is also a very important thing, or as papa Stalin used to say: "Quantity has a quality on its own" , for every thoughtful post,blog,site we are drowned in thousands of crappy sites and it is not always very easy to distinguish them, because it is the sad reality that quality publications will little by little become crap just to survive or fit-in.
> And the crux of what von Neumann perceives as danger is "runaway" technology.
My reading of this article is that von Neumann was talking about carrying capacity, and not some runaway or rogue technology from exploding. We are just too big for this planet. He says this over and over.
I have a huge respect for this guy, but the irony of this is not lost on me:
> Since most time scales are fixed by human re-
action times, habits, and other physiological and psycho-
logical factors, the effect of the increased speed of technological processes was to enlarge the size of units— political, organizational, economic, and cultural —
affected by technological operations. That is, instead of
performing the same operations as before in less time,
now larger-scale operations were performed in the same
time.
We call von Neumann architectures to the very devices that have allowed to operate--by proxy, so far--in different timescales. And we do tons of stuff these days in less time, thanks in part to von Neumann.
Had he lived today, I would imagine he would be still concerned with timescales and sizes of physical places, but from an entirely different perspective.
Wow, that story about doing more in the same time instead of the same with less time, that sounds straight out of this villain origin story the New Yorker wrote about Robert Mercer [1]:
“While in college, he had worked on a military base in Albuquerque, and he had showed his superiors how to run certain computer programs a hundred times faster; instead of saving time and money, the bureaucrats ran a hundred times more equations. He concluded that the goal of government officials was “not so much to get answers as to consume the computer budget.”’
This as some justification for becoming a libertarian-activist billionaire, but it seems more likely this is a universal experience than Mercer plagiarizing von Neumann.
I would think someone who goes on to found a hedge fund would understand that if you drastically lower the cost of something which produces a valuable result, the effect should be to increase the demand for that value, not just shrug and say "no, we only do 1 of those per day".
In the general case, how is multi core different than saying “complicated CPU”, you still have computation in a separate box from data and move bits back and forth.
And if we’re being precise, aren’t we all on modified Harvard systems these days? :P (I am not a computer scientist)
Well there’s the logical difference, wherein a multi core system could compute in a sequence other than the straightforward logical sequence A -> B -> C -> D.
If you put a bunch of von Neumann machines in a room and connect them via a network cable, wouldn't that be a trivial extension of a von Neumann architecture? And isn't that sort of what a multicore system is, considering also that access to the same memory goes through a bottleneck?
Well the networked machine system would need vastly more sophisticated programming to operate at the same level of reliability. A difference in magnitude could be a difference in kind, though I haven’t actually read of anyone specifically addressing the point.
I wonder how long we'll go without another nuclear explosion used in war. I think the armageddon scenario is quite unlikely, simply because so few people have access to the needed amount of nukes to pull it off. It's only a couple of states which can do it. One of those states even survived a regime change without those nukes being triggered. However, there has been a trend of smaller states obtaining nuclear weapon capabilities. The more states you have, the more likely it is that one of them is willing to use the bomb.
So I think rather talking about whether these small states will use nukes, we should talk about when this will happen. 30 years? 50? 100? 500?
There is a few points that make it worrying but certainly not guaranteed.
MAD policy appears to be effectively over, or at least there is no longer any mention publicly, perhaps it is just assumed. While it can appear crazy, hence the name, it was a rather ingenious way to solve the problem, albeit we know now we have come dangerously close at times, at least we knew the risks and the lines that had to be crossed.
The next point and somewhat related is the change in nature of nuclear weapons. The variable ability of tactical nukes to change their explosive size, has resulted in a modern range of weapons that aren't as destructive as their elder brethren. It may seem like a good idea but the issue is it also opens the possibility of their more active use. A state may consider it acceptable. This could result in the reverting to an older policy of nuclear weapons. The MacArthur plans to use them in active combat, it becomes too easy to dial the Nuke down, target a military base and say "sure it's ok it's a legitimate military target".
