Being rational is hard. I can confidently say that none of us succeed at being entirely rational all the time for every topic and action. Being rational does not mean always being right. It means being willing to discover when you are wrong. It does not even mean being able to give compelling reasons for all of your beliefs. At its core, being rational means being open to the possibility of being mistaken, being willing to listen to evidence and arguments that might falsify your beliefs, being committed to learning rather than to any particular position.

Because rationality is hard, we should not let non-rationalists and antirationalists undermine it. One tactic is especially common and insidious. Sometimes it is a deliberate and conscious strategy to undermine rationalism. At other times, it reflects confused thinking about reason. Here is an example, something I came across in the comments section of a news blog:

“Even the most die-hard atheist does, though, have to have some faith if they want to make any argument about the world, even if it is only the faith that they can trust their own senses that what they see, hear etc. is real and not figments of their imagination. We can’t escape from that.”

This assertion is not merely wrong, it is corrosive. The mistake lies in assuming that rationality requires unquestionable foundations. If we were to allow this move, it would undermine reason, evidence, and critical thinking. In its most blatant form, we find it in discussions of religion and gods. The rationalist argues that belief in a particular religion or deity not only is not supported by evidence, it clearly contradicts the evidence. The believer may start by denying this and attempting to argue that evidence does support a belief in an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent God, as well as belief in the resurrection of Jesus, his miracles, and other claims central to Christianity and other religions.

When this approach proves difficult to sustain, the tactic changes. The claim now is that reason itself relies on assumptions that cannot be proven and that must be taken on faith. Before seeing exactly what is wrong with this claim we first need to be clear about the meanings of reason, rationalism, and fideism.

Reason vs. faith

This term has been used in varying ways over the centuries. The confusion this causes tempts me to abandon it in favor of “reasonism” or some other new term. I will stick with the term but specify what I do – and do not – mean by it. In the sense I intend, rationalism is the commitment to base one’s beliefs on the evidence, to calibrate the strength of ones beliefs according to the strength of the evidence, and to be open to revising one’s beliefs when one becomes aware of conflicting evidence.

Rationalists use reason, meaning that they ask questions, apply logic, criticize, and use methods that have improved reliability and accuracy.

If you have taken a course on epistemology or the history of philosophy, you will probably have come across a distinction between rationalists and empiricists. Empiricism is the doctrine that all knowledge comes from, and must be tested by, sense experience. Rationalism, as empiricism’s rival, says that reason is a faculty that can apprehend truths beyond sense perception and can reach certainty. This is not what I mean by rationalism. I take no position about the role of the senses. I disagree with both rationalism and empiricism in the historical sense due to their search for absolute foundations for knowledge.

Another source of confusion in recent years comes from the association of the term with a specific group of writers and thinkers focused in the Bay Area. When people talk about “the rationalist movement,” this is often what they are referring to. These individuals are indeed rationalists in my general sense but they also affirm other views that are not required by rationalism itself. (Bayesianism, fears of AI as an existential risk, utilitarianism, and effective altruism.)

In contrast to rationalism, fideism holds that faith is independent of reason, or that reason and faith are hostile to each other and faith is superior at arriving at particular truths. The word fideism comes from fides, the Latin word for faith, and literally means “faith-ism”. Alvin Plantinga – a philosopher I used to read in the 1990s – defines “fideism” as “the exclusive or basic reliance upon faith alone, accompanied by a consequent disparagement of reason and is used especially in the pursuit of philosophical or religious truth”.

Few people consistently reject reason in everyday life. They couldn’t. People will not survive for long if they make choices based on emotion, religious dogma, or revelation alone. Far more common is a fideism that claims equal status to reason or even superiority when it comes to certain matters, as in religious belief. The Christian Bible is clear enough: 163: Hebrews 11.1: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

In his book, Modern science and Christian Beliefs, Arthur F. Smethurst argued that the basic principles of science – causality, the uniformity of nature, and the reliability of reason – cannot be verified through reason and hence enter the domain of faith. He claims that:

“if we look far enough we shall find that modern science rests upon a foundation of religious belief, and is based upon assumptions which can only be justified by monotheistic faith. Science rests upon acts of faith.”

We can see a similar claim in my original example. That we have faith that our senses are giving us accurate information. That we have in logic and scientific method. Reasoning can only get started by building on a foundation of faith, of the non-rational.

This is a common thought but is mistaken. It trades on an equivocation over the meaning of “faith.” Religious faith requires belief in various things in the absence of evidence and contrary to the evidence. A prima facie trust in sensory information is different. We have come to know that our senses provide us only a small slice of reality and our scientific knowledge enables us to compensate. We do not trust our senses (and other basics about the world) in the absence of or contrary to the evidence. We trust it in line with evidence.

The old rationalist/empiricist distinction feeds this misconception. Both sides attempted to find absolute foundations for knowledge. Descartes most starkly represented the “rationalist” side in basing certain knowledge on indisputable concepts (“I think therefore I am” and his “clear and distinct ideas”). The empiricists instead sought to ground knowledge in sense data. Neither side succeeded but their struggle reinforced the view that knowledge must have foundations that are certain.

True rationalists rely on logic, scientific methods, sensory information, and so on, but they do not treat any of these things as absolutely infallible. They use them because they have proved helpful in acquiring reliable knowledge. They also recognize their limitations. Our senses can mislead us. Even our instruments may mislead us.

This is the essence of critical rationalism. In its most comprehensive and consistent form, this is often known as pancritical rationalism. This is a rationalism that holds the methods of reason themselves open to criticism and refutation or correction. No unquestionable foundations for knowledge are required. Nothing is beyond question. Rationalists hold everything open to revision. A rationalist can be completely consistent. No irrational faith is required.

One modern figure who appears explicitly to be a pancritical rationalist is David Deutsch, who wrote: “The misconception that knowledge needs authority to be genuine or reliable dates back to antiquity, and it still prevails. To this day most courses in the philosophy of knowledge teach that knowledge is some form of justified true, belief, where ‘justified’ means designated as true (or at least ‘probable’) by reference to some authoritative source or touchstone of knowledge.”

We can see the rejection of reason not only among religious thinkers, as I mentioned in an early essay on this blog. Consider also postmodernists and neo-Marxists who reject science and reason as tools of oppression and class warfare. “Another form of fideism – faith as primary – can be seen in existentialists who take a leap of faith to hold a commitment. In today’s world, a much bigger problem than existentialists are those activists who push their emotions as if they were facts and outrage as if it were an argument, and those who place consensus above truth or who see it as the very definition of truth.”

Rationality as a virtue

Rationalism is a fundamentally different cognitive attitude and habit than fideism or any accommodation to faith. Rationality – the consistent application of reason – is an admirable and courageous orientation. Courageous because it is hard to hold everything open to question. Especially when it comes to life and death matters (such as the idea of an afterlife) it is much easier to hold firmly to a reassuring belief despite its obvious weakness when considered rationally.

You cannot act in the world while constantly questioning and doubting all of your beliefs all the time. But that is not what is required of rationalists. We establish some beliefs with a reasonably high degree of confidence based on experience and critical thinking. Until or unless someone gives clear grounds for doubting those established beliefs, it makes sense to continue relying on them. Even so, this takes work, attention, and commitment to finding our way closer to truth rather than to fooling ourselves into a desired belief.

I have major differences with Ayn Rand’s philosophy but appreciate her ability to cut through to the core of issues. Rand made a crucial point when she declared that rationality “means a commitment to reason, not in sporadic fits or on selected issues or in special emergencies, but as a permanent way of life.” I think she was also right to tie rationality to the virtues of independence, integrity, and honesty.

Transhumanism incorporates rationalism in the sense I have described. Like consistent humanists, transhumanists explicitly commit to continually striving to be rational. Like humanists, transhumanists reject faith as a source of knowledge. Perhaps more so than humanists, transhumanists also reject emotions as a source of knowledge and are sensitive to the tendency of emotions to bias thinking.

Reasoning usually concerns itself with finding arguments for continuing to believe what we already believe – reasoning as rationalizing. Rationality concerns itself with challenging our beliefs and relentlessly rooting out those that fail to withstand the challenge. Rationality is not comfortable but it is freeing. Being rational takes commitment, effort, continuing focus, and practice.

It is worth noting a perhaps obvious point: Those who talk a lot about rationality are not necessarily any more rational. Recent evidence shows that famous academics with books and TV shows about dishonesty and cheating do it themselves. In fact, talk about rationality can be little more than signaling to others. Talk is not the same as putting reason into practice. Heavy rationalist talk can even be a way of discouraging others from examining your views and conclusions too closely. “I’m so rational, how dare you question me!” This is rather like the left-wing associated tactic of accusing others of things that you are doing yourself.

A good rationalist is a consistent rationalist. Nothing needs to be taken on faith. We hold our beliefs and assumptions genuinely open to question and to refutation. We apportion the strength of our belief to the evidence. Even the principles of logic and scientific method are open to question. (But good luck trying to construct an argument while doing away with logic.)

The faith-based thinkers want to undermine reason, arguing that it is essentially no different than faith because it relies on assumptions taken on faith or unsupported. This leads inevitably to irrationality. This view leads to the conclusion that there is no rational basis for anything, therefore you might as well choose what you want to believe.

Whenever someone tells you that reason ultimately rests on faith, don’t concede the point. Ask them which belief you are supposedly required to hold beyond criticism. The answer usually reveals the confusion.

Postscript

I recently re-read parts of a book by George H. Smith that I originally read in 1985: Atheism: The Case Against God. On the current topic, I especially recommend Part Two: Reason, Faith, and Revelation. Smith’s discussion is penetrating and illuminating. I do not entirely agree with his epistemology but his core points are strong and well put. A couple of brief excerpts:

“The conflict between Christian theism and atheism is fundamentally a conflict between faith and reason. This, in epistemological terms, is the essence of the controversy. Reason and faith are opposites, two mutually exclusive terms: there is no reconciliation or common ground. Faith is belief without, or in spite of, reason.”

103: “Depending on various factors, such as the nature and amount of available evidence, a belief may be categorized as probable to some degree… Reason demands that the degree of certitude assigned to a belief must be in accordance with the available evidence. Reason does not demand that every bit of human knowledge must be accepted as certain or closed to further investigation.”

108: “This is why reason and faith are incompatible. Faith depends for its survival on the unknowable, the incomprehensible, that which reason cannot grasp. Faith cannot survive in a natural, knowable universe.” “Thus far we have seen that faith must entail belief in the absence of rational demonstration, because reason and faith cannot coexist in the same person at the same time with respect to the same object of knowledge. The presence of rational demonstration negates the possibility of faith. Since nonrational belief is an integral component of faith, we concluded that reason and faith are irreconcilable.”

Debates

Is humanity ready for the intelligence explosion? Doha Debate in Doha, Qatar, January 29, 2026.

In late January, I traveled to Doha, Qatar. I had been invited to debate AI and whether or not we are sufficiently prepared for it. My first point would be that of course we are not prepared for it. There are too many unknowns for anyone to be fully prepared. That is no excuse for refusing to move forward. Doha is where the Iranian negotiations are currently taking place. At the time I traveled there, there was a serious concern that airspace might be shut down because of growing regional tensions, trapping us there. Fortunately, we did the debate and left before that happened.

I am accustomed to the rigors of long-haul economy flights so it was a lovely change to be treated to business class. On the long flight there, I read a large chunk of book 2 of Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem. (I recommend the whole trilogy as well as the Netflix adaptation of the first book.) On arrival, I checked into what turned out to be a luxurious room on the 33^rd floor of the Waldorf Astoria West Bay hotel.

Right after I arrived at the hotel, I met Roman Yampolskiy, author of AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable – the title of which tells you clearly his position. This book is far more apocalyptic than his earlier book, Artificial Superintelligence: A Futuristic Approach. Much as I disagree with Roman, we got on personally very well and spent some time together starting with a chat as we walked to the water and grabbed dinner at a food truck (tasty!). Despite our extensive chat, as requested by the organizers, we avoided discussing the topic of debate.

The next day, we were driven to the Qatar Foundation and met executive director Jigar Mehta, a likeable fellow who looked like the star of a 1970s TV show. We enjoyed a tour of the campus and an elevated view of Education City. This includes satellite campuses of eight international universities including Carnegie-Mellon, Georgetown, Northwestern, and Texas A&M. On that tour, I also met fellow debater Nabiha Syed, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation.

Prior to the start of the debate, each of us was put in our own room for makeup and relaxation. It was like fighters being kept in their own corner until ready to battle. Each of us had someone assigned to us to keep track of us and to show us how to find the bathroom. The debate was spirited but friendly. Right before going on stage, we were individually taken to a room packed with cameras and lights and recorded making a short statement. The Town Hall debate started at 7:00 pm. The stage was expansive and circular with speakers sitting well apart and two sections with selected students who would contribute to the discussion. The debate was largely unstructured, which is not my preference. That meant that we did not drill down very far into any one topic.

After we had time to debate and discuss, the floor was opened to selected students who were seated on one side of the stage. These students had some good comments. A shout-out to Habiba Badawy and Mohammed Al-Hor. During the brief reception afterwards, I was surrounded by students eager to continue the discussion. It was very lively and a lot of fun.

The Al Jazeera cut of the debate currently has over 3.2 million views.

AI debate with Eliezer Yudkowsky, Natasha Vita-More, and Anders Sandberg

Earlier in January, I engaged in a debate/discussion about AI with Eliezer Yudkowsky and Anders Sandberg, and Natasha Vita-More. The video is here.

Before the main discussion, Natasha organized contributions from Peter Voss, Ray Kurzweil, and others. A few days earlier, I posted a blog piece listing the main points I intended to make. We discussed major issues surrounding artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial superintelligence. The debate was largely unstructured, so I did not get to make any kind of sustained argument. My planned opening statement was quickly overridden. With interruptions from the start, I was unable to effectively express my arguments and points. I am unlikely to engage in another debate in this style. I much prefer the format where you get to make an uninterrupted opening statement and rebuttal, with unstructured discussion after.

As you probably know, Yudkowsky insisted that AI would quickly lead to artificial superintelligence and that would destroy humans as the AGIs pursued their own goals – the probability of doom being 99+%. Sandberg accepted the importance of careful control of AGI. I wanted to argue that strong attempts to control AI are both unnecessary and would have bad consequences. My view is that current LLM-type AIs are highly unlikely to achieve any strong form of superintelligence. Alternative approaches might reach that goal. I wanted to question the assumption that AI leads immediately to ever-improving AGI/superintelligent AI (SAI). I would also have argued that the story of rapid and complete control of all resources by AI is highly implausible.

You can find video of the discussion here.

Munk debate on genetic engineering

Motion: Be it Resolved, let’s engineer better human beings

“New powerful engineering technology is already being used to edit human embryos, curing diseases and repairing defective genes before a child is even born. Some welcome this new science as a powerful tool to enhance human intelligence, memory, appearance and physical health. Why wouldn’t we embrace a science that allows people to live longer, healthier, and happier lives? Others warn that this new technology will be used to create designer babies and a new class of genetically “enhanced” elites. It will undermine human dignity and autonomy, and risk unleashing new diseases into the human gene pool. Playing God with human nature, critics argue, will result in a dystopian nightmare of our own making.”

The Munk debates – founded by Canadian businessman Peter Munk and his wife, Melanie Munk – have been held in Toronto since 2008. This time, the Aurea Foundation collaborated with the Deerfield Academy – an independent college-preparatory boarding and day school in Massachusetts chartered back in 1797. Getting to the venue took some traveling, first flying from Phoenix to Boston and then a two-hour ride to the remote Deerfield Academy. There, the students are isolated from smartphones and a long distance from any real population center.

It was an honor to be invited. Previous debaters include Niall Ferguson, John Bolton, Hernando de Soto Polar, Bjørn Lomborg, Nigel Lawson, Christopher Hitchens, Tony Blair, Paul Krugman, Lawrence Summers, Newt Gingrich, Justin Trudeau, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, Jordan Peterson, Max Tegmark, and others.

The main building of the Deerfield Academy

The invitation involved a little bit of drama. Some time after being invited and after signing a contract, I was told that the organizers (I think it was the Deerfield Academy, not the Munk debates, but I’m unsure) were uninviting me because they had to have “diversity” in the debaters. They must have meant diversity in race or sex rather than intellectual diversity because we had the latter covered. The organizers pushed back and I was reinvited.

I would greatly have preferred a different pro-augmentation topic. In this case, I was arguing for genetic enhancement before conception which means making choices for people before they have a say. Sensible genetic enhancements – those that widen a person’s options – are still a good idea but it is definitely more challenging to argue than enhancements for people able to give informed consent.

The debate featured four of us. Arguing in favor of the motion with me was Gregory Stock, biophysicist, best-selling author, biotechnology entrepreneur, and the former director of the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at UCLA School of Medicine. Arguing against the motion was the prominent American bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel, Special Advisor to the Director General of the WHO and a former founding chair of the Department of Bioethics at the NIH. This is the man who said people should die at 75. His debate partner was the award-winning educator, author, and Professor of Reproductive Science at University College London, Joyce Harper.

Greg, me, Rudyard, Joyce, and Ezekiel Emanuel.

I want to give a shout out to Rudyard Griffiths, the chair and moderator of the Munk Debates. Rudyard, who is a senior fellow at the Munk School for Global Affairs and Public Policy, was an excellent moderator and a welcome contrast to some other moderators I have endured. Some moderators really want to be the stars of the event rather than doing their best to enable a good debate.

Preparing for the debate, I was unusually nervous. I did not feel sufficiently prepared, expecting no notes to be allowed on stage. (It turned out that we could.) When I tried delivering my opening statement in my hotel room without notes, it went badly. Past experience tells me that it is always a mistake to try to speak from notes.

View from the stage as people filter in.

We were taken to the Deerfield Academy at 17.30 and taken to the Green Room followed by makeup. The debate started at 19.00. Gregory Stock did a good job in making the pro case. He was followed by Joyce Harper for the opposition. I was on next and thought that I did quite well even though I left the last page of my notes behind. I ended right on time – they were strict on time and had the students start applauding when the counter reached zero. Finally, Ezekiel Emanuel gave his arguments. Then we had 3 minutes each for rebuttals followed by 40 minutes of discussion. We each had 4 minutes for closing arguments.

Greg and I won, swinging the vote in our direction. Oxford style. The initial voting was 29% for, 71% against. After the debate: 35% for, 65% against.

The contrast between my two opponents was stark. Joyce was friendly, likable, and huggable. Ezekiel Emanuel was, to put it mildly, not. When I saw him at the Inn the day before the debate and introduced myself, he was unfriendly. I expected him to be highly persuasive, given his credentials: one of the architects of Obamacare and apparently the most cited bioethicist in the world. Not only was he not impressive, he became increasingly shrill over the course of the debate, perhaps sensing that he was losing. He kept bringing up centralized, controlled scenarios despite me strongly and repeatedly rejecting that characterization. After the debate, the organizers and debaters had a drink together at the Inn, but Emmanuel was not present. The rest of us had a jolly time.

At dinner, with Greg Stock front right.

Biostasis Book

I completed writing on my biostasis book last year. The next job was to produce a well-crafted book proposal. After that, I spent plenty of time searching for suitable potential agents for the book. One agent I had talked to quite a few years ago about another book project was interested but would require too many changes – more than I was willing to make. (Self-publication is a serious backup option.) The rates for even a reply from agents are dismal – single percentage points are not uncommon – but I was pleased to hear back from most of those I contacted, and to have interest from two.

Earlier this month, I signed with an agency in New York. Now, let’s see if he can get me a publisher!

On January 9, I will be discussing major issues surrounding artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial superintelligence. Before the main discussion, we will hear statements from Peter Voss, Ray Kurzweil, and others. The debate/discussion that follows includes Eliezer Yudkowsky and Anders Sandberg. What follows is not my usual essay but some bullet points of issues I want us to cover.

Please sign up for the online event

A point of agreement (I think): Major panics are almost always groundless or misguided. Centralized regulation has serious unintended consequences. Where Eliezer and I disagree is on whether AI is an exception.

In his book (with Nate Soares), If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies [“IABIED”], Eliezer makes his argument specifically about approaches to AI that are similar to the currently dominant approach. His arguments do not apply to entirely different approaches such as “cognitive AI.” This is a crucial point. If his argument is incorrectly taken to apply to ALL AI, we risk shutting down or severely constraining vital AI advances.

It is not at all obvious to me that LLM AGIs (rather than a different type) will achieve meaningful superintelligence. AI needs common sense, physical reasoning, and world models. Current architectures handle these very poorly. A different approach may be needed.

