[tossandthrow]

Reducing progress to increasing entropy makes it even more clear that making progress will likely become easier, not harder.

Yes, oil was important back then. Now we can augment with wind, solar, nuclear, etc.

And more technologies will come.

[breuleux]

Maybe, maybe not. The point is that you can't simply will energy into existence. Its availability, including the ease of exploitation, is a physical given. Which is true of resources in general. Arbitrarily advanced technology can't simply make exploitation arbitrarily easy, so for example there can always be situations where the very best of all possible technologies will be less productive than setting fire to petrol would have been, if there had been any. It's complicated. It's not just what we do, it's not just what we have, it's both.

Probably the best test of how the future might trend long term is to see how well we can extract value from all the stuff and waste we are currently producing, because these will inevitably become the primary resources from which we have to build everything new. Unfortunately that shift is likely to happen extremely quickly and catastrophically, because typically you only start processing bad materials once you're done with the good.