[HN Gopher] This Can't Go On
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This Can't Go On
Author : rfw300
Score : 37 points
Date : 2021-08-03 20:20 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cold-takes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cold-takes.com)
| babelfish wrote:
| This is what terrifies me about the FIRE movement.
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| Could you elaborate? I am genuinely interested.
| kapp_in_life wrote:
| How do you mean? I'm sure even with flat yields people in that
| camp will be far better off than the average person since one
| of the prerequisites is getting assets equal to 20-30x your
| annual expense
| Kydlaw wrote:
| I'm surprised the author tackled this topic without mentioning
| World3 from The Limits to Growth or the heavy reliance of modern,
| developed societies on fossil fuels? Thus it's a very interesting
| economical opinion, but without adding the physical aspects
| (energy consumption) into the reflection, I don't see any
| interesting result.
| N00bN00b wrote:
| Honestly, I can just change what I consider economic growth and
| the problem immediately goes away. I can make that graph do
| anything I want, just a matter of convincing enough people to go
| along with it.
|
| Also:
|
| >Why can't this go on?
|
| >If this holds up, then 8200 years from now
|
| Alright. Well how about we worry about that in 8100 years?
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| fundamentally all human growth and expansion is in order to
| satiate desires for dopamine and other feel good chemicals.
|
| It's a relative cycle including what one has recently
| experienced, combined with observations of relative status (eg,
| what is your neighbor going through). This is a process whereby
| the only way to maintain good feelings is to incrementally
| consume more units of good per unit of dilution (eg time, or
| density). For example getting more reward experiences in
| succession -- this is the example of social media + video games.
| Another example is high fructose corn syrup sweeter per gram...
|
| Until we can get off that treadmill we're going to be more and
| more consumptive (than both our previous selves, and our peers)
| ehmish wrote:
| I think the thing that this article misses is that per capita
| growth (the thing that's important for people's experienced life
| satisfaction) can essentially grow a lot further with fewer atoms
| under cultivation if you increase density. Humanity probably
| doesnt have much more area under cultivation than 300 years ago,
| but it has several orders of magnitude more people. The way i see
| the future going is less people, but each one is a billionaire.
| Kind of like how when stars run out of fuel they don't just
| wither away, but turn into very hot, dense and fast spinning
| white dwarfs.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| A billionaire 150 years ago could not save their life from a
| now-trivial infection with penicillin, or talk to a loved one
| in the next town on the phone.
|
| If we're lucky and smart, we will be vastly better off than
| today's billionaires, even with modest bank balances.
| AndrewGaspar wrote:
| World population in 1700 was 600 million, which is a single
| order of magnitude.
| Kydlaw wrote:
| Thank you for checking, I was dubious too about that claim.
| iforgetmypass wrote:
| Does HN not have rules against clickbait titles?
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| It seems the masses disagree with you, but personally I also
| find it objectionable. I shouldn't have to click through and
| increase someone's ad view count just to find out the article
| is completely irrelevant to me.
| iforgetmypass wrote:
| I see this all the time on HN and it's maddening. Every other
| site I read has rules against clickbait titles.
| tempestn wrote:
| I believe the rule is against changing the title to make it
| more click-baity. (Or for any reason besides necessary
| shortening.) In this case the title of the original article was
| used unchanged.
| iforgetmypass wrote:
| Wouldn't this be the original article author's problem, not
| HN readership's?
| tempestn wrote:
| I would argue that the stagnation option is the most likely.
| After all, the exponential growth in technology and economics is
| made up of a series of smaller 'S' curves in individual
| technologies and industries. Each goes through an initial period
| of slow growth, followed by a rapid expansion, and then a slowing
| and leveling off of growth. We're already seeing this same
| pattern on a larger scale with population growth. Certainly a
| significant drop is possible. I suppose a 'singularity' is
| conceivable as well. But an S curve, with growth leveling off
| over time, seems like a good prior. (Of course, it won't be
| perfectly smooth. Zoomed in, it might end up feeling more like
| the sawtooth graph.)
| iammisc wrote:
| This is silly. For one, large portions of the economy are _not_
| built on actual material. For example, take software, an
| evergrowing segment of the economy.
|
| The number of computer programs is incredibly large. Even
| assuming a dense packed instruction set, even 512 bits is already
| enough to contain more programs than can be assigned to
| individual atoms in a universe! That's right. We could label
| every single atom with a number that would fit in the AVX
| instruction registers. That scale is mind-blowing, but it's true.
|
| Take for example another growing part of the economy: AI. AI
| models like GPT-3 contain billions of floating point parameters.
| The number of potential configurations of the weights (which is
| what ultimately holds the value when models like GPT are
| productized) is orders of magnitude larger than the universe.
|
| The fallacy here is the equivalence of economic goods to material
| goods. Many economic goods are not material.
|
| Moreover, many material goods hold no value due to the material,
| but rather to the placement or arrangement of the material. In
| this sense, the same 'stuff' can be part of multiple goods and
| each of those goods can be more expensive than the previous good.
| For example, if I paid a laborer $10 to mine aluminum, the
| refinery $2 to refine it, the sheet metal factory $3 to make a
| sheet, the sheet metal worker $10 to make a good of it, and then
| the installer $20 to install it. I've made ever more money off
| the same 'stuff'. As industries like recycling take off, there is
| yet more opportunity to be had in the same amount of stuff.
|
| And this doesn't even begin to touch on services and such, which
| do not even require material goods proportional with the economic
| value added.
|
| In other words, there is no reason to believe we will hit up
| against an atomic wall after which we will be unable to expand
| the economy due to a shortage of atoms.
| Kydlaw wrote:
| > The fallacy here is the equivalence of economic goods to
| material goods. Many economic goods are not material.
|
| But what part of the economy does this represents? Most of the
| Internet run through ads, whose objective is to sell stuff. The
| real fallacy is the knowledge economy here. The value of
| Internet is that it sells physical stuff, not that it makes
| people smarter or happier.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| > The number of computer programs is incredibly large. Even
| assuming a dense packed instruction set, even 512 bits is
| already enough to contain more programs than can be assigned to
| individual atoms in a universe! That's right. We could label
| every single atom with a number that would fit in the AVX
| instruction registers. That scale is mind-blowing, but it's
| true.
|
| You're going the wrong direction. The issue isn't fitting atoms
| into data. It's fitting data into atoms. You can give every
| atom a GUID, but you can't give every GUID an atom!
|
| You don't have to put it in terms of economy. Our rate of
| growth for energy and data are unsustainable. Current growth
| would hit a wall informed by our understanding of physics
| somewhere very roughly in the thousands-of-years-range. So
| either we go beyond our needs for space and energy or growth
| slows down. Both of those are a big change from the status quo.
| Kydlaw wrote:
| > Current growth would hit a wall informed by our
| understanding of physics somewhere very roughly in the
| thousands-of-years-range.
|
| A thousand years is a very optimistic estimate I would say.
| World3 (which is still on track of its predictions) predicts
| before 2050, which seems realistic considering the current
| context.
| babelfish wrote:
| Everything you bring up requires mass amounts of energy, which
| consumes mass amounts of fossil fuels and natural gases, and is
| not "free".
| dougweltman wrote:
| How much energy is stored in the chemical bonds of the
| materials that make up a camera? Or a Garmin GPS? Or a
| newspaper?
| arka2147483647 wrote:
| Camera is made of materials which need to be mined,
| transported, refined, milled, soldered, molded, etc.
|
| So quite a lot of energy has been used to make the camera.
| It is not really about of the chemical bonds in the camera,
| but about the the energy the whole manufacturing chain
| uses.
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