When might a non-LLM approach lead to superintelligence? I have friends telling me “in the next couple of years” but I don’t know. Before the currently dominant paradigm, classical AI approaches were tried for decades. It might be quite a while before superintelligence.

Especially when it comes the current approach to AI, I question the usual assumption that AI achieving human intelligence will rapidly become increasingly superintelligent. Is intelligence a property that can be rapidly improved without dependence on its environment and context? Practical intelligence is not a property of isolated individual minds. It requires a lot of cooperation to get things done. That introduces much friction and likely prevents extremely rapid takeoff.

If the concern of people such as Eliezer is a bad outcome from the current approach and since it is highly unlikely that anyone can stop development of LLMs/transformer-based systems – should we not be pushing for more development of different kinds of AI?

To what extent is it feasible to develop superintelligent special purpose AIs but not AGIs? Limiting the size and power of computing centers does not distinguish between them.

In IABIED, the worrier’s “solution” involves global authoritarian government. Somehow, governments will work together to a common end, with no disruptions from political changes. The downside of such a regime – if it were possible to make it work – would be awful.

In IABIED’s account of how SAI would take over proceeds as if (a) humans are not monitoring and are doing nothing to respond, (b) no humans+AI are responding. In reality, achieving not only SAI but its ability to control the physical world would not happen anything like as rapidly as the doomers suggest.

The path from superhuman cognitive capabilities to superhuman control over the world will be lengthy and difficult, not fast and simple. As one writer put it, you are much more intelligent than a cat but you may still find it difficult to force a cat into a carrier if he doesn’t want to go.

Heavy regulation is unlikely to stop AI (because people will not want to stop it) but will centralize its capabilities, which we should try to avoid, especially if the control centers are governments. Reasonable protective measures can be taken at various levels, including the use of liability law that already exists.

If LLM-AGIs continue to be internally mysterious and continue to have problems, do not give them unfettered access to such things as missiles, financial markets, power plants, etc. These facilities can be automated but as systems entirely distinct from the SAIs.

The paperclip maximizer idea seems particularly silly. (IABIED does not depend on this.) Contrary to the “Orthogonality Thesis”, complex minds are likely to have complex motivations.

Finally, the human-destroying AGI sounds a lot like the stories of genies. Both are all-powerful and give you what you request but interpret your request in a way that you regret. The evil AI also sounds like the Devil (or other destructive supernatural entities). It appears to fit the religious “hole” or receptor in our brains. This doesn’t make the claims false but should make us cautious.

I’m looking forward to a vigorous discussion. Join us!

Two favorite arguments of AI ‘doomers’—the nuclear ignition scare and the CFC ban—fail completely as analogies for pausing AI. Both involved small, controllable systems and quantifiable risks; AI is global, diffuse, and inherently uncertain.

At a recent conference in Istanbul on Beneficial AI, I participated in several panel discussions. One was on proactionary vs. precautionary approaches to AI risk management. Most of us agreed on a proactionary approach in which both risks and benefits are considered, with an emphasis on the value of continued progress and learning by doing. One participant – someone I would put in the “AI doomer” category – argued for stopping AI research, at least any AI work that could lead to artificial superintelligence.

Those of us on the proactionary side – and others who recognize the impracticality of an AI pause or AI halt – have pointed out an obvious issue: Any one company or country that halts work on AI will make vanishing little difference since other companies and countries will take over. If all the “responsible” and peaceful countries stop, less responsible and peaceful countries will take advantage and take a strong lead as they continue to develop the technology.

This AI doomer’s reply is to point to two past events: One is the Trinity risk – the short-lived concern that a nuclear detonation might ignite the atmosphere in a runaway reaction. The other is the global treaty banning CFCs, which were thought to be thinning the ozone layer. (There was never any “ozone hole”; that was a typical media distortion and exaggeration.) I will look at both of these comparisons.

First, I have to say that I do not expect superintelligent AI (SAI) anytime soon. You can see some of my reasons in my ongoing series on the singularity idea. A growing number of experts are now stating that they do not see SAI arising from current LLM approaches. A few of those are working on alternative approaches to AI but these approaches are relatively unfunded. I wish them luck but remain skeptical that their efforts will lead to AGI or SAI in the next few years.

Even so, I am extremely interested in the AI risk argument. It is an excellent area to apply the Proactionary Principle, the downsides are seen as potentially very large, even apocalyptic, and the upsides of AGI/SAI are massive. So, although I doubt that this is an issue we will face soon it could happen soon and perhaps unpredictably. Hence my interest. Back to the argument.

My position is easy to state: This doomer comparison argument is facile, unconvincing, and indefensible. Let’s look first at the most famous historical ‘pause’—when physicists briefly feared that the first atomic bomb might ignite the atmosphere.

The Trinity detonation

In 1942–43, during the Manhattan Project leading up to the Trinity detonation, some of the theoretical physicists — notably Edward Teller, Emil Konopinski, and Arthur Compton — raised the question of whether a fission bomb might ignite the atmosphere. The bomb would produce temperatures in the millions of degrees, hot enough to induce fusion among nitrogen nuclei in air. If these reactions could propagate faster than radiative cooling, they might theoretically cause a runaway “burning” of the atmosphere — consuming all air and oceans in a brief global catastrophe.

Throughout this episode, there was no panic, just methodical examination of the possibility. Edward Teller brought the matter to Hans Bethe, who was among the world’s experts on nuclear reaction cross-sections. Teller and Emil Konopinski did a preliminary back-of-the-envelope calculation and found the conditions probably wouldn’t sustain a chain reaction, but the question was not yet rigorously settled.

Bethe then performed a more detailed analysis in early 1943 and concluded the atmosphere could not ignite for two reasons: 1. The energy from gamma rays and fission fragments would be rapidly dissipated. 2. The required conditions for sustained nitrogen fusion (or deuterium burning in the oceans) could not occur at ordinary atmospheric density. If you want to see the demonstration, you can find it in the declassified 1946 LA-602 report, “Ignition of the Atmosphere with Nuclear Bombs” written by Konopinski, Marvin Marshak, and Teller in 1943.

LA-602 analyzed fusion cross-sections of nitrogen and oxygen at bomb-level temperatures; radiative losses (energy escaping as light before more reactions could occur); and the mean free path of particles at atmospheric density. The physicists concluded that the atmosphere was safe by a huge margin — the reaction could not sustain itself because radiation losses and low density would quench any fusion before it spread. This report was reviewed by Bethe and Compton, and later by Oppenheimer, who fully accepted the result.

Resolving the question did not take long. It was raised in 1942-early 1943 and resolved within weeks to a couple of months. By mid-1943, the scientists were completely confident it was impossible. The story became more widely known after the war when journalists learned of it. It also boosted by dramatizations by Arthur Koestler and H.G. Wells, and in Freeman Dyson’s recollections. But before the end of the war, the physicists were never close to cancelling the test — by 1945, they regarded the risk as zero in practical terms (probability < 10⁻²⁰, according to Bethe’s estimate).

Similar theoretical worries resurfaced before the 1980s heavy-ion collider experiments and before the CERN LHC startup (2008). Both times, physicists revisited the math and found the risk negligible.

How does this episode compare to proposals to pause or halt AI research due to the posited risk of AI destroying the human race?

Maybe half a dozen physicists were concerned. The issue was resolved in around two months (according to Hans Bethe).

It was possible to calculate an objective answer – unlike the AI doom scenario.

A pause was both reasonable and possible for a small number of physicists working on a single project. The same is clearly not true for a wide array of companies and countries working on AI, powered by strong incentives. We can see major differences along multiple dimensions.

Epistemic difference: Measurable risk differs from speculative risk. The Manhattan Project risk was quantifiable, verifiable, and objective. The physicists confronted a concrete physical question: can nitrogen fusion self-propagate at atmospheric density? The input data for the calculation consisted of cross-sections, densities, and temperature. All of these are measurable. This enabled a reliable answer to be produced within weeks, an answer universally accepted.

By contrast, AI risk involves unbounded sociotechnical systems with emergent behavior, recursive feedback, and moral consequences. No equation exists or can exist to calculate existential AI risk. There is no laboratory test and no agreed metric of “alignment.” Far from being calculable and objective, claims of existential catastrophe rely on chains of speculative reasoning, not falsifiable physics.

Institutional and coordination context: This was a single military project with a small number of physicists. AI research is distributed globally across corporations, open-source communities, and states with conflicting incentives. Even a pause of a few months in one or several jurisdictions would only shift activity elsewhere. This would be a massively more complicated coordination problem.

A better structural comparison would be global climate policy. The more tightly focused nature of the Manhattan Project issue enabled a brief but absolute pause. If Oppenheimer said, “stop until Bethe signs off,” everything stopped.

Incentives: Manhattan physicists had a single, state-funded goal and could afford to halt for verification because they would get no payoff for speed. By contrast, AI progress brings immediate economic, military, and reputational rewards. Pausing AI would involve somehow changing incentives across markets and nations, a far cry from a small group in one organization waiting for a calculation on which they could agree. Worldwide restrictive agreements are almost impossible to secure and execute. Thirty years of global climate (CoP) conferences with no noticeable difference to CO2 output show this.

Types of uncertainty: The type of physics uncertainty in the Manhattan Project contracts as more data becomes available. It is a bounded problem on which progress can be made, demonstrably and verifiably. The socio-technical uncertainty involved in AI risk (and benefit) expands with scale. New behaviors, risks, and opportunities appear as systems interact with humans and each other. When you cannot determine an upper bound on risk or even objectively assess it, the rational response is unlikely to be to indefinitely suspend research. Doing so will freeze potential solutions. The rational response to open-ended uncertainty is iterative control, not slamming the world with a coercive “freeze!” order.

Implicit in many arguments by AI doomers is an epistemological fallacy: We are not to proceed with AI development until we can prove that it is safe. In other words, doomers are using the precautionary principle. This approach assumes that we can sit back, halt AI development, and figure out safety in the abstract. This is not how knowledge works outside of formal disciplines. We have to grapple with developments as AI research and development continues. Knowledge can be gained only by continued engagement. A universal pause is not prudence, it’s abdication.

The “atmosphere ignition” story does not demonstrate cautionary paralysis. It actually demonstrates scientific responsibility in an area with objective, verifiable conditions.

CFCs: another poor comparison

Another historical case that doomers use to support their claim that a global halt is feasible and desirable is the Montreal Protocol agreement to ban CFCs. This may seem promising because it is indeed one of the very few examples of successful global environmental coordination. However, it succeeded because of factors that are almost entirely absent in the AI context. The Montreal Protocol was a rare success because it fit the template of a solvable collective action problem—clear cause, narrow industry, affordable alternatives, and verifiable compliance. AI governance is a much harder problem precisely because it meets none of those conditions

The CFC problem involved one class of chemicals produced by a small number of companies in a few industrialized nations. The causal link from CFCs to ozone depletion to UV radiation was empirically measurable and confirmed by satellite data. Replacing CFCs was relatively easy, calling for a minor change to ready alternatives, with no transformation of the global economy or revision of national security priorities.

AI development differs in that it crosses domains and is ubiquitous, pulling in language, robotics, intelligence analysis, healthcare, finance, weapons, and more. It involves a vast array of organizations, individuals, and governments who recognize AI’s vital role in innovation and competition. Unlike CFCs, there is no simple substitute for AI progress. Halting AI would be more like halting electricity or computing.

In the CFC case, incentives were not a problem. Companies could profit by producing new refrigerants. There was no pervasive economic downside. The Montreal Protocol worked because compliance could be verified by tracking production and trade of chemicals. AI research happens in software and algorithms. These are intangible, rapidly replicable, and often open source.

As with the Manhattan Project case, scientists could measure and model ozone chemistry and uncertainty shrank as more data became available. AI’s long-term risks are conceptual and speculative. Thinking about how and whether systems become dangerous is a matter of theoretical extrapolation and story-making.

The CFC ban is therefore completely unsuitable as a model for an AI pause or halt. The Montreal Protocol succeeded because it was simple, centralized, verifiable, and economically painless. AI is the opposite: it’s decentralized, strategic, and woven through every major industry and national interest. There are no easy substitutes for machine intelligence and no way to verify “compliance” across codebases and data centers.

The obvious weakness of these comparisons raises the question: How can AI doomers use these comparisons in their arguments?

It may be that those using these comparisons as an argument for pausing or stopping AI research actually believe them. Motivated to prove their view, they may avoid thinking critically about these comparisons. Or they may know that the comparisons fail to make their point but hope others don’t notice. In that case, they may feel that a misleading but effective argument is justified by the extreme nature of the AI doom they believe is almost inevitable and imminent. This would be like Christians who believe that non-believers go to Hell where they suffer forever (a truly evil idea!) and so find any means of convincing non-believers to be justified – up to and including torture. (However, torture may not induce belief but only a claim of belief.)

Finally, it seems to me that those who were most zealous and excited about the Singularity flipped around and became those most terrified of AI/singularity. Plenty of people are attracted to the AI doom scenario because humans are attracted to all kinds of doom scenarios. The psychology of extremity is the same: whether it’s salvation or damnation, it satisfies the craving for cosmic drama. What is more interesting is the conversion of those super-enthusiastic about AI and the singularity whose need for something extreme led them to flip from AI-as-savior to AI-as-damnation.

I admire much of the work of investigative journalist Matt Taibbi. I was therefore sad that he conveys a number of confused ideas about transhumanism in “The Ersatz Religion" of Transhumanism: Interview With Dr. Aaron Kheriaty.”

Misunderstandings and misrepresentations of transhumanism abound. As someone who is both an enthusiastic fan of Matt’s journalistic work and as the founder of transhumanism in its modern form, I have to comment. I will try to limit myself to a two or three points.

First, “I think it’s an ersatz religion,” says Dr. Aaron. No, transhumanism is not a religion. It is not ersatz since it does not claim to be a religion nor is it one. It is a philosophy of life, like humanism or Stoicism. Philosophies of life serve some of the roles of religions but differ in lacking a belief in supernatural entities, reliance on faith, or worship.

Second, Taibbi quotes Nick Bostrom (misspelled “Bostrum”) on “perpetual pleasure.” That actually comes primarily from David Pearce and his Hedonistic Imperative. That does not reflect transhumanism. It is David’s particular flavor of transhumanism – or add-on to transhumanism. Nick and David are utilitarians so it is not surprising that they have this view. I and many other transhumanists reject utilitarianism. I am more of an Aristotelian/Nietzschean/Stoic virtue ethics kind of guy. My founding Principle of Extropy are all about challenging oneself and improving oneself, not wallowing in pleasure.

Third, he should not associate coercive COVID measures with transhumanism. I developed the principle of morphological freedom which insists that each individual should get to decide what is or is not done with their body. Personally, I strongly opposed mandatory COVID vaccinations, lockdowns, and other NPIs. Although transhumanist politics vary considerably, many of us (especially those associated with the original Principles of Extropy) tend to be libertarian.

Fourth, while Martine Rothblatt is a friend, I disagree that transgenderism is the on-ramp to transhumanism. We share the view that we can and should work toward improving the human condition (not based on a central master plan but by enabling choice). One day it may be possible to truly change your sex (I dislike the term “gender”) but is not today. You can wear makeup, have surgery, and make some hormonal changes but it is currently impossible to alter your genetics and neurology to become a different sex.

Taibbi is correct that human nature exists. It is an abstraction but one that represents a set of existing potentialities, capabilities, and limits. He (and Kheriaty) are mistaken if they think transhumanism does not believe there is a human nature. Far from it, most definitions of transhumanism explicitly talk about the possibility and desirability of changing the human condition. You cannot change something that doesn’t exist!

Progressives think they can change human nature just by declaring it so. Transhumanists acknowledge current human nature and understand that advanced technology is the way to eventually make changes (such as doing away with aging).

Taibbi asks: “Lastly: how much of this current transhumanist movement is born out of the presence of new technology, and how much of it is born out of the loss of connection to old thought?” Those who are familiar with my work know that I see transhumanism very much as a continuation of Enlightenment humanism.

Finally, it is shocking and absurd to see the video labeled “An Ideology of Death.” Transhumanism is the philosophy that favors life extension – pushing back illness and death. It is not about immortality. Life extension does not mean immortality since even ageless people can die from disease, injury, accident, war, etc. I can forgive Taibbi and Kheriaty here because there are too many transhumanists talking about “living forever” and “ immortality.” While biological immortality is possible (and already exists in some species), it is not clear that full immortality is possible. We can certainly push back the threat of death but it seems almost certain to get us one day, whether it is in a few decades or a few million years.

Kheriaty says: “I’m a Roman Catholic, so I believe in original sin, and I consider this life to be a vale of tears. But it’s great, there are many good things. The world is beautiful, I love the world that God created, but it’s also very broken and I really don’t want to live here forever. That sounds to me like a curse. “

That’s fine. He doesn’t have to extend his life. If he wants to rush off to his imaginary Heaven and give up on life in the real world, I won’t stop him. Just let us pursue advances that will let us live as long as we choose (barring accidents, etc.).

For those wanting to understanding transhumanism, my blog has plenty of material. For those unwilling to spend more than a few minutes, I suggest reading my essay “A Letter to Mother Nature” which states the essence of transhumanism concisely.

Next time: I will continue my Singularity Series with part 3.

Before going on to consider other questions about the singularity idea it would help to take a step back. To have clear conversation about singularities, we should be clear what we are talking about. Although writers often refer to “the” singularity, that term means different things to different people. There are overlaps but the differences matter.

The original use of “singularity” was in mathematics and physics. The current usage when talking about AI differs from those original conceptions but owes something to them. In mathematics, a singularity is a point at which a function, curve, or surface behaves abnormally — such as becoming infinite, undefined, or losing its usual smoothness. Singularities often represent points of breakdown in a mathematical model, such as infinite values or undefined behavior.

In physics, a singularity is a point in space-time where physical quantities — such as density, curvature, or gravitational field — become infinite or ill-defined, and the known laws of physics break down. Physical singularities arise when mathematical models of the universe predict singular (undefined or infinite) behavior in quantities that are normally finite.

The mathematical and physics kinds of singularity have some resemblance to recent version of “the singularity” such as accelerating, exponential change or an intelligence explosion. Other senses are more loosely related. Setting aide math and physics, what are the main types of singularity concept?

The big three

The singularity idea goes back to statistician I.J. Good and his 1965 article “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine” in which he wrote:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion”, and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.

The idea was elaborated and given a big boost by Vernor Vinge in 1983 opinion piece and a 1993 essay, “The Coming Technological Singularity.” In his fascinating 1988 book, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, roboticist Hans Moravec does not use the term but does go into detail on what amounts to an intelligence explosion.

The person perhaps most associated with the singularity today, Ray Kurzweil, conveyed his own version of the idea in 1990 in his book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, and then in multiple books over the years. Good’s conception is one of the singularity as accelerating change. Vinge also considers the same conception but also the version in which the singularity is a prediction horizon. Kurzweil’s version is also focused on accelerating change and specifically in the form of exponential acceleration.

We should also credit Stanislaw Ulam who in a 1958 conversation with John von Neumann “centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human a airs, as we know them, could not continue.”

Anders Sandberg has identified nine conceptions of singularity (see further reading at the end) with some additional variations but shares the view of myself, Bostrom, and Yudkowsky that there are three main groupings: accelerating change, prediction horizon, and intelligence explosion leading to superintelligence. David Chalmers notes a loose sense that “refers to phenomena whereby ever-more-rapid technological change leads to unpredictable consequences.” He sees the core sense of the term as “a moderate sense in which it refers to an intelligence explosion through the recursive mechanism set out by I. J. Good, whether or not this intelligence explosion goes along with a speed explosion or with divergence to infinity.

Accelerating change (AC)

The rate of change gets faster over time. This need not be exponential at any particular point – or even over the whole trajectory – but is usually seen as exponential or superexponential change. While the core idea is closely tied to growth in computational capacity and power, this sense of the term often explicitly connects to economic growth and social change. (My objection to the view that acceleration must be a smooth exponential is why I prefer to talk of “surges” – see part 1). This sense of “singularity” is especially associated with Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge.

Note that this is usually presented as exponential change or growth in effects. If technological change follows a smooth curve, we can make reliable predictions about some of its capabilities and effects. We can have a reasonably accurate idea of when key technological capabilities will arrive, especially artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial superintelligence (SAI). Hence, Ray Kurzweil makes numerous predictions by extrapolating exponential change. Ray often points out something true and still underappreciated: that our intuitive thinking about the future tends to make linear extrapolations; we struggle to think in terms of exponential change. One highly practical way this difficulty manifests is in investing less because you don’t fully grasp the power of compound interest.

