Return to the middle ages

I came across this article -- Maximize your EROEI, which starts with

We may love our machines, but they don’t love us.

 

And ... we need our machines to love us, why?

 

It ends with

Let us be careful not to commit vast quantities of our limited resources to high tech adventures that are likely to make matters worse, not better. We are more likely to survive and prosper if we return to being tool users and minimize our reliance and addiction to machines. We can set our personal and societal design criteria to rejoin the community of life on this planet. Rediscovering our own metabolic energy can be the key to our survival; it would address the causes of both the compost conundrum and the greenhouse effect.

 

Now, one remark is -- what does he think a machine is, if not a tool?   I expect that what he means by "tool" is "hand tool", something that works using only kinetic energy with an animal, usually human, source.

 

The thing that people are uniquely good at is thinking.   It is, however, hard to do much that is meaningful in intellectual activity when one is spending ones time being a source of kinetic energy & doing manual labor.   For myself, I think that a future in which people spend their time behind a horse drawn plow isn't worth wanting.

 

Also, there is an upper limit on how much energy can be harvested using animal power.   This sets an upper limit on the human population, which I would bet, is much less than 7 billion, more like 1 billion or less.   The transition from here to there is not likely to be a pleasant experience.

 

I think it is very likely that we will transition to a future, and soon, in which there are many fewer people on the earth.   However, the question is, are we going to transition to a future in which a small percent of the population has most of the wealth and power, which most of the rest live as virtual or actual slaves?   Or are we going to find a way to build a future in which it is possible for all people to live in reasonable comfort and there is a greater degree of equality and the hope that life can become better -- the famous "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"?    History suggests that the natural life is harsh for the majority of the people, so to have a life that is good for the masses, we need technology.   We may need better technology and to use it much more wisely, but the way to a bright future is forwards, not back.

 

I suppose he thinks that all would be much the same as it is now, except that people will spend their days farming instead of working in offices or factories.   However, we should expect that the Pareto principle will continue to hold, in which a few have much and most have little.   Until we lose the ability to make medicines and to store food (which may well happen quickly), there will be a relatively large number of people around to share what is left, which will make it easy for the rich to buy the services of the poor for very little.   After a while, famine and disease will kill most people, so the world would settle down to a more or less stable situation, like as not -- in which a few have lives of some comfort & most others have lives that are nasty, brutish and short.

 

I think it would turn out that his utopian fantasy is both utopian (that is, nowhere) and a fantasy.   We have reason to love our machines.

 

 

Marx and nature

I was watching a course on modern western history:   A History of the Modern Western World

 

One of the lectures is on the radical response to the misery caused by the industrial revolution -- in particular, the writings of Marx and Engles.

 

In the industrial societies, a few were very rich, while many were miserably poor.   M&E claimed that this is neither natural or fair.

 

It may not be fair, but I would claim that it is natural.    In effect, I have already claimed by, by saying there seems to be a centripetal attraction to power.

 

There are two things that I think give support to this claim -- observation and logic.  The observation is that it appears that in relatively large, complex societies, it appears that a small fraction of the population tends to hold most of the wealth and most of the power.   I don't actually have a list of all complex societies, with a ranking of wealth vs percent of the population holding it, but in the examples I do know of, one percent of the population holding about 30% of the wealth seems to be pretty typical.   Something that happens spontaneously, over and over again, can reasonably be considered the effect of some kind of natural force.

 

The other support is logic, e.g. the Pareto principle.  It is easier for the rich to make money, therefore those who are rich will tend to become richer, whether they make new wealth de novo (actually from natural resources) or take it from others.   In the latter case, the divide widens more quickly, but even in the former, there can still be a growing gap.

 

Of course, even if it is natural for the rich to be very rich, that doesn't mean it is fair or good or that we are stuck with it.   However, while it may be possible and from our point of view, good on the whole, to create an environment that is artificial in many ways, it is also true that the law of unintended consequences remains in force.  It may be good to build a society with a more equal division of wealth, but it is probably something better done with subtle tools and attention to the effects of the tools, rather than with some kind of blunt instrument.

 

BTW, wikipedia says of the Pareto principle:  [It was named] after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed in 1906 that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population

and adds ...

Pareto noticed that 80% of Italy's wealth was owned by 20% of the population.^[4] He then carried out surveys on a variety of other countries and found to his surprise that a similar distribution applied.