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.

 

Engineering, society and politics

One question that has been around at least since the time of the ancient Greeks -- and still not answered -- is how best to organize society.   The Greeks decided that the best way is to find a good leader & let him make the decisions, but this is the problem of belling the cat.  How can a society continually produce such people, especially given that power corrupts?

 

I like the idea of using science to guide us, of understanding how the world works & then using that understanding to build systems that work.  However, the world is hugely complex.  How do we know what decisions are arbitrary, where we can decide based on what we like, and which are constrained by the laws of nature?

 

In engineering, the answers to these questions are more obvious, at least to some extent.  Gravity provides a known force, materials have more or less known properties -- if you want to build a bridge, you can figure out the forces and the available materials and have a good idea if the thing will stand up.   There are still many free choices, where the physics doesn't constrain the choice, but the engineer has a good idea of what they are.

 

In politics, I think there is a tendency to think that almost all choices are free, when in fact, there are many constraints.  Nature, both human and not, imposes limits, which de facto we obey, but we don't necessarily realize why things work out as they do.

 

For example, I think there is a centripetal force to power.   In the absence of countervailing forces, those that have power tend to accumulate more.    One of these brakes is that those that have power tend to accumulate more, but in the modern age, the main thing that has produced somewhat more flat societies is the frontier.   People have been literally able to get up & move away when the powerful step on them too badly.    We are running out of frontiers, so the centralization of power is accelerating again.

 

 

Happy Halloween ...

Peak oil, peak food, peak population

I ran across a couple of interesting posts in the last few days. This one:

According to the World Bank, over a billion people around the world are now chronically hungry.

From Hungry World: A Silent Crisis Calls for Urgent Action

and also:

Fresh population projections put the number of humans over seven billion in 2011, just 12 years after humanity passed the six billion mark.

From A Billion Teenagers, for Better or Worse

Now, there is good reason to think that the world is at peak oil. There is also good reason to think the world is at peak food right now. [I'm not going to go find the quotes, I shall just assert it for the purposes of this thought experiment.]

Given peak food, that implies that food to feed the 200 million or so new people to be born in the next 2 years will come from that being eaten by those already here. Most likely, it will come from those who are already poor, so that people who are now getting by barely will move into the category of hunger. [The world population now is about 6.8 billion.]

Just for the heck of it, let me assume that each new person represents two new hungry person -- the person just born & someone else who moves from having just enough food to not eating enough.

This would mean that the 200 million new people added in the next two years means 400 million more hungry people -- or 200 million more each year.

Thus, in 2011, we would expect to have 1.4 billion hungry, or about 20% of the world population. In 2016, another 5 years, there would be 7.5 billion people, of which 1.9 billion would be hungry, or about 25%. By 2018, we would be looking at something on the order of 30%.

People who are hungry tend to be angry, quarrelsome, scared and all sorts of unpleasant things like that, and arguably for good reason. I think that when the percent of hunger gets into the 30% and climbing range we are going to see widespread conflict.

Scientific goverment

A decisionmaker may make decision x, thinking it will produce effect X, Nature. cats its vote -- nature decrees that decision produces effect Y, totally different and possibly quite undesirable.

The problem here could be described as a disconect between the model the descison maker is using and the relevant reality.

It doesn't matter if the decision makers in question are dictators, monarchs, an oligarchy, a democracy or a group of clowns standing on their heads. In principal, any of these could make decisons that have the expected effect or not (though if the clowns make good decisions, it might be surprising, since I doubt they would have much attention to put to the task). In general, it is more likely to make a decision that produces the desired outcome if the mental model behind it is sufficiently accurate.

A case in point is the discussion on the health care reform which is being proposed. Krugman makes a cogent argument why it is needed, which makes sense. Other people just say "This would cost money" and want it to fail:

The much-feared Obama healthcare initiative seems to be stalled. Markets are relieved, because this initiative, as it was presented, amounted to a huge transfer payment that would be funded by future tax increases.

Personally, I think Krugman is making all kinds of sense and is right (leaving aside Malthus). However, my point here is that Krugman has a meaningful economic model he is using, while David Kotok seems to be parroting the conservative line, which seems to basically consist of "we don't like it, so it is bad".

I am coming to the conclusion that we would be far better off being governed by some kind of scientific process, one that in effect, consults the natural world on the effect of decisions rather than prejudice and preference only.

Questions of value are not answerable by scientific processes, these must continue to be decided by people. However, the question of how to implement policies that produce the outcomes that are valued can meaningfully have scientific inputs, which if followed have a hope of leaving we the people better off.

Scientific models can only go so far and they are of limited accuracy, of course. However, with research and feedback they can be improved.

Energy bottleneck?

I was reading Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution (which I recommend as interesting, at least to those interested in complex systems and/or biology).

Along the way, when he was talking about the evolution of plants and the way that chloroplasts manufacture plant material and energy from sunlight, he said something to the effect that when we figure out just a few more details, we'll have the solution to the energy crisis.

This points up something interesting. The commentators on energy seem to fall into these main groups:

1. There isn't any problem, what peak oil? And anyway, if oil gets scarce, we'll invent something else.
   
2.  OMG, oil is running out and we are all doomed. We must give up driving, water in bottles and all sorts of extravagance to survive. Everyone should sit in sackcloth and ashes and do penance for the sins of the recent past.
   

So far as I can tell, each of these has a hold of some part of the elephant for their facts. Peak oil is real and in the short run, it is going to be of great importance and produce a huge bottleneck. The world has a huge amount of infrastructure that is tied to oil and, even more important, it has no alternative that is able to bridge the gap over the next decade or so. That is, there isn't any other source available that could inject enough energy into the system to replace the oil shortfall. Even if there were, the existing infrastructure could probably not manage an alternative form -- e.g. there is no way to power 18-wheeler trucks on electricity, even if there were a distribution system to deliver from, say, a wind farm, to them.

However, there is lots of energy that is potentially available and, given the resources, people are able to figure out technology to extract it from our environment and make it useful. Artificial chloroplasts are one idea, solar thermal is another. Wind power, solar panels, whatever. It can be done, but there is a form of activation energy, as it were, that is needed to develop such systems and build the infrastructure. It is apparent that this won't happen until peak oil is staring us in the face, and then it will take time to develop and deploy them.

Thus, there is a bottleneck in energy availability, which is coinciding with a time in which the population growth rate combined with population size is producing a rapid increase in absolute population size -- hence "interesting times".