In an old story, a man makes a deal with the king in which he will place one grain of rice on the first square of a chess board. The number of grains will be doubled for each subsequent square. There are only 64 squares on a chess board, thinks the king, so he can surely afford the rice on the 64^th square. On the third square would be a mere 8 grains. 32 on the 5^th. If the king though ahead to the 10^th square, he might start to worry as 512 becomes 1,024. Yet he would have no idea that, by the last square, he will have to pay out 92,233,720,368,547,758 grains of rice (92 quadrillion).

Prediction horizon (PH)

As superintelligent AI – or superintelligence combinations of humans and AI – emerges, the rate of change becomes so rapid that the future becomes utterly unpredictable based on our past knowledge and experience.

Back in the early and mid-1990s on the Extropians email list – the first transhumanist online forum and today the longest-running – we often referred to “the Wall”. This is one way of referring to the idea of a singularity as a prediction horizon. In other words, technological advance and/or the emergence of superhuman intelligence makes the future impossible to predict from our current limited perspective. This version of singularity is closely associated with Vinge and was hinted at earlier by Ulam.

You might argue that this would not be a real singularity because it has happened before. Or that it is a singularity but just the most recent and most dramatic of a series of singularities. (The same applies to the acceleration view.) Although on a very much longer timescale, you could argue that proto-humans and pre-historical humans could not conceive of the world that humans have created over the last 12,000 years or so.

The essential idea is that more advanced minds would have thoughts and practices that we cannot comprehend or foresee – whether those come from a distinct artificial intelligence or a superhuman intelligence that is our future.

Intelligence explosion (IE)

Highly intelligent systems can design even more intelligent systems. Humans create AI and AI creates superintelligent AI, and so on. Intelligent systems improve themselves in a positive feedback loop – at least until ultimate physical limits are reached. In Moravec’s view, this leads to every gram of matter in the universe is being used for computation. (See his 1988 book and his Extropy magazine essay, “Pigs in Cyberspace.”) This view is closest to those of Good and Yudkowsky.

I questioned the assumption of a strong feedback loop in part 1. I raised doubts about the immediate move from an AGI to SAI and therefore to an intelligence explosion. Many commentators wave their hands and see the transition as too obvious to need defending. In his analysis of multiple types of singularity, Anders Sandberg observed: “There is a notable lack of models of how an intelligence explosion could occur.” My view is that current LLM-AIs alone will not lead to an intelligence explosion. LLMs are not the droids you’re looking for.

One day, it seems quite possible that something like an intelligence explosion may happen. I doubt that will happen in the next decade – by 2035. Almost all the funding and energy is being funneled into LLM approaches to AI. Too little research focuses on hybrid AI systems and neurosymbolic/cognitive AI. It’s easy to get caught up in the remarkable and fabulous progress made by connectionist models. It’s easy to project continued advances up to and beyond the human level. The currently dominant approach will not get us to AGI.

I am far from alone in this view. Others who see LLMs as insufficient for AGI include Yann LeCun, Peter Voss, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, and Gary Marcus. LeCun: “…on the path toward [AGI], an LLM is basically an off-ramp, a distraction, a dead end.” Hassabis: “Deep learning… [is] definitely not enough to solve AI, [not] by a long shot.” Altman: “We need another breakthrough… language models won’t result in AGI.”] Another approach will be needed.

This may be the symbolic approach (GOFAI) or, more likely, a hybrid approach that combines the strengths of the transformer architecture with the symbolic approach. Such an approach is often referred to as neuro-symbolic AI. Neuro-symbolic AI is a type of artificial intelligence that integrates neural and symbolic AI architectures to address the weaknesses of each, providing a robust AI capable of reasoning, learning, and cognitive modeling.

My friend Peter Voss has written on this topic:

“INSA: Integrated Neuro-Symbolic Architecture: The Third Wave of AI, a Path to AGI”

“LLMs are not the Path to AGI”

“The Insanity of Huge Language Models (And a much saner, first-principles path to AGI)”

Gary Marcus also has a lot to say. One recent example:

“How o3 and Grok 4 Accidentally Vindicated Neurosymbolic AI”

If or when an intelligence explosion does happen, the pace of advance may seem explosive from a historical point of view but more like a surge than a spike as we live through it.

Relations between singularity types

Does it really matter which form of singularity we have in mind? Don’t AC, IE, and PH all have in common the view that machine intelligence will grow very powerful very quickly? The three forms do have some similarities but also important differences. Those differences will be clearer when we use more restrictive definitions.

The original conception by I.J. Good was of an intelligence explosion – one that comes only once AI has achieved superintelligence. Unlike Vinge, he does not explicitly or even implicitly assume that human-level AI/AGI will immediately become superintelligent. Otherwise, Good and Vinge have very similar views.

AC and IE: These may sound very similar. AC projects an accelerating pace of technological progress and resulting economic and social effects. IE expects accelerating technological progress leading to a sudden, discontinuous jump in intelligence. To some extent they represent difference emphases. AC puts more emphasis on the outcomes of growing computing power and intelligence. However, clearly an explosion in intelligence would also greatly magnify those outcomes – anything from a posthuman world of limitless possibility to the extinction of the human race.

AC and IE become more distinct and partly inconsistent visions if we take the explosion to imply not just continued increase in intelligence from the human level but a radical discontinuity. The AC model may well fit the situation over years and decades – as it has since the 1960s – but fail to apply when AI reaches human level or super-human level intelligence. The smooth exponentials seen in AC models cease to apply in case of a true and discontinuous intelligence explosion. It also possible that there could be an explosion followed by a return to an exponential path (or even to a slowdown).

[Throughout this discussion, I treat “intelligence” as if it were a unified, definable property. In reality, I don’t believe that and that rejection has important implications for achieving super-intelligence and for the types of outcomes we can expect. But that’s a future discussion.]

AC and PH: These two models look similar in some ways. In the AC view, as exponential accelerating continues it may reach a point where change is so fast that we, looking ahead from today, can have little idea what the future looks like beyond a certain point. We can say that the prediction horizon is a likely result of accelerating change and an even more likely result of an intelligence explosion.

We will get a different result if we insist on a more restrictive version of PH. On the AC view we can project a long way into the future – at least in terms of computing power, intelligence, and perhaps some economic outcomes. According to a strict PH model, we cannot understand anything about the future after the point at which superintelligence AI arises. Of course, the AC model could apply up until the advent of superintelligence.

We could also narrow the application of the PH model, making it more compatible with AC. We could regard the prediction horizon as applying to many of the outcomes of superintelligence while holding that the AC model can still say some useful things about the trajectory of the future. For instance, we may have no clue about the kinds of minds that may emerge or what projections they will devote themselves to, but we may insist that scarcity and basic economic laws will still apply. Scarcity will be pushed back drastically but not entirely eliminated due to competing projects with time urgency and an inability to expand outward faster than light.

IE and PH: These seem to fit well since the intelligence explosion would presumably be the point at which the prediction horizon pops up. If you take PH extremely strictly and generally, you could not talk of a continuing IE after PH. If you cannot know anything after the horizon, you cannot know whether accelerating change continues. But, again, that may be an excessively restrictive definition and conception. We might postulate that we can expect intelligence to continue exploding past the PH but that we can know little or nothing more than that.

Although these three main models share some qualities they also diverge, the degree of divergence depending on how narrow and strict we define them. It remains useful to distinguish between them. AC seems easier to handle than IE or PH. It is important to discuss whether we should expect an IE once we have AGI or SAI, and whether we can do anything to maintain AC but avoid IE and a PH.

In part 3 of this series, I will look at past singularities, the wide range of periods over which singularities happen, and speed vs. intelligence acceleration.

More information

Anders Sandberg (2009): “An overview of models of technological singularity.” This essay also appears in The Transhumanist Reader.

David Chalmers, “The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 17:7-65, 2010.

“Three Major Singularity Schools”, September 30, 2007. Eliezer Yudkowsky.

Another relatively early and interesting take is Damien Broderick’s 2002 book, The Spike: How Our Lives Are Being Transformed By Rapidly Advancing Technologies.

Smart, J. 1999-2008. “Brief history of intellectual discussion of accelerating change.”

Part 1 of the Singularity Series was “Putting Brakes on the Singularity.” That essay looked at how economic and other non-technical factors will slow down the practical effects of AI, and we should question the supposedly immediate move from AGI to SAI (superintelligent AI).

In part 3, I will consider past singularities, different paces for singularities, and the difference between intelligence and speed accelerations.

In part 4, I will follow up by offering alternative models of AI-driven progress.

In part 5, I will explain the difference between Singularitarianism and transhumanism.

In part 6, I will consider my 2002 debate/discussion with Ray Kurzweil.

Finally, in part 7, I will compare the Singularity model to explanatory models in economics.

This is the first part of a likely series on the Singularity idea.

Here, I focus on two points: Economics and other non-technical factors will slow down the practical effects of AI, and we should question the supposedly immediate move from AGI to SAI (superintelligent AI). In part 2, I will follow up by offering alternative models of AI-driven progress. In part 3, I will explain the difference between Singularitarianism and transhumanism. In part 4, I will consider my 2002 debate/discussion with Ray Kurzweil and, finally, I will compare the Singularity model to explanatory models in economics.

I have been thinking about the Singularity idea for many years. The current essay is based on (with considerable new discussion) of a piece I wrote in 1998: “Singularity Meets Economy”, published in Extropy Online, October 19, 1998 – part of “A Critical Discussion of Vinge’s Singularity Concept,” also published in The Transhumanist Reader.

I read Vinge starting in 1984, and became familiar with his version of the Singularity. Similar ideas had been around even before that – various conceptions of accelerating technological change and prediction horizons. In the 1980s and early 1990s, I accepted something very much like the Singularity model of the future. It must have been sometime in the mid-1990s that I came to doubt the validity or plausibility of the Singularity.

My concerns about the Singularity idea have not dissipated over the last quarter-century. The intellectual and emotional gravity of the idea continues to pull thinking into certain directions while downplaying other possibilities. Some people have convinced themselves that the AI takeover and Singularity are just around the corner and have acted consistently. One person cashed in her 4o1(k) and spent it because what’s the point of saving when the AI’s are about to take over and radically change everything and probably destroy humanity? Others stopped saving or decided against having children. With some prominent AI experts predicting AGI in the next 2-5 years, we will likely see more of this.

I’m not the only one concerned about people ruining their lives due to firm belief in a humanity-destroying AI takeover. Zvi Mowshowitz conveys some similar reasons for questioning the inevitability of a drastically rapid and human-hostile Singularity:

I do not consider imminent transformational AI inevitable in our lifetimes: Some combination of ‘we run out of training data and ways to improve the systems, and AI systems max out at not that much more powerful than current ones’ and ‘turns out there are regulatory and other barriers that prevent AI from impacting that much of life or the economy that much’ could mean that things during our lifetimes turn out to be not that strange.

Perhaps before I reach official retirement age, humans will be extinct and the AIs will be chuckling over these cautions. Perhaps. In the meantime, I will continue saving, exercising, and otherwise taking care of my physical and emotional future.

Before I was a philosopher I was in love with economics. Many, perhaps most, Singularity enthusiasts come from computer science and related fields. It may be this difference in background that caused me to be reserved about the concept. It seemed to me that it amounted to extrapolating an exponential curve without regard for real world barriers imposed by economics, organizational structures, regulations, human psychology, and other factors.

The Brakes

After I wrote the 1998 version of this essay, I spent a decade deeply engaged in reading and reviewing high-level material for senior executives, especially on topic concerning the effects of new technologies on business models and strategies. During those years, I learned a lot about how businesses struggle to integrate new technologies and use them productively. This was a time of much discussion of the “productivity paradox” (or Solow computer paradox). This is the observation in business process analysis that, as investment in information technology increases, worker productivity may decrease, and was based on observations of these effects from the 1970s to the 1990s.

As one example of this: Business spend large amounts of money installing enterprise resource management (ERM) systems, including applications such as customer relationship management (CRM) and supplier relationship management (SRM). It was expected that, by implementing these sophisticated IT systems, productivity would be greatly improved. These expectations were often disappointed, at least in the early days, because the new IT systems did not fit well with organizational structures and incentives. For instance, a CRM system might enable salespeople to share information and leads but they won’t do that if they are likely to lose sales to other salespeople.

Another important example of the delay between the introduction of a powerful new technology and its emergence in productivity statistics is that of electrification. Electrification started in the 1890s but did not measurably boost productivity until around 40 years later, in the 1920s and 1930s. Initially, factories replaced steam engines with electric motors, but productivity lagged because they retained old layouts designed for centralized power. It was only after restructuring factories for decentralized, flexible electric use—along with complementary innovations like assembly lines—that economic benefits emerged, illustrating the time required for organizational adaptation.

Historical examples since 1800 reveal similar patterns of technological delays due to social, economic, and infrastructural barriers, suggesting that such factors could restrain the rate of change toward a technological Singularity. Consider the following:

• Steam Engine Adoption (1800s): The steam engine, pioneered by James Watt in the late 18th century, promised to revolutionize industry, but its widespread productivity effect was delayed until the mid-19th century. Early adoption faced challenges like inadequate rail infrastructure, lack of skilled engineers, and resistance from workers reliant on traditional water-powered mills. It took decades of network expansion and workforce retraining for steam to transform transportation and manufacturing, as seen in Britain’s railway boom after 1840.

• Internal Combustion Engine and Automobiles (Late 19th to Early 20th Century): Introduced in the 1880s, the internal combustion engine powered the automobile industry, yet mass productivity gains were not evident until the 1920s. Factors included limited road networks, high production costs, and cultural resistance to replacing horses. Henry Ford’s assembly line, perfected by 1913, and the subsequent infrastructure investment (e.g., U.S. highway system) were necessary to unlock economic benefits, delaying the technology’s full effect by over 30 years.

• Personal Computing (1970s–1990s): The personal computer’s introduction in the 1970s promised a productivity revolution, but measurable gains were slow. Companies struggled with software compatibility, employee training, and resistance to workflow changes. It wasn’t until the late 1990s, with the internet and standardized software (e.g., Microsoft Office), that productivity statistics reflected widespread benefits, a lag of 20–25 years.

• Internet and E-Commerce (1990s–2000s): The internet’s commercialization in the 1990s was hailed as a transformative force, yet productivity growth remained flat through the early 2000s. Businesses faced challenges integrating e-commerce with legacy systems, securing transactions, and shifting consumer behavior. Significant productivity gains only materialized after 2005, with the rise of platforms like Amazon, reflecting a 10–15 year delay.

These examples underscore that the adoption of powerful new technologies often requires not just invention but also extensive complementary changes—new infrastructure, organizational redesign, cultural acceptance, and skill development.

For the Singularity, which hinges on the rapid emergence of superintelligent AI, such delays suggest that even if artificial general intelligence (AGI) is achieved, the transition to a runaway intelligence explosion could be restrained by similar barriers. Misaligned incentives, inadequate global coordination (e.g., differing regulatory frameworks), and the time needed to integrate AI into diverse industries could fragment progress into a series of surges rather than a single, discontinuous leap. Thus, the historical pattern of delayed productivity challenges the Singularity’s assumption of immediate, exponential change.

Smarter implementation can bring gains in productivity more quickly. Very recent studies suggest that LLM AIs are already leading to major gains in productivity in software coding and in business writing.[1] My point was and is not that organizational and other factors will stop productivity growth but that a smoothly rising exponential curve may flatten out due to these facts. The gains may not be exponentially continuous; they may in surges followed by periods of consolidation and learning.[2]

I will not even attempt to guess at the multiple by which economic growth might speed up.

Of course, there is a lot more to be said on the relationship between the technical and economic aspects. Indeed, others have said much, much more! [3] Robin Hanson, with expertise in both AI and economics, has expressed some similar reservations. [4]

The Leap

Vernor Vinge presents a dramatic picture of the likely future:

And what of the arrival of the Singularity itself? What can be said of its actual appearance? Since it involves an intellectual runaway, it will probably occur faster than any technical revolution seen so far… If networking is widespread enough (into ubiquitous embedded systems), it may seem as if our artifacts as a whole had suddenly wakened. And what happens a month or two (or a day or two) after that? I have only analogies to point to: The rise of humankind. We will be in the Post-Human era.

From the human point of view this change will be a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control. Developments that before were thought might only happen in "a million years" (if ever) will likely happen in the next century. [Vinge 1993]

The Singularity idea exerts a powerful intellectual and imaginative attraction. It’s the ultimate technological orgasm—an overwhelming rocket ride into the future. In one dynamic package, the Singularity combines ultimate technological excitement with the essence of Christian apocalyptic and millenarian hopes. Precisely because of this powerful attractive force, the Singularity idea deserves a critical examination. In this short contribution to the discussion, I want to question two assumptions embedded within the Singularity scenario. (These still receive little consideration many years after I wrote this.)

Assumption #1: If we can achieve human level intelligence in AI, then superintelligence will follow quickly and almost automatically.

Assumption #2: Once greater than human intelligence comes into existence, everything will change within hours or days or, at most, a few weeks. All the old rules will cease to apply. [6]

I have doubts about both assumptions. I also doubt that the drastic and discontinuous change in the second assumption necessarily follows from acceptance of the first.

When journalists and others are thinking of someone who talks about AI and the Singularity, there is a good chance they are thinking of Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil’s timeline for AGI – AI capable of matching human intelligence across a wide range of tasks – was considered highly optimistic (or pessimistic you are worried about AGI). He is quoted as saying “We are going to expand intelligence a millionfold by 2045.” However, today (2025) he seems moderate compared to many others. Ray forecasts AGI by 2029 but the Singularity not until 2045. So he expects a gap of 16 years.

Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil both contributed significantly to the concept of the technological Singularity, but their timelines and reasoning for the transition from artificial general intelligence (AGI) to superintelligence (often equated with the Singularity) differ. Vinge, in his 1993 essay "The Coming Technological Singularity," suggested that superintelligence would emerge "extremely soon" after AGI, implying a near-instantaneous leap due to recursive self-improvement. In contrast, Kurzweil, in works like *The Singularity Is Near* (2005) and subsequent updates, predicts AGI by 2029 but delays the Singularity to 2045, a 16-year gap. What are Kurzweil’s reasons for this delay, based on his published arguments and projections as of June 16, 2025?

Kurzweil justifies this delay with several factors: First, infrastructure for superintelligence (e.g., quantum computing, neural networks) requires over a decade to mature beyond 2029’s AGI foundation. Second, he envisions phased intelligence amplification through human-AI collaboration, spanning 16 years via brain-computer interfaces. Third, societal adaptation—overcoming resistance, regulations, and economic shifts—needs this period for AGI integration. Fourth, exponential growth faces non-linear plateaus and resource limits (e.g., energy), delaying the Singularity’s takeoff. Fifth, he ties 2045 to AI’s convergence with nanotechnology and biotechnology, requiring time for cellular-level enhancements like nanobots. Finally, Kurzweil calibrates his timeline with historical computational doubling trends, adjusting for past adoption lags (e.g., electricity), contrasting Vinge’s rapid "intelligence explosion" assumption. This gradualist view supports a surge model over a sudden leap.

My perspective on this aligns with Ray’s. I suspect the ramp up to SAI and to a possible Singularity will take even longer due to additional economic, psychological, cultural, and regulatory factors.

The awakening of a superhumanly intelligent computer is only one of several possible initiators of a Singularity recognized by Vinge. Other possibilities include the emergence of superhuman intelligence in computer networks, effective human-computer interfaces, and biotechnologically improved human intelligence. Whichever of these paths to superintelligence Vinge, like I.J. Good, expects an immediate intelligence explosion leading to a total transformation of the world.

I have doubts about both of the above assumptions. Curiously, the first assumption of an immediate jump from human-level AI to superhuman intelligence seems not to be a major hurdle for most people to whom Vinge has presented this idea. Far more people doubt that human level AI can be achieved. Many years ago, when I told Vernor Vinge that I could easily see AI reaching general human capabilities but did not see that it would then automatically or easily upgrade further, he was surprised and said that this was an objection he had not come across. (That was sometime in 1990s.)

My own response reverses this: I have no doubt that human level AI (or computer networked intelligence) will be achieved at some point. But to move from this immediately to drastically superintelligent thinkers seems to me doubtful. Granted, once AI reaches an overall human capacity, “weak superhumanity” probably follows easily by simply speeding up information processing. But, as Vinge himself notes, a very fast thinking dog still cannot play chess, solve differential equations, direct a movie, or read one of Vinge’s excellent novels.