That to me is the danger in the modern world. Attitudes, at least Western are still as a weapon of last resort but I can't predict the future and say that will always be the case or that other nations will share the same sentiment.
I should also say that nuclear weapons in dictatorships (more so than oligarchies like Soviet Union) is dangerous. Hopefully there will be those that can prevent its usage but dictatorships are fragile things. A dictator may consider their removal an existential threat.
This hasn't born out in practice. Dictators want to live - that's why they're dictators. They ubiquitously loot their countries widely enough to be able to retire to safer waters but don't.
Nuclear weapons in the modern world are useful deterrants, and that's it: a dictator with nuclear weapons has no external enemies they could consider targeting without guaranteeing total annihilation in response.
The one exception here is that using a nuclear weapon on your own country and people might be a useful exercise of power...but even then, it's abundantly clear that the most likely outcome is still total annihilation - the world won't tolerate a nation lighting off nukes against targets in it's own borders much either.
> I should also say that nuclear weapons in dictatorships (more so than oligarchies like Soviet Union) is dangerous.
I'd argue that nuclear weapons are no less safe in representative democracies. The only country to use nuclear weapons against another nation was a representative democracy. The only country to use nuclear weapons against another nation multiple times was a representative democracy. The only country to use nuclear weapons against civilian targets was a representative democracy.
MAD is still going strong. It's not military based, but economical.
It's the reason why theories about intentional release of COVID-19 are bunk.
China is worse off than it would have been without the virus.
Same goes for nukes. If Xi or Putin decide to nuke the US , people will assault their palaces in 3-6 months for food and water. Even if the US somehow fails to respond.
The global economy is interconnected to a degree that makes it impossible for a leader to order a nuclear attack and not have his own people remove him violently
> China is worse off than it would have been without the virus.
Only if you measure progress in economic terms. Nothing I've seen contradicts my belief that they are now geopolitically better off than before the pandemic.
Xi (and every leader for that matter) chances to stay in power are intrinsically linked to one metric:
Quality of life of the population
If you leave quality of life on the table because of geopolitical games you are shooting yourselves in the foot.
Even during massive state sponsored hate campaigns (such as the one promoted by Hitler against the Jews) the population spends just a bunch of minutes per day actually fuming and hating...the rest of the 24 hrs they live their lives.
Quality of life is a much more potent motivator to support the leader/party than hatred.
That's why any sane country and leader would never attack an economically important country intentionally.
Violent wars are relegated to Africa and the economically unimportant areas of the Middle East such as Yemen. With some small outbreaks here and there in ethnically hot areas such as Ukraine
The nightmare-inducing 1984 film "Threads" portrays a nuclear holocaust that begins with exactly these kind of small tactical nukes. <Spoilers>The nuclear conflict begins with the USSR using a nuclear-tipped SAM missile to wipe out a US bomber squadron. The US retaliates with a tactical nuke to wipe out a Russian base. After that, things get ugly fast.</Spoilers>
We said a similar proliferation sentence once on communication technology and biology - and here we are. Everybody can build and wield information-technology weapons and very soon everyone will be able to craft his/her own bio-weapon in a sink.
Exponential tech and social peace of a basically unaltered species do not go well together. Atomic capabilities are basically just one of the thousands of facets of this problem.
Imagine air-borne-electric taxis being prevalent in a future city. A 9/11 event might just look like a hack into traffic control and rerouting a thousand flying batteries to smash into buildings.
With great power, comes great incapability for responsibility.
>We said a similar proliferation sentence once on communication technology and biology - and here we are. Everybody can build and wield information-technology weapons and very soon everyone will be able to craft his/her own bio-weapon in a sink.
I wonder if there isn't a massive difference of likelihood between remote (IT) and physically deployed terrorism. For example, it may be easy to mess with smart cars by tampering with electronic billboards or leaving devices by the road to "fake out" cameras. But it's always been easy to leave dangerous things on a hidden part of a road (over a hill, around a sharp turn). It doesn't happen because very few people want to hurt random people, and those that might do it impulsively have plenty of time to rethink while going to the location, waiting for a chance, and then placing the trap. So I'm not worried the future will have more location-based terrorism or dangerous pranks. Even biological.
