Can growth continue?

I'm pretty sure this point is just ... uh... wrong:

But the deeper reason is that there’s really no such thing as a natural resource. All resources are artificial. They are a product of technology. And economic growth is ultimately driven, not by material resources, but by ideas.

That is to say, I think that you can't have NOTHING BUT ideas and have the kind of economic growth that matters to humans in human bodies. 

The point of having a word like "natural resources" is to distinguish the subset of resources that really do seem to be physically existing things.

Energy is pretty central example here for me. There are finite calories. If we don't have enough calories then we starve. If we don't have enough calories then we can't move our bodies from place to place. 

In The Machine Stops Forster portrayed a civilization that had turned the knob pretty far in the direction of "high hedonic/humanistic satisfaction per calorie" (also per NEW atom) but they still needed some calories, and also all the atoms that they used to build The Machine in the first place.

Calories seem less substitutable to me than atoms.

Maybe it is hypothetically possible to go really deep into some sort of reversible computing paradigm, but ultimately every thought that is worth thinking before other thoughts needs to be sped up, and that irreversibility will cost energy.

So many people are confused about "wtf happened in 1971?" and one of the really big ones is: we stopped having exponential growth in energy which is a necessary natural resource for prosperity. 

(I think the deep cause of this historical problem, and several other historical problems, is that the government and elites stopped being competent, unified, and benevolent. But that's a separate matter, perhaps, and is harder to show on graphs.)

You offered this graph above but it seems like it cleanly explains how there was justifiable and large optimism in the 1950s and 1960s about the median standard of living because of energy, and then there was a train wreck and now we're living in the ruins of that civilization:

But like... there are obvious mechanisms linking "energy --> wealth --> happiness", and also the large scale structure of the global economy lines up in the way that it probably should, given the obvious mechanisms:

(Image here is taken from Figure 1 of Energetic Limits To Economic Growth.)

So maybe I'm missing something? 

If you see some reason to expect wealth to fall out of the sky based on ONLY some clever idea, that would be good news to me and I would love to be wrong, but my current working theory is that the core thing that has to be true to produce radically good social outcomes is more calories per capita per year.

Ideas are important too in my model... but like... look at the Internet and the funding of the NSF. Ideas are doing fine :-)

But ONE of the important good ideas you need to have (that it seems like we are missing) is, roughly: "Natural resources are necessary inputs into wealth and human flourishing and we should coordinate to do more and better natural resource extraction because doing so will cause more wealth and human flourishing to exist."

I think this idea breaking down in the median voter in the west is a cause of a lot of the sadness of the current global situation (China excepted, because they are correctly focused on ramping up energy for the good of China, like any sane society would and should).

It is kind of tragic because if the opposite of this idea motivates the opposite of correct actions at an aggregate level, then unilaterally sane people might actually be punished by the government, rather than profiting from their unique correctness, and the prospects for our society in general would be quite bleak. It is hard to get the median voter to be right about something where they are already wrong as part of the status quo, and they've been wrong for decades, and their wrongness only hurts "everyone, in the long run" rather than "themselves, in the short run".

This is part of why I'd love to hear that I'm wrong. I think natural material wealth (especially energy sources) cause prosperity.

However, few people seem to explicitly believe this? You seem to not believe it here? And government policy isn't generally organized around the idea that "energy resources are actually super important"... 

If I'm wrong then I get to have more hope, and who wouldn't want some justified hope? Is there some way I'm obviously wrong here? :-)

↑ comment by gjm · 2022-05-29T18:09:25.564Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I basically agree with all of the first part of this, but towards the end it seems to miss a very important point. You say

we should coordinate to do more and better natural resource extraction because doing so will cause more wealth and human flourishing to exist

but some natural resources are in fact limited (with hard limits and/or soft ones where the costs go up drastically as you try to extract more), which means that doing more natural resource extraction now may mean having to do less in the future, and the damage done by running out may be less if we do it more gradually starting earlier.

Historically, people arguing for limiting resource-extraction have tended to turn out to have been too pessimistic about the limits, but that doesn't mean there are no limits.

For instance: you showed that graph of crude oil extraction. A crude fit to the bit before 1971 is daily_megabarrels = 0.323 exp(0.070(year-1900)). If we suppose that the only reason reality stopped matching this is that "elites stopped being competent, unified and benevolent" and imagine continuing on that trajectory, then by the year 2100 the total amount of oil extracted (since 1930) would be about 2 quadrillion barrels. The actual figure to date is about 1 trillion. It does not seem plausible to me that there is 2000x as much oil extractible at any cost as the total amount we have extracted so far. Even by 2022, the model suggests ~8 trillion barrels extracted, or about 8x what actually has been; it seems highly plausible that that's more than there is, or at any rate more than can be extracted at reasonable cost.