On my point that the assumption that reaching human level AI is hard but then superhuman AI is easy is questionable, Singularitarian Supreme Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote: “This was the best objection raised, since it is a question of human-level AI and cognitive science, and therefore answerable.”

Slow down, you move too fast

A superfast human intelligence would still need the cooperation of slower minds. It would still need to conduct experiments and await their results. It would still have a limited imagination and restricted ability to handle long chains of reasoning. If there were only a few of these superfast human intelligences, we would see little difference in the world. If there were millions of them, and they collaborated on scientific projects, technological development, and organizational structures, we would see some impressively swift improvements, but not a radical discontinuity. When I come to the second assumption, I’ll address some factors that will further slow down the impact of their rapid thinking.

Even if superfast human-level thinkers chose to work primarily on augmenting intelligence further (and they may find other pursuits just as interesting), I see no reason to expect them to make instant and major progress. That is, I doubt that “strong superhumanity” will follow automatically or easily. Why should human-level AI make such incredible progress? After all, we already have human-level intelligence in humans, yet human cognitive scientists have not yet pushed up to a higher level of smartness. I see no reason why AIs should do better. Okay, one reason: AIs can be reconfigured far more easily than can a biological brain. A single AI may think much faster than a single human, but humans can do as well by parceling out thinking and research tasks among a community of humans. Without fundamentally better ideas about intelligence, faster thinking will not make a major difference.

I am not questioning the probability of accelerating technological progress. Once superintelligence is achieved it should be easier to develop super-superintelligence, just as it is easier for us to develop superintelligence than it is for any non-human animal to create super-animal (i.e. human) intelligence. All that I am questioning is the assumption that the jump to superintelligence will be easy and immediate. Enormous improvements in intelligence might take years or decades or even centuries rather than weeks or hours. By historical standards this would be rapid indeed but would not constitute a discontinuous Singularity.

I find the second assumption even more doubtful. Even if a leap well beyond human intelligence came about suddenly sometime in the next few decades, I expect the effects on the world to be more gradual than Vinge suggests. Undoubtedly change will accelerate impressively, just as today we see more change economically, socially, and technically in a decade than we would have seen in any decade in the pre-industrial era.

But the view that superintelligence will throw away all the rules and transform the world overnight comes more easily to a computer scientist than to an economist. The whole mathematical notion of a Singularity fits poorly with the workings of the physical world of people, institutions, and economies. My own expectation is that superintelligences will be integrated into a broader economic and social system. Even if superintelligence appears discontinuously, the effects on the world will be continuous. Progress will accelerate even more than we are used to, but not enough to put the curve anywhere near the verticality needed for a Singularity.

No matter how much I look forward to becoming a superintelligence myself (if I survive until then), I don’t think I could change the world single-handedly. A superintelligence, to achieve anything and to alter the world, will need to work with other agents, including humans, corporations, and other machines. While purely ratiocinative advances may be less constrained, the speed and viscosity of the rest of the world will limit physical and organizational changes. Unless full-blown nanotechnology and robotics appear before the superintelligence, physical changes will take time.

For a superintelligence to change the world drastically, it will need plenty of money and the cooperation of others. As the superintelligence becomes integrated into the world economy, it will pull other processes along with it, fractionally speeding up the whole economy. At the same time, the SI will mostly have to work at the pace of those slower but dominant computer-networked organizations.

The need for collaboration, for organization, and for putting ideas into physical changes will ensure that all the old rules are not thrown out overnight or even within years. Superintelligence may be difficult to achieve. It may come in small steps, rather than in one history-shattering burst. Even a greatly advanced SI won’t make a dramatic difference in the world when compared with billions of augmented humans increasingly integrated with technology and with corporations harnessing human minds linked together internally by future versions of today’s enterprise resource planning and supply chain management software, and linked externally by extranets, smart interfaces to the Net, and intelligent agents.

How fast things change with the advent of greater than human intelligence depends strongly on two things: The number of superintelligences at work, and the extent of their outperformance. A lone superintelligence, or even a few, would not accelerate overall economic and technological development all that much. If superintelligence results from a better integration of human and machine (the scenario I find quite likely), then it could quickly become widespread and change more rapid.

But “more rapid” does not constitute a Singularity. Worldwide changes will be slowed by the stickiness of economic forces and institutions. We have already seen a clear example of this: Computers have been widely used in business for decades, yet only in the last few years have we begun to see apparent productivity improvements as corporate processes are reengineered to integrate the new abilities into existing structures.

In conclusion, I find the Singularity idea appealing and a wonderful plot device, but I doubt it describes our likely future. I expect a Surge, not a Singularity. But in case I’m wrong, I’ll tighten my seatbelt, keeping taking the smart drugs, and treat all computers with the greatest of respect. I’m their friend!

If you click the heart at the top or bottom of this post it will not only make me happy but will help others find this blog. I appreciate your support and feedback.

1. In a detailed and brilliant essay, Stephen Wolfram explains how GPT works (and how it does not work) and why, despite its surprising skills in language, may well not extend its capabilities to other areas of cognition. [Wolfram 2023]

2. I also consider the effect of economic factors in “Singularity Meets Economy”, in Extropy Online, October 19, 1998 – part of “A Critical Discussion of Vinge’s Singularity Concept.”

3. Robin Hanson: “Is a Singularity Just Around the Corner? What it takes to get explosive economic growth.” Journal of Evolution and Technology June 1998. Vol. 2. Hanson, Robin (2008). “Economics of the Singularity.” IEE Spectrum, June 2008. Eliezer Yudkowsky. “Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics.” Technical report 2013-1. Berkeley, CA: Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

4. See Robin’s “Dreams of Autarky” included in the lengthy debate between Robin and Eliezer Yudkowsky in The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate eBook. Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

5. “Practical Advice for the Worried.” Don’t Worry About the Vase, March 1, 2023.

6. For a lengthy debate on take-off, see Hanson & Yudkowsky 2013.

NEXT: Singularity, Surge, and AGI

If you are still young – by which I mean approximately 40 or less – you may not relate to this essay as much as those of us how have a half-century+ experience of the present unfolding into the future.

By “the future” I mean the future as it looked during my formative years. Although my formative years started at my year zero, I am thinking primarily of a period around 1969 to 1984 – from when I was 5 years old to when I was 20. The starting date is tricky because I don’t have much memory from earlier years. I pick 1969 because that was when I watched the Apollo 11 moon landing in real time (and went on to watch all the others). I watched the Apollo 11 moon landing during the evening of July 20 and my parents let me stay up for the first moon landing at around 4am the next day (England time). They knew I was a huge space fan and wouldn’t deny me this event.

For younger people presumably the year “2024” does not sound futuristic or special. To me, growing up when Space: 1999 (1975-77) and the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey epitomized the future, 2024 still sometimes sounds fantastical and distant.

My image of the future was influenced by the real space program, by reading science fiction, and from TV shows and movies. There were also magazines such as Future Life, Starlog, and Claustrophobia. The earliest influences are lost to the dim mists of early memory but certainly included lots of rocket and space books for youngsters.

Reading was my main source of future vision. Throughout my teens I read Asimov and Clarke and many others, including novels and short story collections I could find by Robert A. Heinlein, Robert Silverberg, and Phillip K. Dick (I read dozens of books by these three writers in 1981-82). Just after the 20-year period, I read Vinge’s True Names, one of the more accurate attempts to envisioning the near future.

Television shows and movies I watched in my pre-teens to mid-teens included Timeslip (the second story included AI, cryonics, and intelligence augmentation!), Dr. Who, Joe 90 (The adventures of Joe McClaine, a schoolboy and spy for the World Intelligence Network (WIN) who can have the knowledge of top experts transmitted to his brain by his scientist father), Space: 1999 (1975-1977), Star Trek (The Original Series), Logan’s Run (1977-1978) & the 1976 movie, The Six Million Dollar Man (1973–1978), The Bionic Woman (1976–1978), 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Andromeda Strain (1971 but I saw it later), Mad Max (1979), Alien (1979 – I was legally too young to see it but lied about my age), Westworld (1973), Silent Running (1972), Battlestar Galactica (1978–1979), Blake’s 7 (1978–1981), a British series about a group of rebels fighting against a totalitarian interstellar government, Blade Runner (1982), and of course Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

Toward the latter part of that 20-year period, non-fiction I read included Arthur C. Clarke’s Profiles of the Future (1981), Douglas R. Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1982), Durk Pearson & Sandy Shaw’s Life Extension: A Practical Scientific Approach (1983), Alan Harrington’s The Immortalist: How Science Could Give Humanity Eternal Life (1983), Jerry Pournelle’s A Step Farther Out (1984) and The Endless Frontier (1985), Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett’s The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul, Timothy Leary’s Exo-Psychology, Petr Beckman’s The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear (1982), Martin Gardner’s Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus, Hans Kugler’s The Disease of Aging: How Not to Grow Old Before Your Time (1986), Eric Drexler’s Engines of Creation (1986), Robert Ettinger’s The Prospect of Immortality and Man Into Superman, Adrian Berry’s The Next Ten Thousand Years: A Vision of Man’s Future in the Universe (1987), John Searle’s Minds, Brains, and Science, and lots of economics and philosophy including Milton and David Friedman, Hayek, Mises, Popper, Nozick, and others.

In some ways, the future appeared to be unfolding rapidly in the second half of the 1990s. There was a feeling that a Singularity really was near. The ramp felt steeper. Economic growth was strong, productivity growth was higher, the stock market reached new highs, the US government achieved a budget surplus (yes, really), computer technology advanced rapidly, the Web came into existence and grew massively, we were decoding the human genome. We cloned a mammal for the first time. Only space travel seemed to lag behind.

But then things fell apart. The number of new drugs approved declined steadily, suffocated by regulation. The stock market stopped booming and Internet stocks crashed. In the USA, life expectancy fell.

At the tail end of 2024, some things are looking up.

Now, we have a bold new push into space. We have AI. We might have a renewal of nuclear energy. Our genetic editing methods are rapidly improving. We have self-driving cars (in some places, including where I live). We have packages being delivered by drones. We may have hyperloop. We have VR/AR (remember Microvision in the ‘90s? Some of you may have had stock in the company, expecting massive growth.) In the USA, life expectancy has reached a new high. The increase in obesity appears to have stopped.

Many things are not going well and are getting worse – the ability to build things quickly and at a reasonable cost being prominent. Importantly, also increasing regulation and risk aversion. Along with optimism, we find pervasive pessimism, whether about climate change, artificial intelligence, or our future demographics. Perpetual trembling under the dire threat of yet another invented existential threat. But enough things are looking promising that it feels like the 2020s could be something like the 1990s.

For those of us in the USA especially, one obvious big coming shift is the change of political administration. I see tremendous uncertainty around how the next four years will play out. But I see quite a few encouraging signs. Compared to the previous Trump administration, the one starting in January 2025 (actually it’s already started) may produce some significant reform and downsizing of the regulatory bureaucratic, pervasive, controlling powers. Trump’s picks for some agencies are questionable but he also has some excellent picks, such as for Chris Wright for Energy Secretary, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya at the NIH, and some others.

One of the worst policies of the new administration might not turn out so badly. I’m talking about tariffs. My pretty good understanding of economics says they are a bad idea. However, I’m getting a sense that Trump will use them as a negotiating tactic rather than actually imposing them as widely as he threatens. The other bad policy is shared by the Democrats – a complete failure to address the growing financial crisis involving Social Security and other “entitlements” and the cost of interest on debt. Even those problems will shrink in magnitude at least a little if Trump’s people actually succeed in slashing the dead hand of government and seriously reducing regulations. Major reform of the FDA and the NRC alone would greatly improve life over the coming years and decades.

Overall, I am cautiously optimistic about the next few years, at least for the USA. Europe, and especially my birthplace the United Kingdom are busy destroying their economies with Net Zero idiocy, extremely expensive energy, along with other anti-market policies. I would list the many encouraging factors here but that it not the focus of this piece.

Futuristic headlines

My self of the 1970s and early 80s would find some recent headlines futuristic and science fictional. Other people who grew up when I did – those less immersed in science fiction and optimistic non-fiction – would find the headlines even more amazing. Some examples:

NASA’s Perseverance Rover Successfully Extracts Oxygen on Mars

James Webb Space Telescope Discovers Potential Signs of Life on Exoplanet

Artificial Intelligence Passes Medical Licensing Exam

Lab-Grown Meat Approved for Sale in the United States

China's 'artificial sun' smashes 1000-second fusion world record

First CRISPR Gene-Edited Babies Born in China

Google publishes landmark quantum supremacy claim

Man gets genetically-modified pig heart in world-first transplant

NASA’s DART Mission Hits Asteroid in First-Ever Planetary Defense Test

SpaceX rocket booster successfully 'caught' on first attempt during flight test

When Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock in 1970, his thesis seemed plausible. Things were changing fast and some people were finding it hard to adapt. Half a century later, change is at least as fast in many ways and yet you hardly hear about future shock. If the shock has not gone away, we have at become inured to it. Reading the above headlines you may have shrugged or muttered: “not that big of a deal” or “so what?” I find it fascinating how quickly we become used to something new and impressive or exciting.

Thrilling my young self

“Max, it’s for you,” called Mum. I got up and went to the phone. “Hello?”

“Hello Max. Look, you are going to find this hard to believe but give me a second and I’ll prove it to you”, I (2024) said to Max (1980).

“Uh, who is this?”

“I’m you! But I’m you from the year 2024. Actually we just say “2024.” People pretty much stopped saying ‘the year’ before the numbers after 2001. I’m using a fictional device to communicate with you through time to tell you some things. I know I would have liked to hear what I’ll tell you, so here I am.”

“You don’t sound like Nick. This is the kind of prank he would pull. Are you making this call for him?”

“No, it’s really me, I mean you, I mean you from 44 years in the future.”

“Ha ha. Okay, let’s see what you’ve got. Hey, wait a sec, did you say you’re using a fictional communication device?”

“Yes, but don’t worry about that.”

“That’s…. weird. So, you’re me from 2024? Whoa, so you’re 60?”

“That’s right. Crazy isn’t it. It seems crazy to me, too. I know you like weight training so you’ll be glad to know that I have stayed in good shape. But, look, this will be more fun if you believe I am your future self.”

“Okay, Mr. Future-Me, prove it!”

“My memory isn’t great and I didn’t start recording the non-fiction books I read until 1981, but I know that this year you read a lot of SF. Silverberg’s Recalled to Life, and Dying Inside (that was excellent but sad), and Master of Life and Death – quite a Silverberg binge. Also Simak’s Why Bring Them Back from Heaven, Philip K. Dick’s Vulcan’s Hammer, Simak’s Ring Around the Sun, and Aldiss’s The Saliva Tree.”

“…that’s right? How the hell do you know that? Nick wouldn’t know that. Did Julian put you up to this? He might know what I read.”

“There’s a lot of stuff I could say that would be right but which you could try to explain away. So, let’s get this over with, and sorry if this embarrasses or alarms you. Right… when you were 8 or 9 and Dad took you to work with him, you [redacted] but nobody found out. A couple of years ago, Russell did [redacted] and you called the police. I’m not sure what year it was, but it must not have been long ago that you stupidly did what the other boys did and threw stones at the window of that factory at the end of the street. When you were about 9 or 10, you [redacted] and Mum walked in and [redacted].”

“Oh my God! What the hell? How can you possibly know that?”

“Because I did those things and they happened to me. I am you, or I was.”

“This is terrible!”

“No, no, relax. I’m you. I’m sorry some of those things happened but that’s not why I’m calling you from 2024. Um, should I let you digest this a bit and call you back later?”

“…This is crazy. This is nuts. This is impossible! It must be true. Can you call back in two hours? No one else will be home.”

“No problem. I’ll make the adjustment and will call you back in two hours, your time.”

“Hey Max. Feeling better?”

“Uh, I’m still a bit shaky but I’m willing to believe it’s you, I mean me.”

“Good, good. I know you like SF and you think about the future, so I’ll tell you about it. Things are changing faster now that they were in 1980, but I can tell you how things are right now.”

“Okay, wow, tell me. Is there a Moon base? Do we have flying cars? Have scientists beaten aging?”

“Ah, I thought you would ask about those. I was hoping to start off with some cool stuff that has happened. That’s a sore point with me! I’m almost 61 now, obviously, and we have made basically zero progress in extending maximum lifespan. Global life expectancy has increased by 10 years, which is pretty impressive historically, but we haven’t stopped the aging process. There is far more interest in doing this but we aren’t there yet. I’m probably going to need cryonics if I’m to get much further into the future.

“You mean being frozen?”

“Kind of. You’re going to get very interested in that in a few years. I’m running out of time so I can’t get into it but today thousands of people have arranged to go into cryonics when they need it, including me. And my wife.”

“Your wife? Oh, shit, yeah I suppose that makes sense. Wow.”

“Ha! Yes, and two dogs. I know you dislike dogs and I understand why. You’ll change your mind.”

“There kind of are flying cars but they are just demonstrations and not in general usage. We do have a lot of drones, which are sort of like mini helicopters; some are the size of toy planes while others are pretty big.”

“No Moon base, sorry. In fact, we still have never been back to the Moon since Apollo 17. We have sent probes to several planets. Private enterprise is now greatly accelerating the number of rocket launches and it looks like we may send people to Mars in the next four years.”

“That’s disappointing. I really want to go into space.”

“Yes, it’s sad. Once the space competition between the USA and the Soviet Union (which doesn’t exist anymore, by the way) was ‘won’, funding and determination dried up. But now commercial efforts are succeeding and creating an economic basis for space.

You must already know that the Space Shuttle will be launched in a few months. It’s a typical government project. The cost per pound or kilo of getting stuff into low Earth orbit will be about 44 times as much as our best current rockets. Actually, the current cost of getting mass into space means that I could afford to do it at the cost of one and a half year’s salary. I wish I could show you some charts. Some people have bought or been given rides into space. Captain Kirk, William Shatner, is one. He’s still alive, by the way. He’s 93 now.

Asteroid mining may not be far off. (Too bad I can’t show you a chart.)

One of the most amazing things happened just a few weeks ago – the leading space company caught a returning rocket between two giant metal arms like chopsticks. As one writer put it, “A skyscraper fell from the sky.” It was incredible. Remember watching the Apollo 11 Moon landing? How incredible and stunning and beautiful that was? That’s how I felt watching this launch and crazy rocket catch. I cried.”

“Oh, right, we have discovered an awful lot of moons that weren’t known in your time. In 1980, scientists knew of only 31 moons. Now we have found 293! Saturn is ridiculous – it has at least 146 moons.”

“Wow! Seriously?”

“Yep. But even more amazing is that we have been able to discover planets around other solar systems. We are continually finding more but right now there are… let me check with my artificial intelligence here… 5,788 exoplanets (as they’re called) across 4,341 planetary systems.”

“That’s crazy! Wait, did you say “artificial intelligence? Like in 2001?”

“Yeah, but I’ll get to that.”

“But I want to hear about it! And robots! Do you have robots?”

“Yep, there are several million robots working in factories, and a bunch of others. We have only recently started to see prototypes of humanoid robots, although lots of people have simple ones that will dust the floor. Just in the last few years, some places have self-driving cars. I’ve taken a couple of rides in one. It’s fun. It was an electric car, by the way. That part’s probably not too exciting. The first electric car was invented about a century before your time and you’re used to the milk delivery vans being electric. (We don’t have milk delivered anymore.)

“You were in a car with no driver? Cool. Are they safe?”

“They are still improving and not yet allowed on the freeways, uh, motorways, but they are already safer than humans driving.”

“Okay, but I want to know about computers and AI.”

“Of course. It’s a bit complicated because computers in some form are everywhere these days. Our fridge, oven, and washing machine all contain computers. Regular cars have computers. What you think of as a telephone is a powerful computer that does way more than let you talk to people. Hey, I remember I, we, saw a demonstration videophone at Bristol Museum. It took a while, but now we talk via video a lot of time, either on our mobile phones or on our personal computer.

Phones are much smaller than yours. They can do hundreds of things: Tell you the weather, guide you to your destination, check your bank account or manage your investments, play music with an almost unlimited choice, play games, set alarms, chat with people with text or by video, take photos and record videos, ask questions of an AI, search for information, shop for anything and have it delivered (the first delivery by flying drone has just started near where I live), use a calculator, book flights, read books (comics too), watch movies or TV shows, use as a flashlight, get the news, translate text in foreign languages, track your fitness, do a guided meditation, study a course, many of which are free, and more. All that in something much smaller than you landline phone.