I'm worried about easy and remote terrorism. Where people don't have to see or even think about the victims, and there's little time for reconsideration between planning and acting.
Needs citation: I wonder if the need to be sneaky in a location is itself a guard rail. It requires the would-be terrorist to imagine how other people might catch them and react, which maybe triggers the social part of our nature. And maybe it only works if they imagine people being present and with faces, instead of disembodied actors on a network.
Its much more complicated and dangerous than you seem to imagine though. There all all kinds of ways nuclear weapons could still be used (including accidentally), and a lot more instability there (Samson option from a non NPT signing Israel, who by the way, used a Hollywood mogul with ties to Epstein to steal timing devices for use in manufacture, or what about an inceasingly unstable Pakistan, etc)
These days the threat model is broken because its preciously not needed to be a nation state to develops some major biological/chemical/drone etc attack with new technologies that on the battlefield would be called force multipliers.
So for those of you who also care about surveillance, I try to explain this is part of the reason for its increases... now when the threat model has evolved but you havent caught up, the rational response is (not saying right, but it makes logical sense on the surface to MICCIMAC) to surveil everything.
I have a great book on the post nuclear world I keep picking up to reread sections of that talks about the political transitions that will happen because of this that is worth a look: "The Shield of Achilles" tldr - corporations are going to take over the gaps left by increasingly ineffective government.
Gain of function research is a lot cheaper than nuclear weapons. It also doesn't radiologically pollute the world, can, theoretically, be genetically tailored, and can even be denied. These factors will make it the preferred means of waging world war scale war in the future if it's not already being used for that presently.
The armageddon scenario might be much easier to trigger than von Neumann believed.
Even 'just a few' 'small' nukes could kick up enough dust to the stratosphere to severely disrupt sunlight and weather, where 'severely disrupt' means (probable) total global social collapse.
I suggest you take a look at "Climate Impact of a Regional Nuclear Weapons Exchange: An Improved Assessment Based On Detailed Source Calculations" [1] or similar papers. Scientists have run nuclear bomb simulations (and these codes are rather good), used them as input to fire simulations (well validated through forest fires) and then done climate models and radiation (in the sense of "light") transport calculations of the atmosphere. The result is "fucks with the polar regions, but humanity is going to be fine".
So we need about 5-10 times larger bombings when ww2 to cool the global temperature with one degree. But we have increased the global temperature with one degree thanks to global warming. So you need at least 10-20 times larger bombings then ww2 to get a tiny atomic winter. And probably a lot larger to get any catastrophic cooling.
Well we’ve done 2 over cities closely spaced with each other and also following a firebombing campaign that burned a lot more cities. If a burning city or forest was all that was required for a nuclear winter we’d have had one long ago. Forests burn without the aid of nuclear weapons.
To get to nuclear winter levels of ash and dust you probably need dozens to hundreds of detonations and burning cities.
Even if you assign a low probability to an Armageddon, why you assume that a more "tactic" explosion will come from a small state instead of the states that have the vast majority of weapons in the planet?
The actual question is can we survive technologists and their paymasters.
It is interesting the JvN starts off on a political-economy note and proceeds to geopolitics considerations, yet doesn't really address the drivers of "industrial revolution" or "empire". He opines that "[a] much more satisfactory solution than technological prohibition would be eliminating war as "a means of national policy.""
There are alternatives, John. Maybe we should work on technology to temper the desire -- construed as "divine right" -- of the few to lord it over the many. That's one alternative. War is rarely a "national" concern. Historically it is the means employed by "princes" and "kings" and "queens" to assert dominance over other egomaniacs. "Technology" of course is used to whip up the masses to serve as canon fodder.
Another alternative is developing robust ethical systems that drill into the heads of budding technologists that their humanity is not worth a paycheck.
A very interesting conundrum, as human reaction times, and the size of the Earth, are unchanged, and are very likely to remain fixed, human polities can only progress towards further destabilization as population and destructive power grows.
