An introduction to the Metacrisis by Daniel Schmachtenberger, founding member of The Consilience Project. Moderated by Niklas Adalberth, founder of Norrsken ...
Fair enough all good points, but the reason we’re all here beyond the natural carrying capacity and eating the planet is because of the exponential tech curve (Haber-Bosch and others) that we’ve been in since discovering fossil fuels. If the energy is there, we will use it to grow at the detriment to everything else, it’s in our nature. If we somehow manage to complete the green energy transition that’s probably even worse for our long term survival, because instead of running out of accessible fossil fuels and being forced to degrow, we’ll keep the growth machine running and accelerate this mass extinction and knock down the rest of the planetary boundaries. All new technologies will allow us to increase the scale of our impacts to the planet.
Thanks for the link, I haven’t read it yet but it looks interesting.
Yeah it’s the “tech curve” being exponential that I don’t see happening. The Haber-Bosch process (after the end of the 19th century, but only by a few years) was revolutionary, and a fine example of the kind of rapid increase in our ability to exploit the hell out of everything that hasn’t been happening so much lately. The increase in technologically-enabled power may have started looking exponential at a certain point, but I don’t believe it has continued like that all the way to the present. The gains today are more incremental, less momentous. The rise and fall of Moore’s law shows a similar pattern in microcosm: Great new invention, rapid improvement, exponential growth that people assume will last forever, then its limits are approached and further progress in that direction is slow and complicated. When I try to imagine how the total curve of technological power has gone I can’t avoid the impression that its rate of growth topped out somewhere mid 20th century at the latest.
Sure it’d be disastrous if we somehow kept up for any great length of time the exponential growth in energy use, production, and population even without fossil fuels, but the idea that this might actually happen starting from this level seems more like a techno-optimist fantasy than any kind of realistic scenario worth considering. Like some other ideas of the Consilience Project it seems to me as if it might be more relevant to some future post-collapse civilisation that needs to avoid making the same mistakes that will bring down ours.
I admit I’m on the verge of losing sight of the overall point of this thread. But thinking about it more, I will add that looking at the actual tech curve itself may not be that important, depending on where you draw the line between technology and capability. For example, it may not matter that increase in transistor density is slowing down when global total compute keeps increasing exponentially. Further, how would quantum computing factor into this (the movement in the cryptography space suggests that a post-quantum world is imminent). On the topic of LLMs, would it matter if those stagnate while the ability of companies and states to manipulate us and drown us in misinformation keeps growing exponentially? And how would the advent of AGI factor into this - in some ways that would be the last invention we have to make ourselves. I guess the point is that some advancements, even ones that are just incremental, seem to have an outsized effect on our ability to impact the world around us.
Anyway, I read the article you linked and enjoyed it. It reminded me a bit of Meditations On Moloch, also a good read if you haven’t seen it yet, attempting to explain the behaviors of civilizations.
That there’s a difference between transistor density and total compute capacity does seem crucial. We can and often do have more microprocessors in the world, and more automobiles, more coal mines, more injection-molded plastic, more batteries, more bombs, more of everything without any improvement in technology whatsoever. Just more of the same, mass-produced by the ever-expanding machine. If there does exist some curve that measures overall tech progress in a useful way, the curve which measures its applications and their effects is necessarily offset from it in time and need not follow its shape. It seems natural to expect our thrust into ecological overshoot to continue for some time after the big impulse that pushed us into it has begun to fade. Much like the “macabre whale analogy” from Scott Alexander there, in which we’re enjoying the results of a whalefall.
As long as resources aren’t scarce enough to lock us in a war of all against all, we can do silly non-optimal things – like art and music and philosophy and love – and not be outcompeted by merciless killing machines most of the time.
On a more optimistic note I think history demonstrates that art, music, and love are not so easily done away with although I’m not so sure about philosophy. Scarcity is going to make a comeback, and the results will be as unpredictable as anything people imagine AGI might do if it does actually arrive some day. I suspect we should ideally aim to make some changes to what is normally thought of as “human nature” in order to avoid the worst outcomes, but that they need not be larger ones than those that have happened in the past. But who the hell knows really.