“Uh, you’re joking, right? The Star Trek communicator doesn’t do any of that, hardly, and that’s supposed to be the 23^rd century.

“No, I’m serious.”

“These must only be for a few rich people, though, right?”

“The poorest people in developed countries have them. In fact there are more mobile phones than there are people.

“Even people in poor countries have been adopting cellphones rapidly. By the way, next year you will buy your first computer.”

“What, that Tandy TRS thing?”

“No, it will be a Sinclair ZX-81. It will have one kilobyte of memory, expandable to 12.

It won’t have a hard drive and will have a funky membrane keyboard. The display will be a puny 24 lines × 32 characters or 64 × 48 pixels graphics mode. Today, my smart watch has vastly more computing power. So do smart rings that you can wear around your finger. The best supercomputers run at almost 2 exaflops – that’s one quintillion floating point operations per second.

“The internet already exists, connecting computers around the world, but it is used by only a few dozen connected sites, mainly universities and research centers. You won’t write letters and mail them anymore. You’ll do practically everything electronically. Over two-thirds of the world’s 8+ billion people will use the internet and there are around 20 billion devices connected.”

“That’s… that’s insane! Science fiction has missed on most of that. What about artificial intelligence, like HAL 9000?”

“AI was slow to develop but recently has taken off dramatically. The currently most popular AI, called ChatGPT, had a million users within five days of its late 2022 release. This year it reached 300 million weekly users. In my time, I use several AI assistants, mostly for research and as a writing tool. AI is as good or nearly as good as the best humans at various tasks and has been improving rapidly. It’s still not good at some things. Actually, it’s the opposite of what most people, including the experts, expected. AI is really good at generating illustrations – even photorealistic – and now is doing well with video. It can translate between languages with no delay. It’s not very good at doing math or at coming up with genuinely new ideas. Some people expect it to do that soon but I think we will need a different approach to AI. In the last few years, lots of people have been worrying that AI will take over and dominate or destroy humanity!”

“What do you think?”

“Nah. Not the current systems or any plausible extensions of them. It’s complicated.”

“What about robots? They’ve got to be pretty good.”

“There are millions of industrial robots. I suppose you can count the self-driving cars. Humanoid robots that can do humanlike tasks are here in small numbers but getting better pretty fast.”

“Wow. Technology is really going to advance, just as I hoped. But what about poverty and hunger? In the 1970s on TV I saw a lot of famine and starvation. Like in Bangladesh, parts of Africa, other places.”

“We still have that but less of it every decade. It is practically all preventable but still happens because of bad government and wars. There’s been nothing like the state-caused Chinese famine not long before we were born but the 1970s were bad. Still, the total number of people starving or food deprived has gone down even as world population has grown – there are almost twice as many people today.”

“I keep reading about overpopulation. I was just writing something about it…”

“Don’t worry about it. Global fertility peaked in the 1960s and has been falling since. You will be among the first people to realize that overpopulation isn’t a problem, although most people won’t believe it. Not even today, although in the last few years, more people are seeing the problem with population stagnation and decline.”

“There’s so much more I want to know!”

“Unfortunately, we’re almost out of time. The signal’s weakening. Let me cover more stuff quickly: People will get much fatter – you will be appalled! But now new drugs look like they will help. Don’t worry, you won’t need them. I know you’re into bodybuilding. You will keep it up, not always consistently. Mr. Olympia will become much larger than Arnold Schwarzenegger or Lou Ferrigno. Runners are getting really close to running a marathon in two hours. Sports performance continues to improve.

“I’ve been really worried about nuclear war. But you’re there so it can’t have happened.”

“Not yet. I know it looked very worrying in your time. It got better, especially with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the world situation has become more volatile. But, yes, nobody has used a nuclear weapon (except for testing) since 1945. In fact, deaths from war have continued to decline, not that there aren’t some horrible, violent places in the world. Unfortunately, the good use of nuclear – for energy – has been far slower than it should have been. That may finally be changing. You will be on the right side of that fight all your life. There are major social changes. Oh, crap, the signal’s dropping off… Homosexuality will be decriminalized in many countries and gay people, as they are called these days, will be able to marry and adopt children.”

“What about…”

“Sorry. Gotta go. I’ll try to reach you again but probably won’t be able to. Enjoy your life! Contribute to the future. Help create a better one. Things are good but could be better. I could be better. You can be better than me. This is only one possible future from your perspective. Bye!”

So much more I want to tell young Max, especially about his life and decisions. Ah well. I wonder if I’ll hear from my 104 year old self? How much of a clue do we have today about life in 2064?”

To my readers:

My output on my personal blog has been low lately. That’s largely because I’m pushing hard to finish a complete draft of my book on biostasis. If I can keep up the pace, I expect to finish a draft around the end of the year or in January 2025. The blog entries I have written have been on our group blog for Biostasis Technologies. Subscribers will probably enjoy my October 29 entry:

Effective Accelerationism and Biostasis

I look at the origins of effective accelerationism (e/acc) and its unacknowledged roots in extropian transhumanism as well as in several Singularitarian writers. Noah Smith has noted the “extropian enthusiasm” of e/acc. The original essays by the e/acc founders can be difficult to distill down so I outline the basics of  e/acc and then survey the many flavors of accelerationism. I point out errors in e/acc’s contrast with transhumanism. That is followed by a critique of the injunction to “follow the will of the universe.” Despite errors and shortcomings I conclude that e/acc is more right than wrong. From the perspective of the central important of life extension, I outline what might be called long/acc or longevity accelerationism.

Recent podcast interviews I have conducted:

Thinking About the Future with Anders Sandberg

Anders Sandberg has been thinking both critically and creatively about the future for several decades. I first got to know him and his thinking in the early 1990s and found someone who vision was remarkably close to my own. In this interview, Anders talks about the work he did for almost two decades at the Future of Humanity Institute and continuing today at Sweden’s Institute for the Future.

I asked Anders what kind of idea we can have of the future in a century or two, how seriously we should take existential risks, the changing attitudes toward life extension, biostasis, and transhumanist ideas, building a human community across time, how people can secure a high quality cryopreservation, and more.

Robin Hanson on cryonics, future trends, AI and more

Robin Hanson, economist, former AI researcher, and prolific blogger, is the author of The Age of EM: Work, Love, and Life When Robots Rule the Earth, and The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life. In this podcast with Max More, Robin tells us about:

• Why he made cryonics arrangements

• How prediction markets have developed since he came up with “ideas futures” in the 1990s

• What we can know about the future where biostasis patients are revived

• To what extent we should worry about AI displacing or harming humans

• Why we should be concerned about population decline

• And much more!

Should you take Rapamycin?

I found Gary Taubes’ book, Good Calories, Bad Calories fascinating and pleasingly incisive in its examination of historical dietary recommendations and where they went wrong. Taubes is the author of several books including Good Calories, Bad Calories, Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It, Rethinking Diabetes: What Science Reveals About Diet, Insulin, and Successful Treatments, The Case Against Sugar, The Case for Keto: Rethinking Weight Control and the Science and Practice of Low-Carb/High-Fat Eating,

I want to make a few comments on a recent post by Taubes on rapamycin.

Taubes notes that “the longevity movement” has become “the hot topic” and that rapamycin is much discussed in that movement. This seems to be true although I have seen more discussion recently of metformin, resveratrol, NAD+ precursors, and to a lesser extent Alpha-Ketoglutarate (AKG). Researchers and influencers, he says, are “no longer talk about treating or preventing chronic diseases, but about extending the span of a life without these disorders – the healthspan.”

Before Rapamycin came along, living a healthy life was about avoiding doing damaging things rather than what we do. “What these articles tend not to say is that the idea of taking a pill or any compound in any form to delay aging is new territory for medical science.”

It is true that much of being healthy consists of not doing unhealthy things – not smoking, not drinking excessively, not eating unhealthy foods or too much of any food. But even conventional wisdom advocates doing some things actively, most obviously exercising. (This exception will be important in relation to another point that I will get to.) The statement about “new territory” is surprising given the long history of pills and compounds and other treatments to delay aging. I mentioned some of this history on my essay on Biostasis as Longevity Plan A. Examples include Gerovital-HC (procaine), cellular therapy, hormone therapy, chelation therapy (EDTA), L-Dopa, lergotrile and other ergot derivatives, nucleic acid therapy, alpha Lipoic Acid, CoQ10 (ubiquinol), DHEA, melatonin, N-Acetyl Cysteine, metformin, NAD+, Dasatinib, quercetin, and resveratrol.

More plausibly, Taubes singles out rapamycin because “with its few decades’ worth of suggestive literature, is the first viable approach to increasing longevity that comes in pill form while simultaneously escaping, at least so far, the pungent aroma of snake oil that wafts over all other prospects.” Rapamycin is popular with many experts and is backed by considerable research, so wouldn’t it be foolish not to take it, asks Taubes. He quotes Seth Godin, “if you wait until you are ready, it is almost certainly too late,” then asks whether this logic applies to rapamycin. If we wait for conclusive evidence for effectiveness and safety, it may be too late.

Rewards, risks, prevention, and cures

Taubes briefly surveys the extent of the research, including its approved use in transplant patients, and two decades of research showing life extension in yeast, worms and fruit flies to mice, and rats as well as current testing in dogs. Life appears to be extended in these animals by 105 to 20%. Given the lack of published evidence in anything larger than a rat, Taubes uses 10% for his discussion. “Instead of dying at 80, say, you die at 88 and the drug delays by the better part of a decade every chronic disease diagnosis and every medical intervention you might receive in response. It might keep your immune system 10 percent younger, which could be critical for fighting off an infection.”

Perfectly reasonably, Taubes asks: Even if the benefits are real in humans, what are the risks? Is it a Faustian bargain? Any bioactive and non-native compound is likely to bring some harms.

In his view, we must make a sharp distinction between preventive medicine and curative medicine. With curative medicine we give a treatment that will have downsides because, without it, the patient will die. A patient hoping to live longer does not face significant medical consequences. A physician’s first obligation is the Hippocratic oath: Do no harm. For transplant patients, that means prescribing rapamycin. But that’s not true for healthy patients. In healthy patients being given preventive medicine to let them live longer, “The only relevant symptom of those who take a drug to extend their lifespan is that they are indeed aging—i.e., mortal.” In preventive medicine, “any risk of harm can be considered excessive.”

This is the first major point where I differ.

I grant that it is legally safer and reputationally reasonable for physicians to refrain from recommending a preventive measure that is likely to have bad side effects. But the distinction cannot be maintained in any rigid way even if we consider only standard treatments that are not typically labeled as “life extension.” Doctors commonly urge their patients to exercise.  But exercise can and frequently does have unwanted effects, from repetitive motion injuries, to broken bones and torn ligaments. Overall, the effects are expected to be beneficial and doctors prescribing exercise should first ensure that the patient is ready for it. But the unwanted effects are real risks. Therefore, Taube’s tidy distinction cannot be maintained.

Another example – one very relevant to Taubes’ own work – is dietary recommendations. Doctors and health experts often recommend specific diets. Taubes himself recommends low-carbohydrate and ketogenic diets. While strict diets can bring major health benefits they may also increase some risks. Which diets do that and how much is a matter of controversy. The point is that doctors recommend changes in diet that could lead to unwanted side effects. They do so because the expect the overall health outcome to be positive.

The distinction between curative and preventive medicine is plausible to a degree but fails to stand up in the end. Taubes does not count harm from death as a natural process as a negative. Therefore, not taking something that is expected to extend your life is the right thing to do if there might be any harmful side effects. But it does not matter that the cause of death is “natural.” It is a matter of risk vs. reward. Aging can be regarded as a disease or set of diseases or pathologies and it kills us more reliably than cancer or heart disease or any specific disease. Life extension medicine is curative.

Mikhail Blagosklonny, author of the opinion article “Rapamycin for Longevity,” is far more bullish. He says that, “If used properly, rapamycin is not much more dangerous than ordinary aspirin.” “Not taking rapamycin may be as dangerous as smoking.” And: “In conclusion, the side effects of rapamycin are well-known and reversible. When used on an anti-aging schedule, side effects may be absent but, if not, they may be mitigated by combining rapamycin with other anti-aging drugs (metformin, statins) or by temporarily discontinuing it.”

How can we know the long-term outcomes?

To be clear, I am not judging whether Taubes or Blagosklonny is more right about the benefits vs. risks of rapamycin. I agree with Taubes that, most likely, randomized trials are unlikely to be done. The testing in dogs may tell us more but we cannot be sure the results extend to humans. Taubes is also right to say that, even if rapamycin improves health in the short run, we have no guarantee that the benefits will not be outweighed by the harms over time. We should absolutely be cautious in taking a substance not well tested in humans. But we should not avoid it simply on the basis that it is preventive rather than curative or that there are risk.

Taubes highlights the difficulties of determining whether continued good health is due to taking a substance such as rapamycin or whether health would have been as good regardless. Unfortunately, Taubes does not consider biomarkers or aging or aging clocks such as GrimAge, an epigenetic age test that predicts biological age based on DNA methylation. Personally, although I find these tests fascinating, I am not yet convinced that they are a solid independent measure of aging. Even so, if they work out, they are a way of gaining knowledge much faster than waiting for a lifetime.

Subtraction vs. addition

Taubes quotes British epidemiologist Geoffrey Rose who distinguishes between two types of preventive measure. The first kind of preventive measure consists of the removal of an unnatural factor and the restoration of `biological normality’—that is, of the conditions to which presumably we are genetically adapted.” These measures can be presumed safe and so can be advocated for “on the basis of a reasonable presumption of benefit.” Taubes says this is he can recommend paleo diets and carb-restricted diets – because they “restore biological normality by removing the foods that are relatively new to human diets and to which we have not had time to genetically adapt.” I agree that this is a reasonable and plausible approach.

The second type of preventive measure “consists not in removing a supposed cause of disease but in adding some other unnatural factor, in the hope of conferring protection.” This increases biological abnormality. All pharmaceuticals are of this type, including rapamycin. “For such measures as these the required level of evidence, both of benefit and (particularly) of safety, must be far more stringent.” I think this is largely correct. It does not mean that the risk/reward equation cannot come out in favor of such a type-2 preventive measure.

Your personal risk vs. reward calculation

Two other points are missing in Taubes’ consideration of risk vs. reward. He notes note that a 10% increase in (healthy) lifespan would be “only” 8 years and that the treatment can (very likely will) have some unwanted side-effects. This impressive and yet still limited potential benefit may not make it worth taking the risks. But different people will rationally come up with different answers. Younger people should probably be discouraged from taking substances such as rapamycin. They have decades to develop problems that are not immediately apparent. Since rapamycin apparently works well when started later in life, it makes sense to wait.

If you are 60, or 70, or 80, the downside risk – given the considerable existing evidence – is small. We typically see young people as the risk takers and older people as more conservative and risk averse. In the case of a life extending treatment, this presumption should be reversed. It makes sense for older people to take more risk since they have less to lose with a life extension treatment.

Adding to that point, Taubes also does not consider the idea of “longevity escape velocity” -- a recent term for a idea that's been around for 50 years. The idea is that improvements in longevity treatments will accelerate so, if you can gain an extra 10 years, that may get you to a better treatment that can give you another 10 or 20 years. In that case, the gain of 8 years is potentially much greater.

Many people think we are at that point on the longevity curve. I thought so 40 years ago but find it highly unlikely -- unless, maybe, AI can accelerate biological understanding and intervention. For someone in their 20s or 30s it becomes more plausible but still highly uncertain. But I do think we will be up this accelerated upward curve in longevity at some point. It will very likely be too late for me. (Hence I have arrangements to go into biostasis.)

Not only does being older shift the balance of the risk/reward decision towards taking a promising compound, the balance shifts further the closer you think we are to making further gains in longevity.

Given his critical thinking about nutrition I was a little disappointed that he did not give more positive consideration to potentially life extending treatments. However, his discussion is more nuanced and contains more wisdom than most critical discussions.

Note: Taube’s writing will be moving to a new, personal blog, Uncertainty Principles.

That’s a lot of Substack reading! Substack is definitely my favorite online forum of all time — except for the Extropy email list in the 1990s.

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📽️ I watched 7 minutes of video

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📜 I scrolled 5 meters in Notes

🕵️ I discovered 4 new posts via Notes

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“As the economy grows, we use a growing amount of resources.” If asked if that statement is true probably the vast majority of people would say that it is. You may find it intuitively obvious. Economic growth = more stuff = more resources.

In a previous essay on the “Getting Better” theme, I showed that pollution is getting better, not worse (and poverty is declining, infant mortality is falling, life expectancy is increasing, everything is safer, and climate-related deaths have fallen over rapidly over the past century.) So, a growing economy can be decoupled from pollution. In “Scarcity or Abundance?” I argued that scarcity is not getting worse. Resources can get less scarce as the economy grows. But surely, a growing economy must use more materials and produce more stuff, right?

No. Not just in theory but in practice economic growth can be decoupled from growth in the amount of “stuff”. The economy can dematerialize. We can find many examples of relative decoupling, where resource use increases more slowly than economic output. But in some of the most advanced economies we are seeing absolute decoupling, where economic growth goes along with shrinking use of resources.

How can this be? In this article, I am going to show that relative and even absolute decoupling are real. I will give plenty of examples and lots of numbers that you can check for yourself. I will look at the diverse ways in which this “dematerialization” of economies takes place and the forces behind it.

Your Swiss Army phone

Let us start with a familiar example: the smartphone. You may remember a scene in the 1978 Superman movie where Clark Kent needs to change into Superman but glances at the new (for the 70s & 80s) cut-off telephone booths that provide no privacy. Today, Kent would not be able to find any phone booths of any kind.

Phone booths are one of the things replaced by mobile phones even before they evolved into smartphones. For all but some professionals the smartphone has replaced the camera and the videocam. We no longer need separate GPS devices like those made by Garmin nor those annoying foldout maps that we wrestled with in the wind.

Depending on your personal habits, your phone may relieve you of the need to own or carry an answering machine, alarm clock, pager, Walkman, Discman, or MP3 Player, calculator, flashlight, handheld gaming device, book or eBook reader, radio, portable audio recorder, TV remote, television, and calendar or personal organizer. A Swiss Army Knife is beaten by today’s phones in terms of versatility. Digitization also means we save space by no longer needing cassettes, LPs, or DVDs, and we no longer need to drive to the video store.

A 2018 study quantified the reduction in materials and energy from switching to smartphones. Smartphones can reduce material use by a factor of 300 and standby energy use by a factor of 30. The “embodied energy” in the devices is reduced from 1706 kWh to 75 kWh and weight is reduced from 26 kg to 0.1 kg. [Grubler, 2018] The precise numbers might be challenged but the overall direction is pellucid.

Decoupling

Many writers and thinkers have assumed that a growing economy inevitably uses a growing amount of resources and imposes an ever-heavier burden on the environment in terms of pollution. You can see this in a statement from the former Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chair, Robert Watson, who fears that the “more people we have on the Earth and the richer they are, the more they can demand resources.”

This view is based on assumptions built into models such as IPAT.

IPAT = Human impact (I) on the environment = population size (P) x income or affluence (A) x technology or amount of pollution per dollar of output (T).

You have to love these neat, tight little equations that reduce the incomprehensibly complex nature of the world into a tidy package. This equation drastically and unhelpfully simplifies reality to create a simple model. How the heck do you measure “human impact on the environment” as a single measure? From what perspective? The human? That of some animal. That of the non-conscious Earth? It looks suspiciously like a manifestation of that seductive intellectual disease, scientism.

Eco-pessimists and enemies of growth typically assume that the population will continue to grow rapidly. They also assume that all effects of population growth are bad. They further assume that increasing income or affluence inevitably means more use of resources and increased burden on the environment. Finally, they assume that technology, especially that put into use since World War II, is responsible for environmental degradation.

As is becoming increasingly obvious to anyone who pays attention, rapid population growth is not inevitable. As we have seen in previous blog essays, global population growth peaked in the later 1960s and has been declining since. In all of Eastern Europe, Japan, and some of Western Europe, population is actually shrinking. In many more countries in Europe and elsewhere, population growth has slowed so much that it is on the verge of ending and reversing.

The P in IPAT in the future can be expected to be a smaller number in most countries and in the world as a whole later this century. Another point that is often missed is that larger populations bring not only burdens but benefits. These include larger markets and more innovation – especially when population is more concentrated (urbanized). We have also seen a steady decline in poverty around the world even as population grows.

