[crimsonalucard]

This. Finally. People on HN think that startups, technology and economic growth have unlimited potential. This is pure stupidity at its finest. Observations of the natural world show a general trend: that everything, from physical resources to energy has limits. It is a mistake to believe that this general observation does not apply to technology and the human imagination.

While we can comprehend what a limit in oil production is... we simply cannot comprehend exactly where or what a limit to the human imagination or technology is... This leads to a false illusion that there is no limit... The reality is: An inability to comprehend something does not lend any evidence to the idea that human potential is unlimited. Like science, true understanding comes from observations of the natural world and as all things observed in the natural world... it is far more likely for humanity to eventually reach a limit in technology.

Whether that limit is among us is debateable. Computing has shown dramatic improvements in the past decade but outside of having an app for everything in my phone, nothing has really changed in the past two decades.

[gilleain]

The comparison you make with the natural world is interesting. If you consider natural systems to be innovators in the space of making new organisms then what have we seen?

First, there were eras of explosive growth into new areas - for example, the first organisms to be able to live on land had a huge new area to grow on. Although the Cambrian 'explosion' may not be as rapid as once thought, the diversity of body plans when multicellularity was invented shows what can happen in moving into a new area.

So the current technological era might be a lot like modern biology - there's never going to be a repeat of the discovery of how to use oxygen, but species will live and die as before. Except of course for humans.

Confusingly here, the metaphor catches up with reality - humans as organisms have become humans as technological innovators, which has the potential for unlimited changes to biology. We could wipe out nearly all life, we could make endless new variants of existing or imagined organisms.

Finally, there's intelligence which got us here. If we succeed in making a truly artificial intelligence, then that could explore the limits of what intelligence can do. Perhaps there are even limits to that - certainly there are physical constraints - but we're not at that limit quite yet.

[piaste]

This is some of the shallowest, most misleading insight I've ever read.

"Human achievement will probably reach a limit at some point" is effectively an empty statement. Even if you could take its truth for granted, it is completely useless information.

There is zero actionable difference between a limit that doesn't exist, and a limit that is unknowable and unguessable. Your behaviour should stay exactly the same either way - i.e. try to achieve as much as you can - until that limit becomes known or guessable in some way.

(This argument is basically a very slight variation on Russell's teapot.)

[feral]

I think the strongly worded logic in your post is questionable.

> There is zero actionable difference between a limit that doesn't exist, and a limit that is unknowable and unguessable.

Thought experiment:

Situation 1: I rely on a single food source, which I know is unlimited.

Situation 2: I rely on a single food source, which I'm not sure is unlimited, but I can't guess when it'll run out.

> Your behaviour should stay exactly the same either way, until that limit becomes known or guessable in some way

Really? Because if I was in situation 2, I would be preparing a contingency. Trying to find another food source. By the time the limit of my current source became knowable, it might be too late and I would starve. The right time to prepare is from a position of strength.

That's an actionable difference - do you think this is a valid counterexample to your logic? Or is something not appropriate?

[piaste]

Yes, I was referring to the subject at hand - human achievement / technology / innovation - not making a universal statement about everything that may have limits.

But I can see how my post could read that way. I'll make that clearer.

[crimsonalucard]

Your argument applies to science fiction and other works that make grand speculations about the future. The future is not knowable thus it is useless and misleading to speculate according to your argument. Your counter argument is far more shallow and misleading.

Our progress towards the future happens regardless of a limit. So why write science fiction? Why write fiction at all? Because we're human. I speculate, therefore I am.

Either way your argument doesn't address the heart of the matter. Is my speculation correct? Or is it incorrect? You have failed to logically address this argument. On the other hand I have only said that one outcome is far more likely than the other, I have not been definitive about it either.

[elcapitan]

The simple logical flaw in GP's argumentation is that it summarizes rather abstract phenomena (human inventions, potential of startups) to compare it against concrete, limited phenomena (oil production). To make that jump, that assumption would have to be proven.