The implication then is of progression from countries to blocs, from blocs to super-blocs, from super-blocs to an inevitable world state when the use, and potential use, of weapons becomes too great for even a continent size union to bear or credibly defend against.
Which breaks down the second there are civilians in space. Everyone who has control over a rocket engine has to a very good approximation a nuclear weapon.
I imagine that a future with a substantial space population will look very much like the past when the Steppe nomads could destroy more advanced civilization by just deciding they should.
The difference is that repopulating 10 billion people takes rather longer than the tens of millions that were usually killed in the past.
I imagine for that reason all space activities involving any significant amount of mass will be conducted under the strict control of a military, or pseudo-military hierarchy. And also as part of a world polity as such control proliferates since even one crazed defector out of say a 1000 such ‘rocket engine controllers’ could destroy civilization on Earth, preventing any possibility of defection would override all other goals.
A future where the equivalents of ‘Steppe nomads’ could throw around significant of mass would be a future where every habitable planet and fixed space facility would be slagged in short order, i.e. even more unstable and untenable.
"Can we produce the required adjustments with the necessary speed? The most hopeful answer is that the human species has been subjected to similar tests before and seems to have a congenital ability to come through, after varying amounts of trouble. To ask in advance for a complete recipe would be unreasonable. We can specify only the human qualities required: patience, flexibility, intelligence."
"Most thoughtful people agree that the world is in serious trouble. A nuclear war could mean a nuclear winter that would destroy all living things; fossil fuels will not last forever, and many other critical resources are nearing exhaustion; the earth grows steadily less habitable; and all this is exacerbated by a burgeoning population that resists control. The timetable may not be clear, but the threat is real. That many people have begun to find a recital of these dangers tiresome is perhaps an even greater threat.
Why is more not being done? Within a single generation, we have made extraordinary progress in the exploration of space, genetic engineering, electronic technology, and many other fields, but little has been done to solve what are certainly more serious problems. We know what could be done: We could destroy all nuclear weapons, limit family size, and adopt a much less polluting and less wasteful style of life. The mere listing of these steps is enough to show how far we are from taking them."
That solution already contains one glaring fallacy. I wonder how badly the other points would turn out if implemented. There’s something to be said about human intuition or even just revulsion when faced with such boldly insensitive proposals, it’s more often than not correct.
Progress has solved every problem the human race has ever had. I see no reason to believe regression is the way to ensure a better future. I trust precedent far more than models by academics who know very well just how unreliable predictive modeling can be.
> Progress has solved every problem the human race has ever had.
Taken literally, then the human race does not currently have any problems, otherwise there would be at least one of the problems we have ever had which is not solved.
But what I think you are actually arguing sounds tautological to me: for every problem that has been solved, it has been solved by "progress". I don't know if you mean technological advancement or social change or something else, but it appears as if progress is defined in terms of solving a problem.
All that is left is for you to show that every problem has an achievable solution to warrant the optimism in "progress". Otherwise, it just seems like your optimism is based in the premise that the human race has solved problems in the past; persistent, long-standing, and current human problems notwithstanding.
Did you read the paper I linked to? That is precisely the entire point of "Why are we not acting to save the world?". We need to apply more science and technology in the right places.
I read it. It’s clearly decades out of date. The specter of species-ending nuclear war was not ended by utopian visions of cooperation… it was the triumph of capitalism, not the ending of capitalism, that arguably coincided with the massive reduction in risk of nuclear war. We aren’t nearing depletion of fossil fuels (unfortunately!) but have much larger reserves than when that was written. Overpopulation is no longer a threat in most of the world and indeed under population and an aging population is rapidly becoming a much larger threat in much of the West and Far East.
Overpopulation wasn’t solved by intelligently overcoming evolutionary sexual urges but by invention and distribution of contraceptives combined with personal entertainment technology (“electricity is the most powerful contraception”), etc.
I find documents like that still highly influential but in many ways orthogonal to how we need to solve our current problems. Some lessons still apply but other points proved painfully wrong and sometimes backwards or at least irrelevant.
