[coolspot]

> high standards of living + high taxes and costs + high retirement costs

Add unsustainable mining/fishing/farming/pollution to feed/dress/entertain all those people with high standards of living.

Now you will see the plateu eventually, yes. But it’s not a natural plateu where we stop because we want chill life, but plateu where we stop because there are no resources (everything is expensive) to support our kids.

[nefitty]

You're not taking into account technological and industrial innovation. Presumably there will be new ideas iterated upon that get us closer to universal abundance.

My main concerns over the next few decades are cyberwar collapse (< 1% chance), runaway AI (10% chance), robotized world war (30% chance), and solar flare induced societal collapse (40% chance).

Yeah, cereal is 20% more expensive but DeepMind just beat GPT3.

[RealityVoid]

I wonder why solar flare societal collapse ranks so high on your list.

[kortex]

Not GP but it's a cascade failure mode with theoretically no upper bound in how much chaos it could cause. A toilet paper shortage caused millions to lose their goddamn minds, what do you think having no refrigeration on a world scale for even a week would do? A CME could potentially fry enough equipment that we would be left in in the dark and unable to repair for months, just due to availability of parts. I believe those estimates are at current production rates, too. If the supply chain and global comms are compromised, it's even harder.

It's definitely at the sweet spot of "terrifying" and "completely plausible."

[nefitty]

Yes, perfectly said.

Here's in-depth info on solar flares. Major ones are considered "Carrington-level events", due to a flare that occurred in 1859: https://www.history.com/news/a-perfect-solar-superstorm-the-...

Vox's 2014 breakdown of the systemic risks: https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2014/7/30/5951263/a-catastr...

NASA article on the prediction that there was a 12% chance a Carrington-level event would occur by 2022: https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/2...

My 40% is based on that information. I'm gut-extrapolating to the next few decades, with the understanding that large devastating flares occur every few hundred years.

[xsarin]

Society is so incredibly dependent on technology that is not EMP resistant and if a solar flare knocks out most of our electronics the bottom is going to fall out. No phones or internet to figure out what's going on, no cars since the onboard electronics are needed- same with trucks, trains etc. Can't go to the grocery store and buy food with your debit card, can't get cash from the bank, grocery store isn't going to get shipments anymore etc.

Our dependence on it all puts us on really fragile ground given that we know there have been sun events in the last 150 years that would obliterate everything we have today

[RealityVoid]

I have read that the dangers of EMP's are greatly overstated and they could damage stuff, but mostly the power grid, since you need long lines to induce sufficient power for it to matter.

[jacquesm]

Exactly. At about 30V / km the potential to do damage to smaller electric circuits is limited, but anything connected to longer lines is at risk.

[baq]

resources are finite and technological innovation is finite, too. thermodynamics gives us very precise upper limits to efficiency increases and to the surprise of no one, low hanging fruit are all picked.

[jstanley]

You could have said the same thing 100 years ago.

[CuriouslyC]

You're making the same mistake all the star eyed futurists make, which is to not realize that in reality, all exponential curves are just early/mid stage sigmoidal curves. You can paradigm shift all you want, that's not going to make infinite progression a thing.

[azeirah]

You're making the same mistake all star eyed futurists-skeptics make, which is to not realize that in reality, new sigmoidal curves are started all over the place.

It's just a matter of time and survival. How long? I don't know. Probably long.

[CuriouslyC]

There is a finite set of sigmoidal curves that can accelerate/plateau. If you add the "progress" from every curve in the set, that also forms a sigmoidal curve (via a transformation of the central limit theorem) with a plateau that is inescapable. You can't out paradigm shift the nature of reality.

[snovv_crash]

Not just sigmoidal, on a longer timeframe they usually end up being more like gaussian

[cryptonector]

Indeed. Eventually the planet will run out of CO2 and life on Earth will almost completely disappear. Eventually plate tectonics will stop as well due to the core of the planet cooling. Eventually the Sun will go red giant and the Earth will really die then. Eventually we'll reach the heat death of the universe.

A gaussian with a really long tail!

We're doomed even if we go inter-planetary -- even if we spread through the galaxy! But the timescales are pretty large, and before then we can have a pretty long (in human scales) and good time.

[baq]

a single example: a 100 years ago the efficiency of ICEs was less than 50% of today's. we're left with maybe 2x until physics doesn't allow us any further improvements.

another example - transistors - we've got maybe 10, maybe 20, maybe 30 years of improvements ahead of us, after that there are fundamental limits that forbid progress.

the rate of change of total technology improvements will slow down and at some point will start to approach zero; maybe even go negative as we as a civilization start to forget how to do things faster than invent new ways of doing things.

[nefitty]

The hard variable is paradigm-shifts. We see things like quantum computers now, which seem boring at the moment, but the sorts of problems they'll be able to handle are staggering to imagine.

Robotics keeps improving, eg replacement/enhancement of human labor. That's a paradigm shift.

I definitely see your point about physical limits. I propose that we're nowhere near our ideational limits, which give us the imaginative capacity to form new solutions within those limits you cite.

[baq]

> I propose that we're nowhere near our ideational limits, which give us the imaginative capacity to form new solutions within those limits you cite.

the problem is, thermodynamics is so generic that it's hard to imagine how to sidestep it - and people do try all the time.

e.g. imagine we have a commercially viable fusion reactor, which translates to basically unlimited energy once you build enough of them that they can be operated and maintained using only fusion power from sister reactors. sounds like post-scarcity world, except if you keep power consumption growing for like 1-2% a year, you'll boil the oceans in a few centuries due to waste heat.

if you invent a technology to capture and repurpose enough waste heat to avoid this problem, you sidestep thermodynamics. if you sidestep thermodynamics, there's a lot more you can do than just making fusion 100% efficient...

[cryptonector]

And people did. Malthus was over 200 years ago.

[cryptonector]

Yes, but you're assuming indefinite growth. Again, in the real world we're already on a path to decreasing population.

[cnlevy]

Sure, African agriculture is already at max. efficency. Giant farms fully mechanized, of course /s

[snapcaster]

Kind of unrelated but if you're interested in African agriculture you should look into Seeing Like a State. The book argues mechanized farms aren't necessarily the highest form of farming for maximum sustainable yield in many places (like many regions in Africa) and has many many hard to notice downsides. A lot of the pressure to consolidate and mechanize has to do with legibility for taxation purposes compared to true yield maximization

[nefitty]

Great point. I'm starting to look at Africa for that low hanging fruit.