[crimsonalucard]

It is only seemingly a flaw. Concrete phenomena and abstract phenomena are in fact the same thing. For abstract phenomena to even exist they must be concrete and thus limited by the concreteness of the physical world.

[adrianN]

> Computing has shown dramatic improvements in the past decade but outside of having an app for everything in my phone, nothing has really changed in the past two decades.

If you exclude making the Internet accessible to hundreds of millions of people, critical improvements in AI and robotics, and all the other stuff about which computer scientists write thousands of papers each year, then yes, nothing much has changed.

[crimsonalucard]

I did exclude those things. I said, nothing has really changed OUTSIDE of computing.

Actually you could make an argument for biology. Much has changed in the realm of genetics though so far it has had little impact on our daily lives.

[eru]

Oh, there are some very simple adjustments we could make right now (without even any new technology) to get a great amount of real growth. Just open some pretty standard economics textbooks:

On the demand side: target nominal GDP to all but eliminate recessions. (Or at least target the long term growth of the price level instead of letting bygones be bygones.)

On the supply side: completely shift the tax burden from labour and capital onto land. Remove barriers to free trade. Review and simplify economic regulations---start with silly zoning laws perhaps. Lower barriers to entry in most industries. Invest in public infrastructure and education. Cut stupid spending, and the most distorting taxes.

(Land taxes can probably even yield enough to pay for a lavish social welfare system. They will definitely recoup all sane investment in public infrastructure. Without distorting the economy even one bit.)

Of course the problem is that all these reforms are politically infeasible.

There might be a technological limit to real growth, of course, but we are far from it.

[gutnor]

> start with silly zoning laws perhaps

Why not keep them and invest in remote working instead of packing even more people in major cities. You probably work most of your time with remote people anyway and tech is definitively there.

Also it is a lot easier to organise plenty of small towns (think hospital, school, road infrastructure, ...) rather than a megacity where you can have literally thousands of people per block.

[eru]

Let the people who want to be packed live in major cities. Than we have more space left over for people who prefer sparser living.

Singapore and Hong Kong seems pretty well organised. Even other big cities like New York seem to work reasonably well on an organisational level. Hospitals, schools, road infrastructure are more efficient with shorter distances and diversified over more people's demand.

[evgen]

This sort of dystopian hand-wringing seems to have a certain cachet aomong some crowds, but seems to mostly stem from profound ignorance and a failure of the same imagination you find so limited. What makes humans different than all of the other parts of the natural world is that same imagination and technology that you seem to fundementally misunderstand. We can change our environment, and more importantly we can change the scope of the environment: if the resources of a small area are insufficient we can bring in more, if the resources of an entire planet are insufficient to meet our imagination we can dream bigger and actually execute on those dreams.

Imagination itself is only limited by our technological progress and there are few limits beyond physics itself to stop us there. Two centuries ago our dreams were merely to fly like birds or travel swifter than horses, now we can dream of travel among the stars. Imagine what we will dream of in a century from now.

[crimsonalucard]

>Imagination itself is only limited by our technological progress and there are few limits beyond physics itself to stop us there.

What is the difference between the natural world and physics? I would argue that there is no difference. I use the language "natural world" as a synonym for "the nature of existence" and "physics." I would assume that in your vernacular, the meaning is the same.

Thus your own statement above validates My argument. You state physics limits technology and technology limits the imagination. Thus in turn imagination is limited by physics. This is exactly my argument.

[snowwrestler]

> Computing has shown dramatic improvements in the past decade but outside of having an app for everything in my phone, nothing has really changed in the past two decades.

I suspect this says more about your ignorance of other industries, than anything else. Modern pharmaceutical research or medical imaging would be impossible without powerful computing. CRISPR is impossible without powerful computing. Self-driving cars are impossible without powerful computing.

