Thursday, June 10, 2010

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.

 

 

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