People need to update their thinking from 70s era ideas like those of Limits to Growth. Degrowther mindset in many ways is a rebirth of those 70s era ideas, and I think Degrowth as a movement is largely counterproductive for addressing climate change (although the sense of urgency is important!).
> I read it. It’s clearly decades out of date. The specter of species-ending nuclear war was not ended by utopian visions of cooperation… it was the triumph of capitalism, not the ending of capitalism, that arguably coincided with the massive reduction in risk of nuclear war.
Last I checked, the threat of nuclear war is not over. Sure it doesn't seem as likely today, but the bombs still exist and if our current prosperity was to halt, it seems their use would become more and more probable. By capitalism do you mean globalization? I agree governments have lost much of their power due to how powerful current corporations are, which was enabled by technology that allowed globalization. So there is less incentive for war nowadays. However when things get though.. cue all the impending changes that climate change will bring... I'm not so sure the threat won't reemerge.
> Overpopulation is no longer a threat in most of the world.
It seems overpopulation is as much of a problem today, as it was back then. It is not mentioned directly, but every time you hear about global warming, water scarcity, over-fishing, the great pacific garbage patch, etc. All of these things are problems of scale. Or do you believe that with 100 thousand humans we would have these problems?
I agree with the oil, but also notice your omission of pollution. As for the larger point of resource depletion, I'm not so sure we are any better than we were in 1980.
Overall I think you are missing the forest for the trees. The purpose of the paper is to highlight how our behaviors are selected for a past when they were beneficial, but currently we are changing our environment at an increasingly faster rate due to technology (and this is the point of the von Neumann paper also). Our methods for dealing with the problems that arise are not good enough.
It seems the subjects here are grand and nebulous so there are no easy answers. At this level I think the most we can say for sure is that there are causes and consequences, and that certainly at some point everything will end.
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.". ― Frank Herbert, Dune
Regarding the environment and humans decreasing the Earth's ability to sustain life, the tech community doesn't seem to pick up on the pattern that technology augments the users' goals and values. As long as our culture values growth, extraction, externalizing costs, comfort, and convenience, technology that makes that system more efficient may decrease pollution in one element, but it makes the system more efficient. That is, we pollute and decrease Earth's ability to sustain life more efficiently.
When Watt made his steam engine, coal use went up. Uber was supposed to lower congestion and miles driven but they went up. We repeat the pattern over and over. The "father" of the Green Revolution, on winning the Nobel Prize said
> "The green revolution has won a temporary success in man’s war against hunger and deprivation; it has given man a breathing space. If fully implemented, the revolution can provide sufficient food for sustenance during the next three decades. But the frightening power of human reproduction must also be curbed; otherwise the success of the green revolution will be ephemeral only.
> Most people still fail to comprehend the magnitude and menace of the “Population Monster”. . . Since man is potentially a rational being, however, I am confident that within the next two decades he will recognize the self-destructive course he steers along the road of irresponsible population growth…"
He understood the value of technology as well as anyone in theory and practice. He recognized that we have to change our values from growth to enjoying what we have, from externalizing costs to responsibility, and so on or technology will keep exacerbating and augmenting our problems. That pattern includes nuclear, electric vehicles, and space travel. They may solve local problems, but they exacerbate the systemic effect. Electric vehicles, for example, make sense as a tactic under the strategy of reducing vehicles. Nuclear makes sense only as a tactic under the strategy of lowering power consumption. But we keep valuing producing more cars and energy.
This community seems over and over again to miss the systemic and unintended side effects. If we had clean fusion under our current values, we wouldn't live as we do today only cleaner. We would grow again until we hit more limits and had to live again under scarcity or natural calamity. Borlaug worked the second half his career to help people see the consequences of helping solve only part of our system but not the system.
If we have to stop growing at some point, at least acknowledging the laws of thermodynamics, the sooner we do it, with the smaller number of people, the more abundance we can live with. The more people we have, the harder to limit ourselves. If we don't, nature will, as we all know.