Heck, GE has an entire series of ads about the impact of computing on their industrial technologies like turbines, locomotives, etc., which mocks the "technology is just apps" mindset.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvfU1NpCJQQ

[placebo]

While it's definitely true that many a time certain crowds tend to have lost touch with reality regarding the potential of a specific activity (as illustrated in repeated economic bubbles), to say that economic growth is limited suggests that economy is in principle a zero sum game. I don't believe that to be the case. Any attempt to predict the absolute limits of economic potential is an attempt to limit the potential of creativity (and I'd say of reality itself). We are nowhere near understanding that potential and I assume we never will. Whether we will be able to continue to tap into that potential instead of self destructing is another question.

[crimsonalucard]

All observations point to limits and thus suggest that reality and therefore the economy is a zero sum game. You talk as if limiting reality doesn't make any sense when scientific observation describes a reality that is in fact limited.

Conservation of energy, conservation of mass, the speed of light, these are limits built into the fabric of existence.

[placebo]

I think it's a bit premature to conclude we have uncovered what the fabric of existence is made of. History has repeatedly shown we have no idea how much we don't know (just until recently we thought we understood more or less what the universe is made of and we now realise we understand less than 5% of it) and the reality keeps delivering surprises.

But just for the sake of the argument, let's suppose we do know how everything works. There's enough matter and energy out there to supply endless economic growth if creative minds continue to come up with ideas on how to leverage it.

Besides that, from a quick research, I see many economists with a much deeper understanding in economy then myself are convinced that economy isn't a zero sum game. This doesn't necessarily make it true, but I'd study their claims before dismissing it.

[crimsonalucard]

>I see many economists with a much deeper understanding in economy then myself are convinced that economy isn't a zero sum game.

These are idealized models. To simplify calculations. The sun will burn out in a billion years so one can assume in a model that it will never burn out.

The fact of the matter is, the economy runs on resources. Resources are limited. Thus the economy is limited.

[fsloth]

"nothing has really changed in the past two decades"

If we discuss consumer products, then I would be willing to agree up to a point. Except, for example, we are finally getting electric cars that drive by themselves. This not just an improvement in computing. Geneticists just got crispr which means there will be an explosion in gene altered organisms.

I'm not sure what kind of big changes you are crawing - these do not reflect the state of the art in sciences but rather what products are manufactured and marketed for consumers. Two decades are actually a really short time for any sort of significant development in any field - although improvements tend to come in bursts.

[jsmith0295]

Except that the technology itself can be used to create technology. That's the whole point. If we were talking about raw human creativity, we already surpassed that capability a long time ago. And it seems likely that we can get the technology to a place where it can improve itself with little enough human effort that growth can be kept up for longer than any of our life times.

[crimsonalucard]

Having technology recursively create technology does not lead to unlimited potential. Such infinite structures lead to stack overflow and do not exist in the natural world without limits.

[jsmith0295]

But how many people actually think the potential is unlimited? Clearly there is a limit, but its likely far enough away from our current position that it doesn't particularly matter.

[PetoU]

to add, I would say, the limits of human imagination are cognitive limits posed by the physical limits of our brains. Let's say cognitive biases, you can't completely unbias yourself. You could argue, that with coming technology, we can modify the biological basis (those limits), but just go more meta. We will have limits about how to modify those limits.

[frgewut]

Of course there are limits (e.g. mass of human population will never exceed Earth's mass etc). But what these limits are?

For example we can double the size of human economy by colonizing Mars. This sounds very achievable to me.

[crimsonalucard]

Limits are never reached, they are only approached asymptotically. Thus most people will never observe a limit in human innovation in their lifetimes, instead they will only observe an eternal slow down as innovation spends forever converging with the limit. This makes it impossible to prove (or disprove) that there is a limit to technology. One can only make an educated guess.

Have we reached the limits of human colonization? Are we approaching a limit? Mars may be possible, but it is an order of magnitude harder than colonizing the Americas. Colonizing the west happened only a couple years after Columbus discovered the new world. Mars was discovered 3 centuries ago... are we at a limit? How long will it take to colonize the nearest star?