[HN Gopher] The Complexity Trap
___________________________________________________________________
The Complexity Trap
Author : mocko
Score : 28 points
Date : 2022-05-28 07:40 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (consciousnessofsheep.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (consciousnessofsheep.co.uk)
| thirdplace_ wrote:
| I don't see big problem here. At some point in the future we
| probably can't increase our consumption any further. Maybe even
| have to reduce it. It's gonna be painful but not catastropic.
|
| I don't see this is a trap. More like an inevitability.
| Ecstatify wrote:
| [Alternative link]
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220528074047/https://conscious...
| mftb wrote:
| I'm surprised this hasn't elicited more commentary. His thesis
| seemed to be pretty simple, that as we burn through our low-cost,
| high-return, surplus energy, our economics worsen. We then seek
| to remedy the problem through more energy-intensive complexity
| (The Complexity Trap), which doesn't work very well. He then
| seemed to argue that we got kind of a pass during the Industrial
| Age, because of oil's greater efficiency than coal, but that we
| won't be so lucky this time.
|
| I guess I'm surprised someone hasn't come back with some well
| known counter theory? I kind of like this one, but I'm sure there
| are other interesting ones?
| arpa wrote:
| ... uranium to oil is what oil is to coal.
| beefman wrote:
| No coincidence that Soddy was the discoverer of
| transmutation. Writing in the 1920s, before the fission chain
| reaction was conceived, he anticipated its potential
|
| "If ... there is at hand not merely in the remote stars, but
| at our feet, an unlimited source of energy of the order of a
| million times more powerful than any known, what tremendous
| social consequences await the discovery of artificial
| transmutation!"
| bsedlm wrote:
| but whereas once upon a time one could find very good quality
| oil very easily. uranium has always had to be processed a lot
| to reach usable form.
|
| also, making oil into usable gas also yields (or used to
| yield?) lot's of very useful resources used for plastic and
| lubricants and so on.
| beefman wrote:
| It turns out this processing has the magnitude of a
| rounding error in the uranium lifecycle. Also, not all
| reactors require it.
| mftb wrote:
| That's an interesting idea. I also think quantum may be to
| traditional computing as oil was to coal. The OP would
| probably just write it off as increased complexity though.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| While a good set up the conclusion isn't really supported by the
| arguments. Just increasingly bizzare assertions that complexity
| is somehow a trap while conflating it with energy usage
| (nevermind that said complexity is often used to reduce usage of
| energy).
|
| It seems to be one of its own tiresome arrogant meme "the world
| is too complex for me personally to understand so we should make
| things worse so I feel better!".
| andrewjl wrote:
| _The point is that most of these technologies have already reaped
| the cheap and easy, and, indeed, almost all of the hard and
| expensive improvements that are ever going to be made. In this
| respect, we are entering a period similar to the early twentieth
| century when we hit the limits to coal-powered technologies. The
| big difference today being that there is no even more energy-
| dense and easily available new energy source available to us to
| usher in a new suite of technologies in the way that oil-based
| technologies rapidly replaced coal in the years after World War
| Two._
|
| Disagree, we have at least two and possibly third sources of
| energy that can replace oil. Those being solar & wind plus
| nuclear respectively. Historically speaking it took large
| investments in drilling techniques and infrastructure to allow
| oil to replace coal as a major energy source. It isn't that
| different now.
| martijnvds wrote:
| Not to mention efficiency gains on the energy consumption side.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-05-29 23:01 UTC)