Why Economic Growth Will Fall
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Why Economic Growth Will Fall
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Re: Why Economic Growth Will Fall
#2This. Finally. People on HN think that startups, technology and economic growth have unlimited potential. This is pure stupidity at its finest. Observations of the natural world show a general trend: that everything, from physical resources to energy has limits. It is a mistake to believe that this general observation does not apply to technology and the human imagination.
While we can comprehend what a limit in oil production is... we simply cannot comprehend exactly where or what a limit to the human imagination or technology is... This leads to a false illusion that there is no limit... The reality is: An inability to comprehend something does not lend any evidence to the idea that human potential is unlimited. Like science, true understanding comes from observations of the natural world and as all things observed in the natural world... it is far more likely for humanity to eventually reach a limit in technology.
Whether that limit is among us is debateable. Computing has shown dramatic improvements in the past decade but outside of having an app for everything in my phone, nothing has really changed in the past two decades.
Re: Why Economic Growth Will Fall
#3This. Finally. People on HN think that startups, technology and economic growth have unlimited potential. This is pure stupidity at its finest. Observations of the natural world show a general trend: that everything, from physical resources to energy has limits. It is a mistake to believe that this general observation does not apply to technology and the human imagination. While we can comprehend what a limit in oil…
> Computing has shown dramatic improvements in the past decade but outside of having an app for everything in my phone, nothing has really changed in the past two decades.
If you exclude making the Internet accessible to hundreds of millions of people, critical improvements in AI and robotics, and all the other stuff about which computer scientists write thousands of papers each year, then yes, nothing much has changed.
Re: Why Economic Growth Will Fall
#4This. Finally. People on HN think that startups, technology and economic growth have unlimited potential. This is pure stupidity at its finest. Observations of the natural world show a general trend: that everything, from physical resources to energy has limits. It is a mistake to believe that this general observation does not apply to technology and the human imagination. While we can comprehend what a limit in oil…
This is some of the shallowest, most misleading insight I've ever read.
"Human achievement will probably reach a limit at some point" is effectively an empty statement. Even if you could take its truth for granted, it is completely useless information.
There is zero actionable difference between a limit that doesn't exist, and a limit that is unknowable and unguessable. Your behaviour should stay exactly the same either way - i.e. try to achieve as much as you can - until that limit becomes known or guessable in some way.
(This argument is basically a very slight variation on Russell's teapot.)
Re: Why Economic Growth Will Fall
#5This. Finally. People on HN think that startups, technology and economic growth have unlimited potential. This is pure stupidity at its finest. Observations of the natural world show a general trend: that everything, from physical resources to energy has limits. It is a mistake to believe that this general observation does not apply to technology and the human imagination. While we can comprehend what a limit in oil…
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Re: Why Economic Growth Will Fall
#6This. Finally. People on HN think that startups, technology and economic growth have unlimited potential. This is pure stupidity at its finest. Observations of the natural world show a general trend: that everything, from physical resources to energy has limits. It is a mistake to believe that this general observation does not apply to technology and the human imagination. While we can comprehend what a limit in oil…
The comparison you make with the natural world is interesting. If you consider natural systems to be innovators in the space of making new organisms then what have we seen?
First, there were eras of explosive growth into new areas - for example, the first organisms to be able to live on land had a huge new area to grow on. Although the Cambrian 'explosion' may not be as rapid as once thought, the diversity of body plans when multicellularity was invented shows what can happen in moving into a new area.
So the current technological era might be a lot like modern biology - there's never going to be a repeat of the discovery of how to use oxygen, but species will live and die as before. Except of course for humans.
Confusingly here, the metaphor catches up with reality - humans as organisms have become humans as technological innovators, which has the potential for unlimited changes to biology. We could wipe out nearly all life, we could make endless new variants of existing or imagined organisms.
Finally, there's intelligence which got us here. If we succeed in making a truly artificial intelligence, then that could explore the limits of what intelligence can do. Perhaps there are even limits to that - certainly there are physical constraints - but we're not at that limit quite yet.
Re: Why Economic Growth Will Fall
#7Considering we live in an infinite universe I do not see why economic growth can not continue even accelerate.
Especially seeing that sometime this century we will get cheap space travel (getting there) and AI (getting there) and transition from fossil fuels to renewables and fusion (getting there)
Tho' yes seeing how some of our best and brightest are working on how to serve more ads and how to get people spend their free time locked in their walled garden...
Re: Why Economic Growth Will Fall
#8This. Finally. People on HN think that startups, technology and economic growth have unlimited potential. This is pure stupidity at its finest. Observations of the natural world show a general trend: that everything, from physical resources to energy has limits. It is a mistake to believe that this general observation does not apply to technology and the human imagination. While we can comprehend what a limit in oil…
This is some of the shallowest, most misleading insight I've ever read. "Human achievement will probably reach a limit at some point" is effectively an empty statement. Even if you could take its truth for granted, it is completely useless information. There is zero actionable difference between a limit that doesn't exist, and a limit that is unknowable and unguessable. Your behaviour should stay exactly the same eit…
The simple logical flaw in GP's argumentation is that it summarizes rather abstract phenomena (human inventions, potential of startups) to compare it against concrete, limited phenomena (oil production). To make that jump, that assumption would have to be proven.
Re: Why Economic Growth Will Fall
#9This. Finally. People on HN think that startups, technology and economic growth have unlimited potential. This is pure stupidity at its finest. Observations of the natural world show a general trend: that everything, from physical resources to energy has limits. It is a mistake to believe that this general observation does not apply to technology and the human imagination. While we can comprehend what a limit in oil…
This sort of dystopian hand-wringing seems to have a certain cachet aomong some crowds, but seems to mostly stem from profound ignorance and a failure of the same imagination you find so limited. What makes humans different than all of the other parts of the natural world is that same imagination and technology that you seem to fundementally misunderstand. We can change our environment, and more importantly we can change the scope of the environment: if the resources of a small area are insufficient we can bring in more, if the resources of an entire planet are insufficient to meet our imagination we can dream bigger and actually execute on those dreams.
Imagination itself is only limited by our technological progress and there are few limits beyond physics itself to stop us there. Two centuries ago our dreams were merely to fly like birds or travel swifter than horses, now we can dream of travel among the stars. Imagine what we will dream of in a century from now.
Re: Why Economic Growth Will Fall
#10This. Finally. People on HN think that startups, technology and economic growth have unlimited potential. This is pure stupidity at its finest. Observations of the natural world show a general trend: that everything, from physical resources to energy has limits. It is a mistake to believe that this general observation does not apply to technology and the human imagination. While we can comprehend what a limit in oil…
Of course there are limits (e.g. mass of human population will never exceed Earth's mass etc). But what these limits are?
For example we can double the size of human economy by colonizing Mars. This sounds very achievable to me.