Fair enough all good points, but the reason we’re all here beyond the natural carrying capacity and eating the planet is because of the exponential tech curve (Haber-Bosch and others) that we’ve been in since discovering fossil fuels. If the energy is there, we will use it to grow at the detriment to everything else, it’s in our nature. If we somehow manage to complete the green energy transition that’s probably even worse for our long term survival, because instead of running out of accessible fossil fuels and being forced to degrow, we’ll keep the growth machine running and accelerate this mass extinction and knock down the rest of the planetary boundaries. All new technologies will allow us to increase the scale of our impacts to the planet.
Thanks for the link, I haven’t read it yet but it looks interesting.
Yeah it’s the “tech curve” being exponential that I don’t see happening. The Haber-Bosch process (after the end of the 19th century, but only by a few years) was revolutionary, and a fine example of the kind of rapid increase in our ability to exploit the hell out of everything that hasn’t been happening so much lately. The increase in technologically-enabled power may have started looking exponential at a certain point, but I don’t believe it has continued like that all the way to the present. The gains today are more incremental, less momentous. The rise and fall of Moore’s law shows a similar pattern in microcosm: Great new invention, rapid improvement, exponential growth that people assume will last forever, then its limits are approached and further progress in that direction is slow and complicated. When I try to imagine how the total curve of technological power has gone I can’t avoid the impression that its rate of growth topped out somewhere mid 20th century at the latest.
Sure it’d be disastrous if we somehow kept up for any great length of time the exponential growth in energy use, production, and population even without fossil fuels, but the idea that this might actually happen starting from this level seems more like a techno-optimist fantasy than any kind of realistic scenario worth considering. Like some other ideas of the Consilience Project it seems to me as if it might be more relevant to some future post-collapse civilisation that needs to avoid making the same mistakes that will bring down ours.
I admit I’m on the verge of losing sight of the overall point of this thread. But thinking about it more, I will add that looking at the actual tech curve itself may not be that important, depending on where you draw the line between technology and capability. For example, it may not matter that increase in transistor density is slowing down when global total compute keeps increasing exponentially. Further, how would quantum computing factor into this (the movement in the cryptography space suggests that a post-quantum world is imminent). On the topic of LLMs, would it matter if those stagnate while the ability of companies and states to manipulate us and drown us in misinformation keeps growing exponentially? And how would the advent of AGI factor into this - in some ways that would be the last invention we have to make ourselves. I guess the point is that some advancements, even ones that are just incremental, seem to have an outsized effect on our ability to impact the world around us.
Anyway, I read the article you linked and enjoyed it. It reminded me a bit of Meditations On Moloch, also a good read if you haven’t seen it yet, attempting to explain the behaviors of civilizations.
That there’s a difference between transistor density and total compute capacity does seem crucial. We can and often do have more microprocessors in the world, and more automobiles, more coal mines, more injection-molded plastic, more batteries, more bombs, more of everything without any improvement in technology whatsoever. Just more of the same, mass-produced by the ever-expanding machine. If there does exist some curve that measures overall tech progress in a useful way, the curve which measures its applications and their effects is necessarily offset from it in time and need not follow its shape. It seems natural to expect our thrust into ecological overshoot to continue for some time after the big impulse that pushed us into it has begun to fade. Much like the “macabre whale analogy” from Scott Alexander there, in which we’re enjoying the results of a whalefall.
On a more optimistic note I think history demonstrates that art, music, and love are not so easily done away with although I’m not so sure about philosophy. Scarcity is going to make a comeback, and the results will be as unpredictable as anything people imagine AGI might do if it does actually arrive some day. I suspect we should ideally aim to make some changes to what is normally thought of as “human nature” in order to avoid the worst outcomes, but that they need not be larger ones than those that have happened in the past. But who the hell knows really.