Increasing income and wealth and advancing technology can and increasingly do lead to less impact on the environment and even decreased resource use, as we will see below.

The more modest but still important version of the dematerialization thesis is that of relative decoupling: Environmental effects and resource use grow at a rate slower than population or income. We see this happen when agricultural yields grow and when efficiency reduces the amount of energy used per unit of output. Figure 1 illustrates this across four regions, including globally. [See Figure 1]

Figure 1. Recent trends in real GDP, total energy use and total material use for China, Germany, OECD and the World. [Ward, et. al, 2016]

The more dramatic and remarkable version of the dematerialization thesis is that of absolute decoupling: Even if population and consumption increase, the environmental and resource impacts decline.

We are seeing this happening in countries including the USA, the UK, Sweden, Germany, and Denmark. Even twenty years ago one researcher found that “the value of GDP per pound [USA] rose from $3.64 in 1977 to $7.96 in 2000.” As Bailey puts it: “…what people want is not more oil, steel, concrete, plastic, newspapers, and so forth. What they want is heating, cooling, housing, information, communication, and entertainment. How those services get to them is immaterial.”

This decoupling of increased consumption from resources and environmental impact can be achieved in several ways – dematerialization takes several forms.

Forms of dematerialization

You can categorize the forms of dematerialization in multiple ways. Wikipedia, for instance, cites a source using three categories: Optimize, digitize, and servitize. McAfee [2019] groups dematerialization into four: slim, swap, optimize, and evaporate. As companies seek to maintain and expand their profit margins, they figure out ways of using fewer resources.

They may slim by using less of a particular material. Aluminum cans use less metal (25% less for soft drinks and 50% less for food cans). You might recall a scene in Jaws (1975) where Captain Quint intimidates Hooper by crushing a beer can with one hand – a feat far less impressive today.

Farmers are producing bigger harvests with less fertilizer, land, and water. Magnet makers are using fewer rare earth metals. The weight of an average car has fallen by 25% since the 1970s. Communications satellites provide another example: Telstar 1 in 1962 “could handle 600 telephone calls simultaneously. Modern Intelsat satellites can handle 120,000 calls and 3 TV channels at the same time.” [Bailey 2001]

Companies may also swap by replacing one resource with another. Consider how US coal consumption fell as fracking took off. If we committed to nuclear energy, we could cut back usage of both coal and natural gas. A kilogram of uranium-235 fuel contains about 2-3 million times as much energy as the same mass of coal.

Another path is to optimize by making better use of existing materials. McAfee notes that improving CNW’s railcar utilization from 5% to 10% would halve the company’s stock of 30-ton cars. Commercial airlines have optimized by improving their load factors. The percentage of seats occupied on flights has risen from 56% in 1971 to over 81% today.

The final path is to evaporate by replacing some materials with nothing. My smartphone example illustrates this.

Metals

In the United States, there has been a peak then a decline in the consumption of metals, as shown by McAfee. [McAfee, 2019, p.79] Looking at the five most important metals, we can see a reduction not just in annual consumption per capita but a reduction in the total weight of these metals used annually. In other words, all five most important metals in the USA are “post-peak.” Peak metal was around 2000. According to the US Geological Survey:

• Copper consumption peaked around 2000 and continued to go down through 2020. Copper consumption fell more than 40% from its peak.

• Aluminum: Consumption down more than 32% from its peak.

• Nickel: Consumption has been up and down but has fallen since 2017.

• Steel: In 2015, US steel consumption was down more than 15% from its high in 2000.

• Gold: Consumption was about the same in 2000 as in 1970. Since 2000, it has continued to decrease.

The figure below shows the reduction in the amount of iron ore and pig iron consumed in the United States. A similar reduction is evident for chromium and fluorspar along with much more drastic reductions for sodium sulfate, cadmium, thorium, and asbestos.

Steel has increasingly been replaced with aluminum and its alloys. Cars weigh 30% less than they did sixty years ago. As Smil notes, falling quantities of ore, coal, fluxing materials, and total energy have been used to produce a ton of hot metal, and rising conversion efficiencies in foundries along with the universal adoption of continuous casting mean that steelmaking requires less energy and material.

Another way to see this is to look at the “steel intensity” of the economy over time. This is measured in kilograms per dollar of value produced. “Using constant GDP values adjusted for inflation and expressed in constant 2009$... the steel intensity of the US economy fell from 37 kg/$ in 1929 to […] 6.7 kg/$ in 2013.” [Smil, 2016]

Even if you adjust apparent domestic consumption numbers for indirectly traded steel-intensive products, you see considerable declines in the absolute numbers. The relative causes vary between countries but include product redesigns and substitution with lighter or cheaper alternatives (mostly aluminum and plastics). In Germany and Japan, less need for building construction also results from static or declining populations. 

Peak paper, recovering forests

For years after personal computers appeared, people jeered futurists who forecast the end of paper. It took a few years, but those futurists have been increasingly vindicated. The United States reached peak paper in 1990. Paper usage has been falling ever since even as the population has continued to grow. According to McAfee, “Humanity as a whole probably reached peak paper in 2013.” UK researcher Chris Goodall found that paper and board consumption in the UK fell 18% in the decade to 2011. [Pearce, 2011]

Most people probably believe that, in the USA and in Europe, we are losing forest area. The data on the four timber products lumber, plywood and veneer, pulp products, and fuel show that this has not been the case for some time. During the last century, a clear trend of relative dematerialization revealed itself. The number of Americans multiplied by 3.5 during the century while US GDP grew nearly fivefold. As Jesse Ausubel points out:

Had timber consumption risen in constant proportion, Americans would have consumed about 16 times as much timber each year in the 1990s as in 1900, rather than the 1.7 times they actually consumed.

The historical depletion of wood reversed during the last century. The volume of wood on American timberland rose by 36% in the second half of the century. This is partly because the average American consumes much less timber compared to someone in 1900, and partly because millers and foresters became more efficient. You will not hear about it in the news, but many previously cleared areas – such as in New England and the upper Great Lakes states – have regenerated. [Ausubel, 2000]

In a 2015 paper, Ausubel says that foresters talk of a “forest transition” when a country stops losing forested area and starts gaining it. France was the first country, entering forest transition in 1830. Even as the population of France has doubled, so have French forests. As Ausubel puts it: “In other words, forest loss decoupled from population.” The United States attained its forest transition around 1950 if you measure by growing stock. Measured by area, the transition was around 1900.

Peak commodities

Over the last twenty years or so, Jesse Ausubel in the USA and Chris Goodall in the UK have been tracking signs of dematerialization. In 2011, Goodall found that the amount of physical stuff consumed in the UK had fallen to the level in 1989. That trend has continued since. The country has been consuming less water, building materials, paper, food, cars (automobiles), fertilizers, textiles, and even energy. [Goodall, 2011a; 2011b; 2013; 2014; 2016]

Similar trends are forming across Europe, with reductions in household energy consumption in France, Sweden, and The Netherlands. The use of cars has fallen not just in the UK but also in Germany, Japan, France, Australia, and Sweden.

Following up in 2014 on his 2011 paper, Goodall wrote: “Recent data support the ‘Peak Stuff’ hypothesis and suggest that economic growth in advanced countries does not increase the use of material extracted from the soil or earth’s crust.” In a 2016 update, Goodall wrote:

Controversial in 2011, it’s now accepted that energy use is also falling across most of the OECD countries and Britain’s requirements continue to fall 1-2% a year, even as the economy continues to perform relatively well. Our aggregate use of materials is continuing to fall, as is also the case in the EU as a whole.

Ausubel had noticed that Americans were consuming less per capita. Apart from farmland and timber, he also noticed that use of plastic peaked around 1990. More interestingly, he saw that they were consuming less in total of some of the most important components of an economy, such as steel, copper, fertilizer, timber, and paper. This reversal in use of materials since around 1970 surprised him and intrigued him enough to get together with colleagues to thoroughly examine other trends in the use of 100 commodities in the United States from 1900 to 2010. [Ausubel, 2000, 2008, 2015]

Of the 100 commodities, the researchers found that 36 had peaked in absolute use and another 53 commodities had peaked relative to the size of the economy but were still growing in total. Most of those “now seem poised to fall”. At the time of this study, only 11 of the 100 commodities were still growing in both relative and absolute use. In the case of nine basic commodities, absolute use was flat or falling for about 20 years. [Figure 3]

Figure 3: Use of nine basic commodities in the United States from 1900-2010. Uses five-year moving average. Data source: USGS National Minerals Information Center (2013).

McAfee made a similar finding: “Of the 72 resources tracked by the USGS, only six are not yet post-peak.” [McAfee, 2019: 82-83] Gemstones accounted for the great majority of these pre-peak resources. Setting aside ornamental stones, “more than 90 percent of total 2015 resource spending in America was on post-peak materials.” The one notable non-gem exception is plastic. For several decades, plastic use grew faster than the economy. In recent years, that pattern has reversed and growth in plastic has been lower than growth in GDP.

In other words, despite the growing population of the United States, the intensity of use of resources has begun to fall. A large majority are growing more slowly than GDP and nine basic commodities have been flat or falling in total for around 20 years.

Fertilizers, water, crop acreage

Does Arizona use more or less water today (population 7.3 million) compared to 1960 (when the population was around 1.3 million)? The answer seems obvious. It must be a trick question! No trick but the answer will probably surprise almost everyone: Less. According to the Arizona Department of Water Resources (ADWR), the state used about 7.1 million acre-feet of fresh water in 1957, compared to 7.0 million acre-feet today. [Nicla, 2019]

It is not just Arizona. In the United States as a whole, even as crop tonnage has quadrupled since the 1970s, the amount of water and fertilizer used has fallen. In the 1970s, experts predicted increasing water use until 2000 but that is not what happened. Even as the USA grew by 80 million people, water use remained the same. US Geological Survey data shows that water use in 2010 has fallen below the amount used in 1970. Domestic water use in most advanced countries has also declined modestly.

The massive increase in crop tonnage over the last 50 years has been accompanied by a reduction in agricultural area from 472 million to 390 million hectares by the 2010s. Improvements in agricultural productivity have gone hand-in-hand with reductions in acreage also in Europe, Latin America, and East Asia.

Energy: The key to everything

Energy is a scarce resource in the sense that our access to it is limited at any time. But in the long run energy is essentially limitless. We might naturally assume that even if we are using less material we surely are using more energy. The reality is more complicated.

According to the US Energy Information Administration, total U.S. energy consumption per capita has decreased since the 1970s. Annual per capita energy consumption was relatively flat from the late-1980s through 2000 and has generally decreased each year since then. In 2020, U.S. per capita energy consumption dropped to its lowest since 1964, mainly because of economic responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2023, per capita energy consumption was about 4% higher than in 2020, but it was 3% lower than in 2022.

Primary energy consumption in the United States has moved up and down since 1998 but peaked in 2007 at 97 exajoules (97 quintillion joules). In 2019, the number had decreased to 94.65 exajoules. Despite population growth, energy consumption is now about the same or slightly lower than in 2000. [Sönnichsen, 2022] The population has grown in that time meaning that that energy per capita has declined. Indeed, energy use per capita in the US in 2023 was about the same as 1965 and has been trending down since 2000.

U.S. energy consumption per dollar of GDP declined nearly every year since 1949.

Global energy consumption continues to grow, but it does seem to be slowing — averaging around 1% to 2% per year. As you would expect, energy consumption is rising in countries with quickly rising incomes and growing populations. In wealthier countries energy consumption is falling.

In the United Kingdom, primary energy consumption is now lower than it was in 1965! (Despite the population growing from 54.3 million to 69.2 million.) Electricity demand in the UK is the lowest it has been since 1990 (and continues to fall by 1-2% annually).

Energy use has stayed steady or declined in other countries such as Sweden, Germany, Denmark, and Switzerland. Across Europe, household energy consumption in 2009 was 9% below the 2000 level. The decline was 15% in France, Sweden, and The Netherlands. These results remain even when you adjust for trade, that is, goods manufactured elsewhere and imported (and the converse). For the EU as a whole energy consumption in 2023 was about the same as in 1983.

Energy use per person is growing in India and China but has been falling for 20+ years in the USA, Canada, and EU.

By 2050, the EIA sees decreasing energy intensity in OECD countries. Energy intensity measures the energy efficiency of an economy. It tells us how much energy is needed for each unit of output. OECD countries are trending toward lower energy intensities.

Even if energy use globally were to continue to rise, the amount of material resources needed to generate it could fall. In 2024, we are finally seeing a long-overdue reawakening of interest in nuclear power (fission, although new results in fusion are also promising). Consider that one kilogram of uranium-235 fuel contains as much energy as 2-3 million times as much coal.

Is the flatlining of electricity consumption a good or bad thing? To the extent that it is due to greater efficiency it is good. To the extent that it is due to economic decline it is bad. Abundant affordable energy enables dematerialization.

Falling pollutants

I continue to be surprised by how many smart people believe that pollution is getting worse in the USA. In reality, we have seen a decoupling of economic growth from pollution – not just in a relative sense but an absolute reduction in pollution. We can see this clearly by looking at measures of air pollution.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), these are the changes in major pollutants from 1980 to 2018:

• Carbon monoxide down 73%

• Lead down 99%

• Nitrogen oxides down 62%

• Compounds from automobile exhaust associated with ozone down 55%

• Sulfur dioxide down 90%

• Particulates down 61%

Between 1970 and 2017, the combined emissions of six common pollutants (PM2.5 and PM10, SO2, NOx, VOCs, CO, and Pb) dropped by 73%. Aggregate emissions fell 74% from 1970-2018. [EPA, 2018] The trend follows a standard pattern in many countries. Pollutants grew along with population and economic output until the economy reached a certain level of wealth and technology. As Americans continued to become wealthier, a preference for clean air led to continuing reductions in pollutants. The same is true of many other developed countries.

Figure 5: Change in emissions compared to growth, population, miles driven, and GDP, 1970-2018. Source: Statistica.

If you consider carbon dioxide to be a pollutant or a problem, note that countries including the USA, UK, France, Spain, Italy, and many others have reduced emissions while increasing GDP. This remains true if we correct for trade. Total CO₂ emissions in the USA in 2020 were the lowest since 1986. Per capita US CO₂ emissions in 2020 were the lowest since 1949 and lower than 1916. The United Kingdom and Sweden have managed even more impressive reductions. Germany’s CO₂ emissions per person in 2020 were the lowest since 1950 and similar to the amount in 1912. [Our World in Data, 2020]

Causes of dematerialization

What are the forces driving dematerialization? As McAfee argues, we can first of all dismiss the CRIB strategies: Consume less, Recycle, Impose limits, Back to the land. We have not shrunk our economies. Recycling may have the opposite of the intended effect. When a resource is recycled its price tends to go down because more of it is left. When a resource is cheaper we tend to consume more of it. Rather than going back to the land, we have been doing the opposite. This is good because we put less pressure on the environment and use fewer resources due to greater efficiency.

The two main and interrelated forces leading to dematerialization are capitalism and technology. By “capitalism” I mean a broad term encompassing societies with profit-seeking companies, strong property rights and contract enforcement, free entry and competition in markets, voluntary exchange, and a high degree of private ownership of property. By this definition, all rich countries today are capitalist. Poorer countries lack these qualities. Much of their economy may be centrally controlled. They may make it hard to start a business, reducing free market entry and competition. Laws may be poorly or inconsistently enforced.

Profit-seeking firms aim to satisfy the boundless wants of people. What people want are goods and services. They do not inherently care how much material they are made of. Profit-seeking firms will always tend to look for more efficient means of providing for wants and needs. To do otherwise would be to ignore an opportunity to profit. Increased profits will be temporary as other firms adopt the innovations and improvements in efficiency. The race then continues as new efficiencies are sought out.

In the pursuit of innovation and efficiency, firms drive technological progress. Government regulation and central direction are not needed and typically get in the way. Markets communicate needs and wants through price signals in a decentralized way that no centralized body can manage. This is not just due to a lack of sufficient computer power. Without markets, accurate information about preferences cannot be gathered and implicit values cannot be made explicit. The inability of a centralized agency to foresee innovations makes it essential to allow and enable markets to create and reinforce incentives to innovate. [Lavoie, 2016]

Since “capitalism” in the sense defined here depends on multiple factors, the term can apply to economies that may look quite different. Economic freedom and competitiveness are needed to spur innovation and ultimately dematerialization but these can be measured in various ways. Some people are confused about Scandinavian countries, having the impression that they are socialist or on the socialist end of the capitalism spectrum. Those countries may have larger tax-funded “social safety nets” than the USA but also often have fewer regulations and less central planning.

Although measures of economic freedom differ in their metrics, they usually reveal a similar picture. The two most-referenced economic freedom indexes are compiled by the Fraser Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Both give high scores to Singapore, Switzerland, New Zealand, Denmark, Australia, Estonia, and Ireland. They both give very low scores to Democratic Republic of Congo, Algeria, Republic of Congo, Iran, Zimbabwe, Sudan, and Venezuela. [Fraser Institute, 2022; Heritage Foundation, 2022.]

Many studies of these relationships have found that countries with higher and improving economic freedom strongly tend to grow faster and generate higher levels of GDP per person. [Figure 6] Economic freedom also correlates with the income share of the poorest 10%, income earned by the poorest 10%, life expectancy, infant mortality, poverty, and other measures of well-being.

Figure 6: Economic Freedom and Income per Capita.

Regulations are often credited with reducing the environmental impact of production. If so, they might also contribute to dematerialization. However, regulations that compel reductions in use of specific resources or in generation of pollutants have costs and side-effects. Regulations have no basis in the preferences expressed in markets and so typically have high costs and unintended consequences.

McAfee’s discussion of “responsive government” as a major driver of dematerialization has two major shortcomings. The first is the failure to consider the costs and side-effects of regulations and centrally issued commands. The other, as Adler notes, is the failure to recognize that improvements in environmental measures start before regulation.

In most cases, it is only when a trend is already underway that regulation is imposed. For instance, the trend toward reduction in pollution started before the EPA. In the seven years before the Clean Air Act, the level of ambient sulfur dioxide fell by 58% in New York. China started doing much better at restraining its carbon dioxide emissions after abandoning communism. [Bailey & Tupy, 2020, p.115]

The future of dematerialization

Will dematerialization continue in the more economically advanced economies? Will dematerialization emerge as other countries become wealthier and more technologically advanced?

Even if the trend does not continue or spread to other countries, we face no shortage of resources – as I have argued in previous essays. We will eventually tap resources in our solar system outside of Earth beginning with the Moon and asteroids. The asteroid belt is estimated to contain $700 quintillion worth of resources. The Davida asteroid is estimated to contain $27 quintillion of platinum, iron, nickel, and other precious metals. That is $27,000,000,000,000,000,000. [Maxey, 2017; Yarlagadda, 2022]

We may not find it necessary or economical to mine the asteroids for a long time if relative and absolute dematerialization continue. Dematerialization does look like an almost inevitable trend – an outcome of the environmental Kuznets curve. [Agarwal, 2022] Named after Simon Kuznets, this curve suggests initial industrialization is a “cheap and dirty” phase where resources are used inefficiently and pollution is extensive but, as a certain level of income is reached, resources are used more efficiently and pollution is reduced. (The original Kuznets curve expressed a similar trend in economic inequality.)

Chris Goodall believes that dematerialization may be accelerating. GDP and resource use are moving beyond relative decoupling to growth with reductions in total material and energy use. Jesse Ausubel notes that it is still the early days, “but Goodall’s paper is potentially very significant, and jibes with our work and expectations on dematerialization.”

Markets and technological progress are enabling us to tread more lightly on the planet rather than using it up at an accelerating pace. As Adler puts it, “The Malthusian “limits to growth” have not merely been delayed or forestalled; they have been transcended.

Looking further into the future, we might also factor in the effects of nanotechnology in whatever forms it takes. The ability to control matter on the atomic level would make reuse and recycling drastically more advanced than it is today. If we move more of our business and personal activity to virtual environments (as these begin to rival physical reality in their richness), fewer physical resources will be needed, with the possible exception of energy to run the computers.

A previous essay compared the reality of improvements in life with people’s mistakenly gloomy beliefs. Another essay argued that resources are far less scarce than most people think, especially when you understand scarcity in terms of affordability. A third article looked at the flaws in the influential Limits to Growth. The current article summarizes some of the evidence showing another way in which resource scarcity is being pushed back.

