I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.) I hope we are in a similar era with regards to climate change. Surely there's a lot of money to be made in harnessing effectively un…
Re: slavery: I've wondered before if the arrow of causation might go both ways. Slavery has existed throughout history. With slaves, what's the incentive to industrialize? You have "free" and captive human labor. But take that away, and suddenly the idea of machines doing stuff for you seems a lot more compelling. Slavery also displaces industry in the economy. Slave-driven industries compete with industrial developm…
Importantly, I think there's only so much advancement you can get out of people by investing in economies of scale and iterating on process (and people, as icky as that idea is), while there's a huge amount of advancement to get out of machinery, including moving to whole new categories of machinery (which depending on how far you want to take the "slaved are machines" metaphor is waht a shift away from slaves was in the first place). In that respect maybe what you're noting is just that the shift from slaves to machines was the first in an iterative process which is speeding up over time.
> If we'd abolished slavery in Roman times we might have terraformed Mars by now.
I think maybe the right was to look at it is if we were able to abolish slavery and keep the same output (which might have required an economic or social system that incentivized farm consolidation for economies of scale that plantations were able to more easily achieve), then yes, we would have terraformed mars by now, but probably just because we happened to be along the tech tree earlier in the timeline.