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Ask HN: Is the world going to shit?

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Re: Ask HN: Is the world going to shit?

#111

Post by aristofun »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #67
aristofun wrote: post #65

This is a very dangerous narrative, for some reason popular nowadays — the scarcity mindset, the story of “limited resources”. If you go back 5000 years ago you’ll see there’s only so many people the planet can feed. The actual fact is that people _create_ resources when they cooperate (this is why now our planet can afford so many people that ancient would never imagine possible). It’s not about the technology but a…

Farming produces more food than needed, so you can feed others. Technology just makes farming more efficient, so a smaller percent of the population needs to farm. As long as there's still potential for more farming, population growth means more farmers producing food. If you exhaust the planet's resources for farming, or climate change reduces it, more people won't mean more resources anymore.

Why do you think farming is a linear game?

What makes you think it’s impossible to get food from other sources that we didn’t invent yet and would probably not even call “farming”?

Re: Ask HN: Is the world going to shit?

#112

Post by cercatrova »

soulofmischief wrote: post #83
solarmist wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly, but even if 90% or even 99% of humanity dies it still isn't an existential threat. If 100k humans survive that's more than enough to carry on humans and civilization as a whole.

This take always rubs me the wrong way because it conveniently ignores the fact that letting 90% of humanity die is wrong and should be avoided given that 1% of humanity is more or less to blame for this mess.

If one is going to use a word that means a specific thing then get annoyed because that word didn't conform to what they wanted it to mean, I mean, can we do anything about it? They should have used a different word. Calamitous or monumental are good words for what you're describing.

Re: Ask HN: Is the world going to shit?

#113

Post by cercatrova »

aristofun wrote: post #111
ASalazarMX wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Farming produces more food than needed, so you can feed others. Technology just makes farming more efficient, so a smaller percent of the population needs to farm. As long as there's still potential for more farming, population growth means more farmers producing food. If you exhaust the planet's resources for farming, or climate change reduces it, more people won't mean more resources anymore.

Why do you think farming is a linear game? What makes you think it’s impossible to get food from other sources that we didn’t invent yet and would probably not even call “farming”?

Indeed, it reminds me of lab grown meat, or lab growth anything for that matter. Didn't Star Trek have a machine that could make any food possible just by putting molecules together? That's not farming and yet it could feed people.

Re: Ask HN: Is the world going to shit?

#114

Post by cercatrova »

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #104
midoridensha wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with wind energy: wind is ultimately created by solar energy heating the atmosphere, so wind turbines are simply removing some energy from the atmosphere and converting it to useful work.

Its still exponential growth so it will eventually mean all possible useful wind and solar is used up. Then what?

If we truly used up all solar and wind power on the planet (which is a mind-bogglingly large amount of energy) there is still nuclear fission which is also a very large amount. Then if we invent fusion, that's basically infinite energy for free. And on top of all that, Earth is not the only planet, and the Sun has energy that does not only hit the Earth, so we can be construct a Dyson sphere.

Energy from our human scale today is basically infinite when we count all the sources available to us.

Re: Ask HN: Is the world going to shit?

#115

Post by colinmhayes »

hypefi wrote: post #75
JoeMayoBot wrote: post #74

The book, Enlightenment Now, by Steven Pinker makes the opposite argument that over time, life is getting better. It tracks various aspects of human life throughout history with research, statistics, and graphs that tell a different story.

Do you know about the "The Turkey Fallacy" ? "the story of a turkey who is fed by the farmer every morning for 1,000 days. Eventually the turkey comes to expect that every visit from the farmer means more good food. After all, that’s all that has ever happened so the turkey figures that’s all that can and will ever happen. But then Day 1,001 arrives. It’s two days before Thanksgiving and when the farmer shows up, he…

luckily we control our own destiny unlike said turkey. Pretty paternalistic to compare people to pets. Quality of life has improved because of our actions, not the hand of some farmer.

This is the same line of thinking as the famous "what happened to all the horses" thought which conveniently ignores the fact that horses only existed to serve as tools for people and were therefore replaced when a more useful tool was found.

Re: Ask HN: Is the world going to shit?