If we are revived from cryopreservation decades from now, we need not worry that we will inevitably return to a world of poverty, pollution, and desperate scarcity. Far from inevitable, a dark future is unlikely. It is possible because the governments of the world might manage to completely block economic and technological progress. Let us not let that happen.

Coda: Bucky Fuller and ephemeralization

Perhaps the first person to write about dematerialization was Buckminster Fuller, systems theorist, writer, designer, and inventor (1895-1983), although he called it “ephemeralization”, a term he coined in 1927 and discussed in his book, Seven Chains to the Moon. [Fuller 1938] One of Fuller’s inventions – the geodesic dome – provides an example of ephemeralization. Compared to standard approaches, the geodesic dome used less material, was lighter, and supported heavier loads.

Fuller used the term to mean the ability of advancing technology to do “more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.” According to Fuller, ephemeralization “is the number one economic surprise of world man.” The concept referred to increasing efficiency in output of products and services while requiring less effort, time, and resources. Despite finite resources, ephemeralization would result in ever-increasing standards of living for an ever-growing population. Fuller used the example of Washington Carver’s assembly line (as used by Henry Ford). Another example is the evolution of bridges. Fuller saw ephemeralization as inevitably affecting all of human development.

References

Adler, Jonathan H., “Markets and Dematerialization.” HumanProgress, January 12, 2022.

https://www.humanprogress.org/markets-and-dematerialization/

Agarwal, Prateek, “The Environmental Kuznets Curve.” The Intelligent Economist, February 2, 2022.

https://www.intelligenteconomist.com/kuznets-curve/

Ausubel, Jesse H. 2000. “The great reversal: Nature’s chance to restore land and sea.” Technology in Society 22: 289–302. Full text:

https://phe.rockefeller.edu/publication/great-reversal-natures-chance-restore-land-sea/

Ausubel, Jesse H. & Paul E. Wagonner, “Dematerialization: Variety, caution, and persistence.” Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, Sep 2;105(35):12774-9.

doi: 10.1073/pnas.0806099105. Epub 2008 Aug 26.2008

Ausubel, Jesse H., “The Return of Nature: How Technology Liberates the Environment”. Breakthrough, 2015.

https://thebreakthrough.org/journal/issue-5/the-return-of-nature

Bailey, Ronald, “Dematerializing the Economy: We're doing more with less. That's good for planet Earth.” Reason 9.5.2001

https://reason.com/2001/09/05/dematerializing-the-economy/

Bailey, Ronald and Marian L. Tupy, Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know. Cato Institute 2020.

Bernstein, Amy and Anand Raman, “The Great Decoupling: An Interview with Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee.” Harvard Business Review, June 2015.

https://hbr.org/2015/06/the-great-decoupling

Book, Joakim, “Worldviews Are Pessimistic Because They Are Outdated.” HumanProgress, December 12, 2019.

https://www.humanprogress.org/a-much-needed-update-to-our-outdated-worldviews/

Dematerialization (economics) - Wikipedia

EPA, “Our Nation’s Air.” EPA, 2018.

https://gispub.epa.gov/air/trendsreport/2018

Ephemeralization - Wikipedia

“Economic Freedom of the World 2022 Annual Report.” Fraser Institute.

https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/economic-freedom-of-the-world-2022.pdf

Friedlander, David, “What is Ephemeralization and Why it Matters.” LifeEdited, June 26, 2014.

https://lifeedited.com/what-is-ephemeralization-and-why-it-matters/

Fuller, R. Buckminster, Nine Chains to the Moon. Anchor Books, 1938, 1973, pp. 252–59.

Goodall, Chris, “Peak Stuff.” Carboncommentary.com, October 13, 2011.

http://static.squarespace.com/static/545e40d0e4b054a6f8622bc9/54707f8fe4b0a126e0887228/54707f96e4b0a126e0887549/1318874793000/Peak_Stuff_17.10.11.pdf?format=original

Goodall, Chris, “Peak Stuff - did the UK reach a peak of material consumption in about 2001-3?” Carbon Commentary, October 31, 2011.

https://chris-goodall.squarespace.com/blog/2011/10/31/peak-stuff-did-the-uk-reach-a-peak-of-material-consumption-in-about-2001-3?rq=stuff

Goodall, Chris, “Peak Stuff Updated.”

https://chris-goodall.squarespace.com/blog/2013/01/28/peak-stuff-updated?rq=stuff

Goodall, Chris, “Peak Stuff Again.” Carbon Commentary, July 2, 2014.

https://chris-goodall.squarespace.com/blog/2014/07/02/peak-stuff-again?rq=stuff

Goodall, Chris, 'Peak Stuff': households now spend more on services than physical goods.”

https://chris-goodall.squarespace.com/blog/2016/2/24/peak-stuff-households-now-spent-more-on-services-than-physical-goods?rq=stuff

Grubler, Arnulf et. al, “A Low Energy Demand Scenario for Meeting the 1.5 °C Target and Sustainable Development Goals without Negative Emission Technologies.” Nature Energy 3, no.1 (2018): 515-27.

“2022 Index of Economic Freedom.” Heritage Foundation.

https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking

Lavoie, Don, National Economic Planning: What Is Left? Mercatus Center, August 5, 2016.

Maxey, Kyle, “Asteroid Mining – Who Wants to be a Trillionaire?” Interesting Engineering, July 20, 2017.

https://www.engineering.com/story/asteroid-mining-who-wants-to-be-a-trillionaire

McAfee, Andrew, More From Less: The surprising story of how we learned to prosper using fewer resources – and what happens next. Scribner, 2019.

Nicla, Andrew, “Does Arizona really use less water now than it did in 1957?” The Republic/azcentral.com, February 12, 2019.

Pearce, Fred, “The New Story of Stuff: Can We Consume Less?” Yale Environment 360, November 28, 2011.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/the_new_story_of_stuff_can_we_consume_less

Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom. Harper, 2020.

Ritchie, Hannah, “A number of countries have decoupled economic growth from energy use, even if we take offshored production into account.” Our World in Data, November 30, 2021.

https://ourworldindata.org/energy-gdp-decoupling

Ritchie, Hannah and Max Roser, “United States: CO2 Country Profile.”

Our World in Data, 2020.

https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states?country=~USA

Smil, Vaclav, Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization. Wiley, 2013.

Smil, Vaclav, Still the Iron Age, Butterworth-Heinemann; 1st edition, February 17, 2016.

Sönnichsen, N., “Primary energy consumption in the U.S. 1998-2021.” Statistica, July 18, 2022.

Tupy, Marian L. and Gale L. Pooley, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet. Cato Institute 2022.

Ward, James D., Paul C. Sutton, Adrian D. Werner, Robert Costanza, Steve H. Mohr, Craig T. Simmons, “Is Decoupling GDP Growth from Environmental Impact Possible?”. Plos One, October 14, 2016

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0164733

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0164733

Yarlagadda, Shriya, “Economics of the Stars: The Future of Asteroid Mining and the Global Economy.” Harvard International Review, April 8, 2022.

https://hir.harvard.edu/economics-of-the-stars/

A much more economics-based essay is coming up, related to my other posts on human trajectories. If I haven’t been posting often enough for you, you can find another essay and a podcast on Biostasis Technologies’ blog. The essay looks at the powerful effect of exercise on longevity. For now, I was annoyed enough by a ridiculous philosophical view that is so anti-extropic I had to write about it.

In our amazing and beautiful world – yes, including the human world – there are also many things that are ugly and repulsive. In today’s culture, we are not supposed to say that anything is ugly or repulsive. Everything is equal! We are all the same! I am saying it anyway because to do otherwise is to annihilate any basis for values.

Ahumanism is one of those ugly things. It does not offend me personally. It offends me philosophically and existentially. It offends me as a human being. Ahumanism pushes certain ideas to an extreme. Relatively few would endorse it in full. Yet its pretensions echo themes common in anti-human belief and activism.

When I write of ahumanism here, I am specifically focusing on Patricia MacCormack’s philosophy, as dumped on us in her book, The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene. I feel it necessary to say that I am not making any of this up. Look for yourself! I promise MacCormack is a real person and it is a real book that I am commenting on, not a parody or a fake. She exists and the book exists. She expects to be taken seriously. And, in an important sense, her views should be taken seriously despite their confusion, self-immolation, and  irrationality, and clownishness, too many people have absorbed at least elements of the same anti-human, self-hating, anti-existence way of thinking.

Again, I want to emphasize that I am picking on MacCormack because she has so proudly distilled the essence of this evil philosophy. (I rarely use the term “evil” but I will do so here.) That does not mean that MacCormack is having much of an evil effect on the world. Nor does it meant that I think that she herself is evil. I think one of her ideas is evil but there is more to her than this idea. She may be a lovely person in many ways and probably has never harmed anyone significantly. But the existentially horrible message that she conveys and amplifies must be identified and challenged.

MacCormack’s ahumanism

In short, MacCormack wants humans to stop reproducing and for the species to die out. Suicide is a praiseworthy for those virtuous enough to do it. Animals can eat each other but it is unacceptable for humans to eat other animals. She takes a postmodernist, “progressive”, anti-rationalist stance. She epitomizes misanthropism, praises Marx and Engels, hates men, claims to be optimistic and life-affirming as she worships death for humanity, advocates eating and having sex with dead bodies, and recommends that we spend what time we have left practicing occultism and engaged in death studies.

When she talks of death, MacCormack means it as “both advocating for the deceleration of human life through cessation of reproduction, thus death of humans (…), and the absolute end of perception that apprehends all living organisms and relations through anthropocentric-signifying systems.” In other words, it is hard to get people to kill themselves so we should pressure everyone to stop having children. And we humans should cease thinking about the world from a human perspective.

MacCormack shows little interest in engaging in rational argumentation for her views. “I have sought to no longer argue like a human, with other humans.” “These claims are presumed rather than argued, so the calls to action are presented not as balanced contemplations but as para-academic DIY pleas to activism, small and large.” We are to take action based on “presumptions’ that are asserted, not argued. How convenient that no rational argument is needed or appropriate.

Before diving into the ugly, murky details of her ahumanism, first let us get a sense of her style:

The negative value of the end of anthropocentrism is where the jubilance of the world begins. The everything else that comes at the end of these systems is primarily only really the end of the primacy of one isomorphic functioning mode of knowledge. Difference and proliferation which seethes beneath in a germinal state has the capacity to express when the anthropocentric mode is diminished to one of many ways, historical or majoritarian-hysterical.

Okay then. In a panel discussion on YouTube, MacCormack also uses the term “post-bourgeoise.” Anyone who uses the term “bourgeoise” in the 21st century deserves some derision. The term comes from Marxist philosophy and means the social class that owns the means of production. Whatever usefulness it may have had in the century before last it is laughably outdated. Everyone with a 401(k) or IRA is a member of the bourgeoise today. The real power of rule is not in owning capital it is in the political control of capital.

Look, I studied Marxism both independently and as part of my degree at Oxford University. I know Marx, Engels, Lukács, Gramsci, and the Frankfurt School. I know my bourgeoise from my bologna. Non-ironic use of the term is a sure sign that the writer’s brain has been overcome by an intellectually terminal infestation of sub-Marxist postmodern pseudo-intellectualism.

MacCormack says: “The strive for solidarity is consistent in this manifesto and the work of what could be called “post-communist” (or even post-political) writers of manifesti, which is why the book is so inspired by Guattari.” Sorry, “manifesti” is not a word. It’s a pointless academic invention in a futile attempt to sound intelligent.

Questions and answers about ahumanism

Q: Would you say that ahumanism is misanthropic?

A: Yes. Misanthropy – literally “hatred of the human” – is the general hatred, dislike, or distrust of the human species, human behavior, or human nature. Misanthropists see all or most humans as fundamentally flawed and unworthy. These flaws cannot be corrected other than through a total transformation in how we live. MacCormack goes to an extreme in his misanthropy. There is no such transformation possible. All we can do is to let ourselves go extinct.

Arthur Schopenhauer often comes up in discussions of misanthropy. For Schopenhauer human existence is the results of a pointless, blind will that pushes us to eternally engage in futile struggles. His philosophy has some parallels with Buddhism. But MacCormack has no problem with the “will” behind the rest of nature. It is specifically humans whose existence she judges as worthless or, rather, of negative worth (from some unspecified perspective).

Q: Since she comes from a postmodernist background it is safe to assume that she is socialistic?

A: She explicitly credits Marx and Engels. This makes sense since the ideas of that dire pair led to the brutal deaths of around a hundred million humans. MacCormack would consider that a good start. She also credits the SCUM manifesto. This manifesto comes from Valeri Solanas and stands for the Society for Cutting Up Men. (Solanas attempted to murder Andy Warhol in 1968.) Of course, to MacCormack, Solanas got it only half right. The men should go first but every human being should die off. She also likes Hugo Ball’s Flight Out of Time: The Dada Manifesto. Dada texts aggressively attack reason, rational principles, and the principle of non-contradiction.

Q: MacCormack says that “This manifesto is emphatically optimistic and life-affirming.” Does it strike you that way?

A: Sure, if war is peace and if freedom is slavery. Seeking an end to the human race is optimistic and life-affirming in that sense. In the real world, this is a philosophy of hatred of humanity and a glamorizing of our species extinction. She does (inconsistently) affirm the life of all of nature red in tooth and claw with the sole exception of humans. MacCormack writes: “I call for an end to the human both conceptually as exceptionalized and actually as a species.” She has hidden the optimistic and life-affirming aspects of her view very thoroughly. I cannot find any sign of them. The book’s description reinforces this absurdity in declaring “the apocalypse as an optimistic beginning.”

When she says she calls for the end of the human “as exceptionalized”, the implication is that all other lifeforms should go on about their lives, killing and devouring each other without remorse but humans are the exception and should happily die out. It is MacCormack who is turning humans into an exception.

MacCormack seems to have missed an obvious way out of the imperative to off our species. It is only humans who are to self-terminate. All other species, including scorpions, deadly bacteria, and the Box jellyfish, are exempt from thanatological urgings. The postmodernists ignore physical and biological reality. Why not then simply declare that you identify as ahuman? If women can be men and men can be women just by declaring it to be so – without even any physical changes let alone the currently impossible biological and genetic changes to make it so – why not declare that you resign from the human race? Problem solved!

Of course, MacCormack will not let consistency get in her way. Consistency is a bourgeois, rational idea.

Q: MacCormack says in her foreword: “It is a manifesto of doing something right now, individually, collectively, artistically.” Is that an accurate statement?

A: Yes! The thing you can do right now is to die and to encourage others to kill themselves and, in the meantime, to have no children. You can also take action by eating and having sex with dead human bodies, by advocating death activism, queer feminism, and occultism “as artistic political practices”. MacCormack is quick to stress that “the celebration of the corpse and of death here is entirely mutual and consensual.”

Only humans care about mutualism and consent so it is another inconsistency to take a  specifically human moral standpoint to condemn humans. If humans have the same status as other animals – nay, a lower status – why should be apply human morals to our actions? Her advocacy of cannibalism and necrophilia makes sense in her worldview but her condemnation of our eating of other animals does not fit. Apparently antinatalist abolitionism is a “summoning to creativity”. Creativity is not about exploring new ways of living for her; it is about finding better ways to accelerate our extinction.

Q: Is MacCormack justified in claiming that her book is “a work of radical compassion?”

A: For all other living beings (or maybe only animals), yes. There is no compassion for humans who should fuck off and die. MacCormack asserts that “Radical compassion is as simple as it is difficult – simple because very few demographics of humans would be unable to the practices of compassion offered…”  Except most of the world’s population who need to eat and do not have the luxury of artificial meat or existing solely on vegetables. (For some unknown reason, MacCormack does not accord moral status to vegetation, a position which seems terribly “bourgeois” and animal centric. Basically, radical compassion = professed compassion for other animals but hatred for humans.

On p.191 of her book, we are told that The Ahuman Manifesto is an apocalyptic conclusion stained with tears ‘of love and joy’. It is hard to see love and joy in this nihilistic philosophy. In MacCormack’s view humans should not value themselves more than they value bacteria. How is this not complete and utter nihilism?

Her philosophy is nihilist. It says that, for humans, existence is no better than non-existence. More than that, existence is worse than non-existence.

Q: MacCormack is really into death, huh?

A: She loves death, at least the death of humans. She is so turned on about human death that she spends considerable time talking about “thanaterotics.” But this is all entirely healthy because her “death love” is “free of misogyny, racism, and of the angst-ridden pessimism of the typical white male, who can only rather insensitively imagine necrophilia and cannibalism in the savage, sensational and pornographic terms of the serial killer” (as Steven Alexander put it).

We must not use compulsion in pursuit of her aims, so her philosophy is one of ethical affirmation and a type of freedom, according to her. True, it is the freedom to be eaten or used as a dead and decaying object of sexual gratification.

Q: Would you say that MacCormack is a traitor to the human race.

A: Definitely. MacCormack says so herself.

Q: What is MacCormack’s motivation?

A: I can only speculate. But I will not do that right now.

Q: What novel would be a natural place for MacCormack as a character?

A: That’s easy: Either The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. MacCormack is close to an archetypal villain or weak person or parasite like Wesley Mouch, Ellsworth Toohey, and others.

Conclusion

Beyond MacCormack there are several related issues that call for separate essays:

• What is the connection between ahumanism, deep ecology, and the degrowthers?

• Her rejection of personal identity.

• The moral status of other species.

• MacCormack’s phallophobia.

I may tackle the first and third of those in the near future. For now, don’t hate your existence, don’t feel guilty for existing, and don’t work on wiping out your species! Go forth and create, procreate, invent, and produce.

Yes, I’m back. It has been about seven weeks since I last posted. Between conferences, writing my cryonics/biostasis book, and other activities I haven’t found the time. That should change. I have several more essays ready to write including one on the nasty intellectual and spiritual disease called “ahumanism”, one looking at the declining success of Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway compared to the market, one on dematerialization of the economy, one on effective accelerationism, and the next piece in the True Transhumanism series.

In the meantime, you can find my very first podcast production over on Biostasis Technologies’ Substack – an interview with Emil Kendziorra, the main man behind cryonics and biostasis progress in Europe and, soon, the USA. Also, I want to thank Max Borders for republishing my piece on communicating life extension effectively. Check out other-Max’s blog if you like smartly subversive ideas.

Many people like to paint the USA in a poor light. Natives as well as outsiders. It is easy to find things to criticize but that’s true of any country. It is true that the USA has a relatively high level of obesity and diabetes. Today’s medicine can only do so much even if it is the best in the world. When life expectancy declined in the USA in the previous decade and again during COVID, some people actually cheered. When I posted the first signs of a rebound, one commentator from Europe seemed doubtful and disappointed.

The decline in USA life expectancy during the previous decade, according to the United Nations newly released 2024 report, is less than previously reported. The decline in 2015-2017 was tiny. The drop in 2020-2021 was much larger. But this was followed by a major rise in 2022 and again in 2023. In fact, the number for 2023 (79.3) is a new record high. Here are the numbers and the graph from which I extracted them:

2000: 76.81

2005: 77.53

2010: 78.67

2011: 78.70

2012: 78.82

2013: 78.82

2014: 78.88

2015: 78.72 (-0.08)

2016: 78.69 (-0.03)

2017: 78.65 (-0.04)

2018: 78.80

2019: 78.92

2020: 77.01 (-1.91)

2021: 76.38 (- 0.63)

2022: 77.98 (+1.60)

2023: 79.3 (+ 1.32)

As I predicted, the reduction in life expectancy from COVID was short-lived. The rebound started in 2022 and has continued. In 2002 the USA’s life expectancy increased by 1.6 years. Gaining more than a year per year (as also happened in 2023) means we have reached longevity escape velocity! Well, not really. Over the 23 span from 2000 the gain was 3.11 years, or 0.135 years per year.

1970: 70.73

1980: 73.73

1990: 75.37

The 1970s and 1980s showed impressive gains in longevity: 3.0 years in the ‘70s and another 1.64 years in the ‘80s. Or 0.3 and 0.164 years per year. So, no LEV or “Methusalarity”, just a steady increase.

According to the UN numbers, North America (79.64, 79.3 for the USA) has a higher life expectancy than Europe (79.06). Presumably, this is due to Eastern Europe dragging down the average.

The USA hater and anti-humanists who want to see humans die out will be disappointed at the continuing progress.

Two major qualifications and caveats should be noted here.

First, if your interest in the numbers is to apply them to yourself and your family and friend, the average life expectancy for the entire country is not a great measure. If you are not obese, not diabetic, do not smoke, and take good care of your healthy, you are in a subgroup with a higher life expectancy.