(Is the exponential model unreasonably pessimistic? Well, your own description of what was happening before 1971 was, specifically, "exponential growth in energy". If we don't mind using 4 parameters instead of 2 we can get about as good a fit as the exponential above -- daily_megabarrels = 4.73 + 1.96e-5(y-1921.6)^3.74. In that case, total extraction to 2100 would be "only" 70x what we have actually extracted to date.)

(Is it unreasonable for me to be talking specifically about oil when what matters is total energy? It might be, if I were arguing specifically that we shouldn't be aiming to get a lot of energy. But I'm not arguing that; perhaps we should be aiming for that; my point is just that specific resources may be meaningfully depletable, and that that means that some things under the heading of "more and better natural resource extraction" could actually be bad ideas.)

So we should definitely coordinate to do more efficient resource extraction, and to find ways to use effectively-unlimited resources like sunlight, but for resources we might realistically run out of some time in the foreseeable future there's a tradeoff between prosperity now and possible collapse later and in some of these cases we may instead need to coordinate on extracting less.

(Important complication: extracting more now may help us with figuring out ways to be more efficient, finding new resources, and mitigating the damage when we run out, in which case we should be extracting faster than simpler models of the tradeoff would suggest.)

Replies from: JenniferRM

↑ comment by JenniferRM · 2022-05-30T07:04:23.051Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'm friendly to basically everything you've said, gjm ;-)

Once we are thinking in terms of collecting certain kinds of important resources now versus saving those important resources for some time in the deeper future... 

...we're already working with the core premise: that there ARE important resources (and energy is one of the most important). 

Details about early or late usage of this or that resource are (relatively speaking) details.

Oil and coal are not things I'm not particularly in love with. Thorium might be better, I think? The sun seems likely to be around for a LONG time and solar panels in space seems like an idea with a LOT of room to expand!

There has to be "ideas" here (jason's OP on ideas is right that they matter), but I think the ideas have to be ABOUT energy and atoms and physical plans for those ideas to to turn into something that makes human lives better.

(Image source!) In practice, right now: oil and coal are our primary sources. For Earth right now, solar is still negligible, but if eventually we have asteroid minining and space solar arrays, I'd expect (and hope!) that that stuff would become the dominating term in the energy budget.

The idea of just "putting an end to all that fossil fuel stuff" in the near future seems either confused or evil to me. EITHER people proposing that might be UNAWARE of the entailment in terms of human misery of halting this stuff without having something better ready to go, OR ELSE they might be AWARE of the consequences and misanthropically delighted with the idea of fewer humans doing fewer things? 

I'm pro-human. Hence I'm pro-energy.

I think climate change might be an "elephant in the room" when it comes to energy policy? 

But I'm also in favor of weather and climate control if we can get those too... Like my answer is "optimism" and "moar engineering!" to basically everything.

Controlling the climate will take MORE resources to accomplish, not less! If, for example, humans are going to reverse the desertification of the Sahara, and use the new forests as carbon sinks, that will be a HUGE project that involves moving around a LOT of dirt and water and seeds and chemistry and so on. I'm not precisely sure that fixing the Sahara would be the specific best use of resources, but I do think that whatever the right ideas are, they have to be ideas about resources and atoms and physical reality.

I disagree, strongly. Not only do I believe this line of reasoning to be wrong, I believe it to be dangerously wrong. I believe downplaying and/or underestimating the role of energy in our economic system is part of why we find ourselves in the mess we're in today.

To reference Nate Hagens (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xr9rIQxwj4) 
We use the equivalent of 100 billion barrels of oil a year. Each barrel of oil can do the amount of work it would take 5 humans to do. There are 500 billion 'ghost' labourers in our society today.

(Back to me)

You cannot eat ideas. You cannot treat sewage with them. You cannot heat your home with them. You cannot build your home with them. You cannot travel across an ocean on them. 

1000x0 is 0. Technology is a powerful multiplier, but 0 is 0.

You cannot build cold fusion power plants with ideas. You cannot conjure up the material resources or the skilled labour and energy inputs necessary to build them with ideas. (once again Nate Hagens - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0pt3ioQuNc)

.... aaaand then there's the whole topic of renewables and the hidden costs and limitations thereof.

The only idea I have encountered that nullifies this reality is a superintelligent AI. The thing we're all so scared of, but simultaneously the only technology powerful enough to both harvest and utilize energy on scales beyond human ability. And also powerful enough to coordinate human activity such that Jeavons Paradox doesn't nullify the benefits (and, more generally, such that we don't waste such an insane amount of energy on stupid things).

And finally, re population:

Demographics, read about them - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40697556-the-human-tide

tl;dr Yes, Malthus was 'wrong'. He was wrong because it turned out that women with access to education and opportunity choose to have less children (there are exceptions, but not too many). Technology/ideas didn't save us from exponential population growth, it was a natural (i.e. not consciously considered, organized, enacted) change in behaviour. 