#116

Post by koyanisqatsi »

scotty79 wrote: post #110
koyanisqatsi wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not entirely the case because there are still some commodities that are connected to actual productivity in the real world but by and large you're correct, it's mostly a game with monopoly money and mostly destructive consequences. It's again another reason we are collectively in this current mess. People have been chasing fake tokens in an economic game without paying any attention to real world consequences of…

But my question still stands. Can we have infinitely growing economy if we make the real world part of it increasingly small? We managed to reduce food production from something like 90% of the economy to 5%, industry to 15%. Maybe at some point all of non-virtual part will be like 1% of our total economy?

It's theoretically possible, the question is who would want to live in that world? What you're asking is more of a sci-fi question that anything pertinent to our current set of problems. Profit motives need to be re-oriented to account for biospheric damage. Right now it doesn't matter what you're doing as long as it is legal and making profits by extracting natural resources as quickly as possible in order to convert those resources into consumer gadgets and weapons. This is not a viable model for a sustainable global civilization.

By most measures the biosphere is close to ecological collapse and the markets have not taken any notice of this fact because quarterly profits do not require a livable and ecologically stable planet. As long as this quarter's profits are the same or higher than last quarter's it doesn't matter how much damage was done to the biosphere to achieve those profits. Most large scale organizations are effectively accelerating ecological collapse because they operate by an economic model that is completely at odds with the reality of biological existence on a finite planet. Instead of being concerned about AGI, recessions, and infinite markets people should really be concerned about unsustainable business models at odds with the physical constraints and dynamics of the planet. There is no economics without a sustainable ecology and more people need to wake up and notice this fact.

Re: Ask HN: Is the world going to shit?

#117

Post by ASalazarMX »

aristofun wrote: post #111
ASalazarMX wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Farming produces more food than needed, so you can feed others. Technology just makes farming more efficient, so a smaller percent of the population needs to farm. As long as there's still potential for more farming, population growth means more farmers producing food. If you exhaust the planet's resources for farming, or climate change reduces it, more people won't mean more resources anymore.

Why do you think farming is a linear game? What makes you think it’s impossible to get food from other sources that we didn’t invent yet and would probably not even call “farming”?

I think it's easier for the concept of farming to evolve as technology advances, than the production of food not being called farming anymore. Food made in labs could be considered farming, yeast cultures like the ones in Asimov's Foundation could too.

As the sibling comment mentions, only things like Star Trek's replicator could be considered beyond farming, as you're using the same pool of resources used to other activities besides feeding. In this case, farming and mining would be interchangeable.

Re: Ask HN: Is the world going to shit?

#118

Post by md2020 »

benwad wrote: post #85
fasthands9 wrote: post #9

Per capita emissions in the US and other western nations are declining even when you account for production shifted to other countries https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/no-the-us-didnt-outsource-... I don't truly see the "no one knows how to do anything end to end". This is somewhat true - but I don't know if 500 years ago the same person necessarily knew how to work with bronze and to raise cattle and to preserve fo…

One glaring omission from that article is any mention of per-capita emissions. The author keeps asserting that US-based measures to combat climate change are ineffective because China pollutes more, but the US (and all Western countries) have a far larger per-capita footprint than China. Policies to reduce this footprint could have a huge effect on emissions globally, even though the US isn't the total biggest emitte…

Yeah the same author has a reply to that since the per-capita emissions point is brought up a lot: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-per-capita-emissions-i...

Re: Ask HN: Is the world going to shit?

#119

Post by lamontcg »

"Degrowth" is unlikely to ever happen. It just isn't popular. And people against things like combating climate change tend to use degrowthers as a useful tool to win arguments.

"Deprofiting" would be much more likely to have a chance.

Re: Ask HN: Is the world going to shit?

#120

Post by AnimalMuppet »

soulofmischief wrote: post #83
solarmist wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly, but even if 90% or even 99% of humanity dies it still isn't an existential threat. If 100k humans survive that's more than enough to carry on humans and civilization as a whole.

This take always rubs me the wrong way because it conveniently ignores the fact that letting 90% of humanity die is wrong and should be avoided given that 1% of humanity is more or less to blame for this mess.

Letting 90% of humanity die is wrong and should be avoided, whether or not 1% of humanity is to blame.
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