Guest post: This period of maximal disruption

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Crank them out, ladies.

A healthy populace needs steady economic growth.

Steady economic growth comes from constantly increasing productivity.

Productivity growth requires the ongoing creation of new jobs.

New jobs require an ever-growing working-age population.

That’s been the formula for the past half-century or more. But it rests on a number of assumptions that can’t stay true forever. And just because this formula has worked up until now doesn’t mean it’s the only one that can ever work.

Firstly, and most obviously, civilization can’t just keep growing and consuming forever. The planet’s size is fixed, and so are the resources within it.

Secondly, there’s no actual law that states that a healthy populace needs steady economic growth. It’s just that in a capitalist system, that’s how things have turned out. An ever increasing amount of total resources can serve as a modest counterbalance to capitalism’s tendency to concentrate resources in the hands of the few. New resources just entering the system will be distributed somewhat evenly at first before the Gordon Gekkos of the world inevitably find ways to capture them.

So how about instead we build an economic model that stops the Gordon Gekkos stealing what we already have so we don’t have to keep mining new resources to make up the losses?

And lastly, there’s the sudden emergence of AI, which may at long last uncouple the link between productivity and human-powered jobs. At the very least it will certainly disrupt such a link. Our species is running out of skills to justify our existence in pure economic terms. A human life costs a lot ot maintain — a lifetime of food, water, shelter, and energy — and under the current economic model, we’re losing opportunities to earn our keep, as we get outbidded by the automatons of Artificial Intelligence.

Things are rapidly coming to a head all around the world, with climate change, overpopulation, and now the technological disruption of labour. If civilization manages to emerge from this period of maximal disruption at all, it will have to do so with a new economic model to sustain humanity at a much lower population, with a fixed or even declining rate of consumption of the planet’s finite resources.

It would be nice of some kind of Artificial General Intelligence could find a way to orchestrate a safe passage for humans through the upcoming mess.

But I’m not particularly hopeful. When we look up at the skies, there’s a reason we aren’t seeing a universe teeming with civilized planets. More and more I’m coming to believe it’s because civilization is intrinsically doomed to wipe itself out.

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