We may not run out of ideas but we may run out of exploitable physics. For instance what is most needed at the moment is a clean, cheap and large scale energy source that can replace gas,  oil, and coal, without which much of the technological and economic development of the last hundred and fifty years or so would have been impossible. Perhaps fusion can be that thing. Perhaps we can paper over the Sahara with photovoltaics. Perhaps we can design fail-safe fission reactors more acceptable to the general population. Let’s assume we will solve the various technical and geopolitical problems necessary to get at least one of these technologies to where we need it to be. My point is this, what if physics either didn’t allow, or made it technologically too difficult;  for any of these three possibilities to come to fruition ? We’d be at roughly the same place in terms of development, but without the potential safety net these technologies could give us. What likelihood of continued progress then?   And so on. A greater population (of humans at least) in the future will certainly provide a greater fund of technological ideas, but to keep the world in a healthy enough state to support that population may require physics that is either unavailable to us, or just too difficult to exploit.

In regard to the amazing possibilities available to us by manipulating macromolecules, I am completely with you. We have only just scratched the surface of what is achievable using the physics we have readily to hand, IMO.

What are your thoughts on This can’t go on [LW · GW]?

One could argue that at least some of the growth is not a measurement of increased human satisfaction, but just of Goodheart mismeasurement and nefarious schemes of the wealthy to increase their power at the expense of the common man.  

GDP is a classic example of a measure that has changed meaning over time.  Take the simple example of neighbors who each mow their lawns every week.  It's unmeasured, but valuable enough for them to do it.  Then one neighbor starts to do both lawns, and the other reciprocates with taking care of all the kids during the day.  Also great value, good specialization, improved welfare.  But if they decide to PAY each other for the services, nothing changes about the work performed or value received, but now GDP is up by twice the value exchanged (each pays the other $x, for $2x gdp measurement).

Given the horrifically inefficient way we are using our current idea-creating resources (people), it seems a much better investment to improve our efficiency, rather than creating more underutilized resources at great expense.

The number of potential molecular compounds, or the number of possible DNA sequences, is astronomical. We have barely begun to explore.

Hate to say it, but most DNA sequences/molecular compounds are probably useless. The Library of Babel is far less than 0.000001% good novels, for instance.

[EDIT: This comment is a bit of a mess, but I haven't figured out yet how to make the reasoning more solid.]

Regarding productivity specifically, it seems relevant that AGI+robotics leads to infinite labor productivity. The reason is that it obsoletes (human) labor, so capital no longer requires any workers to generate output.

Therefore, for there to be any finite limit on labor productivity, it'd need to be the case that AGI+robotics is never developed. That situation, even considered on its own, seems surprising: maybe AGI somehow is physically impossible, or there's some (non-AGI-related) catastrophe leading to permanent collapse of civilization, or even if AGI is physically possible it's somehow not possible to invent it, etc. A lot of those reasons would themselves pose problems for technological progress generally: for example, if a catastrophe prevented inventing AGI, it probably prevented inventing a lot of other advanced technology too.

i think this piece would benefit from a few examples of historic ideas which boosted the labor productivity multiple. it’s not clear to me why ideas aren’t treated as just a specific “type” of capital: if the ideas you’re thinking of are things like “lean manufacturing” or “agile development”, these all originated under existing capital structures and at one time had specific “owners” (like Toyota). we have intellectual property laws, so some of these ideas can be owned: they operate as an enhancement to labor productivity and even require upkeep (depreciation) to maintain: one has to teach these ideas to new workers. so they seem like a form of capital to me.

my suspicion is that these “ideas” are just capital which has escaped any concrete ownership. they’re the accumulation of positive externalities. it’s worth noting that even once these ideas escape ownership, they don’t spread for free: we have schools, mentorship, etc. people will voluntarily participate in the free exchange of ideas (e.g. enthusiast groups), but that doesn’t mean there’s no upkeep in these ideas: it just isn’t financialized. in the end, a new idea displacing an old one doesn’t look all that different from a more efficient (higher output per input) machine displacing a less efficient machine: they’re both labor productivity enhancements which require some capital input to create and maintain.

If I understand correctly, discussions of superintelligence imply that a 'friendly' AGI would provide for exponentially increasing TFP growth while effective number of researchers could remain flat or decline.

Additionally, number of researchers as a share of the total human population could be flat or decline, because AGI would do all the thinking, and do it better than any human or assemblage of humans could.

If AGI points out that physics does not permit overcoming energy scarcity, and space travel/colonization is not viable for humans due to engineering challenges actually being insurmountable, then an engineered population crash is the logical thing to do in order to prolong human existence.

So a friendly AI would, in that environment, end up presiding over a declining mass of ignorant humans with the assistance of a small elite of AI technicians who keep the machine running.

I don't think that my first two paragraphs here are correct, but I think that puts me in a minority position here.