In a way, it's already happened, it's just that there is a delay effect and it takes time for things to... unravel ("the future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed yet")
I'd say we've basically known since at least https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth (but in many ways much earlier than that) and have simply been in denial. Yes we adapt and leverage technology and innovation, but there are rather hard time limits and we've exhausted our window quite some time ago. The correction (to use a friendly word) will be very painful.
The number of people is /not/ remotely the limit on abundance or efficiency. Do you know when Holocene extinction occured? During human population bottlenecks from localized depletion of food sources. No overpopulation - we were endangered and bear the scars of it genetically to this day. No technological efficiency there to blame. And no mythical elyium values - they didn't have that priveledge. Any uncontacted tribe that managed to live hunter gatherer by definition was extremely lucky at the time. They had an environment capable of supporting them stationary and no rivals as threats. If they were nomadic over any significant area they would have been known and exposed to human networks.
Efficiency is our only way out of it. Farm acreage shrinking isn't from shortage of housing but an abundance of productivity.
> If we had clean fusion under our current values, we wouldn't live as we do today only cleaner. We would grow again until we hit more limits and had to live again under scarcity or natural calamity. Borlaug worked the second half his career to help people see the consequences of helping solve only part of our system but not the system.
It's almost as if a population of apes that evolved to live in groups of 200 individuals maximum and has survived only by constantly spreading to new areas once resources are depleted can't run a sustainable planetary society.
Every single trait that we need to run a sustainable planetary society is selected against in the local incentive system of both evolution, capitalism, and technological advancement.
Frankly, our greed is eating this planet. And we are greedy because the greedy strategy worked best (evolutionarily) up until now, and greed was baked into our genes by all the selection pressures of the many systems we are a part of and set up ourselves.
Jevons Paradox is often misunderstood and misapplied.
Improving efficiency of coal burning and extraction can increase use of coal, especially if no alternative exists and it is the bottleneck for economic development. But if you develop a more efficient technology that doesn’t burn coal, it’s not going to automatically mean more coal will be used. Natural gas, wind, and solar have all increased in absolute terms in the last two decades in the US while coal burning has halved in absolute terms, reducing overall absolute grid emissions in the US.
Anyway, just wanted to point that out. (But I will say Jevons Paradox is a good argument against just relying on improved internal combustion engine efficiency in hybrid cars and buses vs using another energy source for transportation entirely, like renewable and nuclear electricity for trains, electric buses and electric cars.)
> it’s not going to automatically mean more coal will be used. Natural gas, wind, and solar have all increased in absolute terms in the last two decades in the US while coal burning has halved in absolute terms, reducing overall absolute grid emissions in the US.
In a tightly interconnected global economy it is disingenuous to disconnect the energy usage of one country or region from another.
US coal usage goes down because the things we used to build with that energy are now built in China. Solar panels in the US are cheaper than ever because manufacturing has switched to being 80% Chinese production, and guess where the energy to build those solar panels comes from? Coal.
As you can clearly see no source of energy has decreased overtime globally.
Looking at local energy production is just an accounting trick, but the planet doesn't really care. You can't combat global warming by saying "look, technically we didn't produce that energy on our shores!"
If you forced China to decrease its use of fossil fuels you would immediately feel the impact on the global economy. Just because the power plants aren't within our borders doesn't mean that's not energy being consumed for our benefit.
Unless we choose not to use it. Our culture values growth and extraction. Other cultures have lived far longer than the period from the Industrial Revolution until now, often with higher marks of health, longevity, abundance, and prosperity without lowering their environments' ability to sustain life. Only very recently did our lifespans pass typical ones for other cultures, but in the US they're already dropping again.
We sometimes do so protect. We have national parks and protect endangered species, for example. We can do plenty more. Jevon's Paradox and rebound effects don't have to happen.
Trash that will age as poorly, as long as people keep solving problems. There is no perpetual motion machine, so the answer to this shitty rhetorical question is: We die when we stop making new technology. Welcome to the beginning of Infinity.
"The carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by industry's burning of coal and oil-—more than half of it during the last generation—may have changed the atmosphere's composition sufficiently to account for a general warming of the world by about one degree Fahrenheit." (Page 512 / 666 / 9)