I don’t buy it. Yes, progress has been accelerating so far. But I think there are some limits :
-First the limits of the human brain. We’re just bright monkeys, and there’s no reason to assume that our brain is wired in such a way that we can understand anything and everything. Our ability to work on quantum physics is just a side effect of our ability to outsmart saber-toothed lions and mammoths. You’d have IMO to assume a higher purpose (like a god, for instance) to believe that there’s no limit to what we can learn, understand or create.
-Second, a quantitative limit. For a long time, the population growth rate has been very high, and within this always larger population, an always larger proportion received a good education. Earth’s population is going to stagnate at about 9 billions in the decades to come. When every single bright child of a subsistence farmer will have access to higher education (and we’re on the way of achieving that, see China or India, for instance), we’ll reach the limit of our collective brain power, while until now, the number of available educated individuals has been steadily raising.
-Third a material limit. We’ve come to a point where major endeavors into understanding the world and/or producing new tools might require a pooling of resources from the wealthiest countries (see the funding of the latest particle’s accelerator, or of the latest fusion reactor prototype). When we’ll need for instance a particle accelerator the size of the Earth for our next step into understanding the inner working of the universe, or, according to a current thread, a rail gun the size of the solar system to launch an interstellar space probe, we might run into a problem.
I don’t think we’re about to reach a limit very soon, but I do think that at some point in the future (maybe some decades or a century) the rate of progress will stop accelerating, will stagnate, and eventually will slow down. It doesn’t mean that we’ll completely stop making progress, nor that the world won’t be extremely different by this point, but I don’t believe in an everlasting exponential rate of progress.
Considering that we are presently headed for global disaster with ecological disruptions and resource depletion, postulating that the future won’t lead to radical technological improvements will result in a future that is anything but “boring”. Miserable, chaotic and lethal, but not boring.
[QUOTE=Paul Ehrlich]
The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate …
[/QUOTE]
and
[QUOTE=Paul Ehrlich]
Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.
[/QUOTE]
*
Those quotes are from 1970.
Of course he was wrong.
Slee
*Note, starvation is a problem. Too many people die of starvation every year. However, much of this is for political reasons and not one of production. See North Korea as an example.
There’sno"ofcourse"about it.Yes, Erlich was wrong,but only because he left any so-called "Green Revolution"out of his reasoning.
What DT is referencing is Global Warming. Yes,it’s possible that a similar tech response to this will happen. But most decidedly NOT if it’s business as usual, like that article references, since “Most energy […] derived from fossil fuels” and “cars, buses, taxis and planes” are the root cause of GW.
And topsoil loss, the end of cheap petroleum-based fertilizers, and increasing scarcity of fresh water. Just off the top of my head. Are such problems solvable? Hopefully, but not by doing more of the same things that created them.
Oh, yeah, true, the Green Revolution is also very fossil-fuel reliant.
Not that I’d know about the GR, see, it never really hit Africa. You’ll see all sorts of reason offered as to “why”, like corruption and poor infrastructure - but no reason given why the same factors didn’t stop it in Asia and South America, both of which at the time were as riddled by those problems.
The adverse geography argument is the only one that makes sense to me - but Africa’s poverty in that regard is only a foretaste of what it will be like for successful GR projects once the coming water & climate crises hit. India’s GR is not going to withstand the loss of Himalayan glacial water, I think.
Just as a side note, actually, there is – our brains are computationally universal (at least if supplied with enough pen and paper…), and thus, if the universe is itself computable (which I’d argue is the conservative hypothesis), we can indeed understand anything and everything, at least in principle. There’s no ‘higher’ intelligence in the sense that it can understand anything fundamentally incomprehensible to humans; it can, at best, understand it faster (of course, for really complex things, this may mean that they are not feasible for a human being to understand).