• Women tend to live longer than men.

• Individuals with higher income and education levels tend to have a life expectancy that is 5-10 years longer.

• If you are Asian American you may expect 85 years.

• If you as Hispanic American you have an average of 81 years.

What is life expectancy?

Second, it is easy to misunderstand life expectancy. When the decline in life expectancy during COVID was in the news, it was period life expectancy that was being referred to. If we are using period data we are collecting it from groups of people at a given time. This is based on the assumption that the death rate for each age group is the same as for this year’s newborns. Period life expectancy therefore measures death rates in one specific year. This can vary dramatically – as during COVID but far more so a century ago during the flu epidemic – and is not a prediction of how people will live in reality.

By contrast, cohort measures of life expectancy relies on a group of people, a cohort, tracked over time. It tells us the average lifespan of those people. We do not know that precise number until the last person in the cohort dies.

In principle, period and cohort life expectancy could be identical. Looking back from the late nineteenth century, the two measures have diverged. Cohort life expectancy (actual average lifespan) is higher than period life expectancy. This is because the mortality rate has declined over time. Contrary to the period life expectancy assumption, people did not experience the current year’s mortality rates at each age in their lifetime.

Even before the 2024 release, the best estimates suggested that a boy born in 2022 will live about seven years and a girl six years longer than that widely reported life expectancy at birth.

Global life expectancy

Global life expectancy also recovered from the pandemic years and reached an all-time high of 73.17 years. That is up from 68.07 in 1950, a gain of 0.07 years/year. It was only 32.0 in 1900. The stunningly wonderful gain of41.17 years in that time comes to an impressive 0.335 years/year.

The improvement in global life expectancy has been steady apart from a sudden and large drop due to famine in Communist China.

If life expectancy has continued to rise what does that imply for global population?

Living longer, slowing global population growth

Over the decades that I have argued for extended longevity, the most common objection has been overpopulation. Funnily enough, this argument got going at exactly the time when global fertility peaked. The peak was 4.96 children per woman in 1968. The long-term decline in fertility – followed by slowing population growth – has continued relentlessly. Yet the overpopulation panic has continued unabated. It is only the last couple of years that more people are recognizing how outdated that concern is.

The fall in fertility has been so rapid and proceeded so far that it has swamped the effects of extended longevity. The United Nations provides the most-cited source. Its projections have tended to be higher than those of other sophisticated modelers such as the Wittgenstein Centre and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). Even so, the UN has reduced its projected numbers several times.

In the UN’s 2019 report, global population in 2100 was projected (medium scenario) to be 10.4 billion and still growing. The 2022 revision put the peak at 10.4 billion in 2086. The 2024 revision puts the peak at 10.3 billion in 2084, going down to 10.35 billion in 2100. That is 550 million fewer than in 2019. The largest reductions in projected numbers are found in North America and Latin America.

By contrast, the IHME locates global peak population in 2061 at 9.73 billion and falling below 8 billion by 2100. If faster progress is made, population could be 9.32 billion by 2055.

As I pointed out in an earlier essay, the biggest source of uncertainty arises from fertility estimates for Africa. By the end of the century the uncertainty range is one billion (80% confidence interval). The UN and IMHE seem to agree on this.

What I find astounding in the acceleration in the fertility decline. Looking at the transition from 6+ to <3 children, we see an enormous difference between earlier and later countries undergoing the fertility transition. -- accelerating fall in fertility – in later countries it falls faster. For 6+ to <3 children: It took Britain 95 years (1815-1910) for this drop. It took China just 11 years (1967-1978) and 10 years in Iran (1986-1996).

Also quite surprising is the degree of change in the UN’s population projection for the USA. Just two years ago, the UN projected 394.04 million for 2100. In the 2024 report the number zoomed up to 421.28 million – a difference of more than 27 million.

The peaking and projected decline of population, both global and regional, concerns me. Innovation, investment, and a strong economy are easier in a growing world. Eternally growing bureaucracy, Green suppression of reliable energy sources, and a less adventurous and more risk-averse culture all threaten progress – including our ability to overcome the curse of aging. What, if anything, we can do about that is beyond the scope of this essay but you can find plenty of recent discussion of the topic elsewhere on Substack.

For more details of the UN’s 2024 report, see Our World In Data.

[LLMs are getting ridiculously good at generating still and moving images — apart form weirdly morphing lips — yet still add text to them that is some insane form of English. Strange. Hence “NASA Technology Relevance Level” becomes “ASA Technollogsy Rearness Livel.”]

This essay may not flow as smoothly as usual. If so, that’s because it is made up of material for a different blog piece that I found fascinating but not essential to an already-long essay – “Rationality, Repair, and Revival: Exposing the Argument from Lack of Imagination.”

The core idea of that essay for The Biostasis Times was to point out the differences between the part of the biostasis or cryonics process that we can achieve today and the part that will come some decades in the future when repair and revival of patients may be possible. We can examine the reasonableness of current practices using existing science and technology and existing evidence. But it is much harder to evaluate the plausibility of repair technologies that are decades from being feasible.

In the BT Times piece I noted that biostasis – in the most common form which is cryonics or in the form of chemical preservation – involves two quite distinct groups of methods and technologies. One group includes the methods used to get patients preserved under conditions as good as possible. This uses currently known and tested technologies and procedures – emergency medicine protocols and devices, ischemia mitigation drugs, vitrification solutions, and so on. The other group of methods and technologies are what we will need decades from now to repair and revive biostasis patients.

Future repair and revival technologies are, obviously, far more speculative. We will not be able to prove conclusively that the goal is achievable until we achieve it. Much like space travel. It was common practice for people – even experts in relevant areas – to take a large, smelly dump on the idea that humans would one day be able to fly, get into space, and land on the Moon. Today, we know those people were wrong. Enough independently-thinking souls soldiered on, setting aside these arrogantly ignorant nay-sayers. If we dig deeper, we can see that not only were they wrong – not an offense in the least – they had no justification for their dismissal.

Critical thinking is essential and poorly practiced by the vast majority of humans, and not always consistently by the best. We need more of it. We also need better imagination – not fantasizing, not unlimited and free floating imagination — but thinking about possibilities that respects physical limits but also adopts humility about what we can know about what is and is not impossible.

In my BT essay I present the tendency to dismiss bold claims about future technological capabilities in the form of the Argument from Lack of Imagination. Arthur C. Clarke, author of the extremely relevant Clarke’s Laws 1-3, argued that there was a frequent failure of nerve and imagination.

That essay bloated up to over 8000 words. Not all the content was really necessary to the main point. All of the extraneous material is, however, completely relevant to what I write about here in Extropic Thoughts. So, that essay (now slimmed down to under 6000 words) is the context for the pieces that follow.

Don’t fret, pet. You don’t need to read my BT piece to enjoy and perhaps learn from this piece. But please read it anyway. The first chunk looks at the incredible advances in microchips and their fabrication to make the point that “I can’t imagine how it could be done” is worthless as a serious argument.

Today’s microchips are obviously impossible!

We quickly become so used to new technologies that we rarely stop to consider how implausible they would have seemed a few decades earlier. We walk around blithely with our portable supercomputers, hang high resolution screens on the wall, choose from an endless supply of information and entertainment at close to zero cost, and get our organs scanned by invisible waves.

Shift your perspective back to the first half of the 20^th century. Imagine someone describing today’s microchips and the sophistication of their fabrication plants. If we could send back a detailed description, it would be considered science fiction. Probably even Jack Kilby, who invented the first microchip in 1958, the integrated circuit, would struggle to comprehend how these chips are possible.

Since the 1950s the cost of a transistor has fallen by about a factor of 300 million. In 1954 the first transistor radio had 4 transistors which cost $2.50 apiece ($29.03 in 2024 dollars). Today, an AMD Ryzen processor with 9.9 billion transistors is on sale for $650, or about $0.000000066 per transistor.

The cost of a semiconductor fabrication facility (“fab”) has increased from about $31 million in 2024 dollars to 10-$20 billion or more today. That’s around 300 to 600 times as expensive. (Rock’s Law, says that the cost of a semiconductor fab doubles every four years.)

A current microchip has features around 50 nanometers (billionths of a meter, duh) wide. That’s about 1/2000^th the width of a human hair. Layers are only a few atoms thick.

Layers can be added to the wafer surfaces of a microchip that are no more than a nanometer thick. That’s 1/100,oooth the thickness of a human hair.

Chip manufacturing requires processes that are hundreds of thousands of times more accurate than conventional manufacturing.

For much more, see Brian Potter’s excellent blog essay from which the above points are derived.

What we can build today would seem inconceivable not so long ago. And yet we did it by gradually building innovation on top of innovation, driven by market incentives.

Today’s familiar example is LLM AI models. Not long ago it would have seemed highly implausible (to almost everyone) that in six years we would see an increase in petaFLOPs by 6,800 in six year, to 50 billion (50 quadrillion) petaFLOPs.

Following a much-compressed version of the above, my BT Times essay looks at the spectrum from advanced design to exploratory engineering, considers the differing kinds of possibility, and then delves into technical possibility and exploratory engineering. The following section was another cut.

What if physics is wrong?

Here is one complication that I am going to leave aside but for a brief comment: If empirical possibility depends on the fundamental laws of physics, what happens if our physics turns out to be wrong or incomplete? This is almost certainly the case. Newtonian laws of motion stood for almost a quarter of a millennium and excelled at explaining and predicting a vast range of phenomena. Finally Newton’s view was overturned by special and general relativity. You could say it was falsified or you could say that it was shown to be an approximation valid in limited (but still myriad) conditions.

Currently, relativity and quantum mechanics both produce incredibly precise and testably correct predictions. Yet they do not cohere together. The hunt is on to develop a more comprehensive theory that incorporates them both into a more general and powerful framework.

I am not going to delve further into this because a revision of our understanding of fundamental physics could cut either way in terms of empirical possibility. Under Newton’s laws, we could in principle travel faster than light without limit. After Einstein, accelerating past light speed appears to be an absolute limit for particles with mass. That obviously limits us. If theories positing an accelerating expansion of the universe are correct, it may never be possible for us to develop a universal civilization capable of communicating with all other parts. On the other hand, new physics may open up new possibilities. For instance, some physicists believe that wormholes in spacetime may enable faster than light travel.

What about travelling back in time? There has been attempts to show that this could be achieved under extraordinary circumstances but generally it is thoughts to be impossible. Is it logically impossible or physically impossible? I leave this as an exercise for the reader.

You can’t do that!

[An expanded version of the text in my BT Times blog essay.]

Clearly, you should be extremely cautious before declaring that something will remain technically impossible forever if it cannot be shown to be physically impossible. Even things that are considered to be physically impossible may turn out to be possible. One fascinating area that makes this point vividly is materials science. Materials such as graphene and quasicrystals were thought to be physically impossible before they were created.  

We have already noted Richard Feynman and Eric Drexler’s thoughts about exploratory engineering. Here are some other classic examples of goals that are physically possible but technically impossible with current technology. The most popular area of application has been space structures and propulsion systems. These are ideas sufficiently well worked out that no clear barriers exist to making them eventually technically possible:

Geosynchronous satellites: Almost 600 geosynchronous satellites hover about our planet, the first being Syncom 2, launched on July 26, 1963. Herman Potočnik seems to have originated the idea in 1928. Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke popularized it in a paper in Wireless World in 1945.

New nuclear fusion designs: A rapidly growing field moving beyond magnetic confinement approaches.

Solar sails: Solar sails – or light sails or photon sails – propel spacecraft using radiation pressure exerted by sunlight on large surfaces. In a 1610 letter to Galileo, Johannes Kepler (having suggested that comet tails point away from the Sun due to light pressure) wrote: “Provide ships or sails adapted to the heavenly breezes, and there will be some who will brave even that void.” In his 1865 novel, From the Earth to the Moon, Jules Verne speculated that light or electricity will enable us to travel to the moon, the planets, and the stars.

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky proposed in 1921 using the pressure of sunlight to propel spacecraft through space and suggested, “using tremendous mirrors of very thin sheets to utilize the pressure of sunlight to attain cosmic velocities”. Friedrich Zander 1925 technical paper included technical analysis of the idea, and in 1927 JBS Haldane speculated that “wings of metallic foil of a square kilometer or more in area are spread out to catch the Sun's radiation pressure”.

J.D. Bernal presented similar thoughts in 1929. Fictional accounts followed from Cordwainer Smith in his 1960 story, “The Lady Who Sailed The Soul.” Jack Vance’s 1962 story, “Sail 25” revolved around a training mission on a solar-sail-powered spaceship. Arthur C. Clarke and Carl Sagan also explored the idea. The first spacecraft to make use of solar sails was IKAROS, launched in 2010. In 2022, two 100-foot lightweight composite booms unfurled the 4,300-square-foot sail quadrant – the largest solar sail quadrant ever deployed.

Mini-magnetosphere plasma propulsion: M2P2 is an advanced plasma propulsion system enabling spacecraft to attain unprecedented speeds with minimal energy and mass requirements using a large scale magnetic bubble around the spacecraft to ride the solar winds.

Space elevator: Also referred to as a space bridge, star ladder, and orbital lift. By coincidence, both Charles Sheffield in his 1979 novel, The Web Between the Worlds and Arthur C. Clarke in The Fountains of Paradise presented this idea. Considerable thought has been devoted to considering how this could be made to work. Currently available materials are too weak and heavy to make the concept practical. Solutions could come from advances in carbon nanotubes, boron nitride nanotubes, diamond nanothreads, and macro-scale single crystal graphene. Engineer David Smitherman of NASA/Marshall's Advanced Projects Office organized a workshop at the Marshall Space Flight Center to turn the idea into a practicable project.

Dyson sphere: Physicist Freeman Dyson declared in 1960 that “It is possible to take planets apart.” The Dyson sphere would harness much of the energy output of our sun by surrounding it with a kind of cocoon. Dyson was inspired by Olaf Stapledon’s 1937 novel, Star Maker. Dyson saw such structures as able to meet the eventual energy needs of a vast technological civilization. More recently, astronomers have searched for signs of extraterrestrial life by looking out for signatures created by such spheres. There is current speculation that one good candidate has been identified in Tabby’s Star. The concept has unfolded into other possible constructs including rings, bubbles, and swarms.

Alderson disk: An Alderson disk is a hypothetical artificial astronomical megastructure akin to Niven’s Ringworld and the Dyson sphere. The disk has a thickness of several thousand miles with the Sun in the hole at the center. The outer perimeter of an Alderson disk would be similar to the orbit of Mars or Jupiter. If you thought Saudi Arabia’s The Line city project was ambitious, this ups the ante by several orders of magnitude.

Jupiter brains and matrioshka brains: A Jupiter brain is a hypothetical computational platform comparable in mass and size to the gas giant planet of that name. A Jupiter brain is made of computronium, an ultra-dense material that can execute calculations at the molecular level. Fans of A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy may recall Marvin the paranoid android (really more depressed than paranoid) who complained that he was treated badly despite having a “brain the size of a planet.” Your smartphone is millions of times more powerful than the computers used in the Apollo mission to the Moon. (Impossible, obviously!) A Jupiter brain is optimized for computational speed. Any plausible design for a Jupiter brain must grapple with the requirements for heat dissipation. The idea was examined closely by transhumanist (and my friend) Anders Sandberg in his 1999 paper.

The term “matrioshka brain” was coined by Robert Bradbury in 1997 and presented on the Extropians email list – an email list overseen by my organization, Extropy Institute –perhaps the first serious discussion forum on the Web (participants including Marvin Minsky “the Father of Artificial Intelligence”, several of the originators of Bitcoin, and other farsighted folk). Bradbury also presented his thinking at my Extro-3 conference on August 10, 1997. (See also Bradbury’s contribution to the anthology Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge.

While a Jupiter brain is optimized for computational speed, a matrioshka brain operates on a smaller scale and is optimized for capacity and minimal signal propagation delay. The matrioshka brain is classified as a class-B stellar engine, employing the entire energy output of a star to drive computer systems. The name of this concept derives its name from nesting Russian matryoshka dolls.

More exemplary examples exist than I can cover here. You might check out Adrian Berry’s inspiring 1974 book, The Next Ten Thousand Years, which covers Dyson sphere, space habitats, the economics of abundance, and other applications of exploratory engineering. There is the work of Robert L. Forward (a fitting surname) whose research focused on the leading edges of speculative physics and included space tethers, and space fountains (extremely tall towers extending into space), solar sails (including Starwisp – using microwaves instead of solar radiation), antimatter propulsion, and other spacecraft propulsion technologies. Check out his book Indistinguishable from Magic.

There is Hans Moravec’s 1988 book, Mind Children, which delves into the limits of computation. In his introduction to Far Futures, physicist and SF author Gregory Benford outlines stellar engineering to extend the life of our sun to 100 billion years. Physicist Frank Tipler has speculated in detail how we might extend life indefinitely in a finite universe.

Mind-blowing as many of these idea are to most people they are all grounded in and limited by an advanced understanding of physical limits.

Exploratory engineering may be too conservative – it specifies a limit to new technologies based on physics but sometimes the physics is wrong – or the interpretation of the physics is wrong. A good example is the creation of graphene (see Appendix 1). Considerations of thermal fluctuations, structural integrity, edge instability, and principles derived from the Mermin-Wagner theorem and others seemed to imply that such materials could not exist stably in nature. Experimentation demonstrated that physical understanding to be incorrect.

Unforeseen “impossible” materials

Originally, I included the following in my BT Times essay, then as an appendix, and then I cut it in the interests of focus and brevity. I include it here because it provides a concrete and relatively recent set of examples of discoveries and inventions that were considered impossible or extremely unlikely until they happened.

We have discovered or created new materials that no one expected and – in some cases – were considered to be impossible. These are not examples of exploratory engineering but do illustrate how the supposedly impossible sometimes happens.

Graphene: Discovered in 2004 by Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov at the University of Manchester, graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a two-dimensional honeycomb lattice. Its discovery was unexpected because it was previously believed that truly two-dimensional materials could not exist stably in nature due to the principles derived from the Mermin-Wagner theorem and related theories in physics. These principles suggest that two-dimensional crystals are inherently unstable and would either curl up or disintegrate under normal conditions. The reasons for this belief are rooted in thermodynamics and materials science:

1. Thermal Fluctuations: In a two-dimensional crystal lattice, atoms are restricted to a plane, and thermal fluctuations (vibrations of atoms due to temperature) are expected to be more pronounced because the atoms have less constraint compared to those in three-dimensional structures. According to the Mermin-Wagner theorem, long-range ordering in two dimensions is disrupted by thermal fluctuations at any finite temperature, leading to the presumption that a flat, two-dimensional material would not be thermodynamically stable.

2. Structural Integrity: Without the support provided by a third dimension, two-dimensional materials were thought to lack the necessary structural integrity. It was assumed that they would not be able to maintain a stable, flat structure and would tend to form tubes or wrinkles or even crumble under normal conditions.

3. Edge Instability: Two-dimensional materials have edges that are only one atom thick, which could make them chemically reactive or structurally unstable. This edge reactivity was expected to lead to further complications in maintaining a stable two-dimensional structure.

It was found that graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice, is not only stable but also exhibits exceptional strength, electrical conductivity, and thermal properties. Stability is now attributed to the strong covalent bonding between carbon atoms in the graphene sheet and the specific electronic properties of carbon, which help stabilize the structure despite the theoretical predictions.

The discovery of graphene opened the door to further research into other two-dimensional materials, such as transition metal dichalcogenides and black phosphorus, which have since shown that two-dimensional materials can be both feasible and useful for a variety of applications.

Quasicrystals: First identified in 1982 by Dan Shechtman, who later won the Nobel Prize for his discovery, quasicrystals are structured materials that exhibit a form of symmetry that was once thought to be impossible. They are ordered but not periodic and have unique thermal, electrical, and mechanical properties.

Aerogels: While the first forms of aerogel were developed in the 1930s, significant advancements and variations have been made in the past 50 years. Aerogels are the lightest solid materials and are composed of up to 99.8% air. They have exceptional thermal insulating properties and a high surface area, making them useful in applications ranging from thermal insulation in spacecraft to the next generation of consumer electronics.

Metallic Glasses: These amorphous metals, developed in the late 20th century, are formed by cooling molten metal so quickly that crystals do not have time to form. Metallic glasses have higher strength and resistance to wear and corrosion than crystalline metals of similar composition. Their discovery opened up new applications in various fields including aerospace, medical devices, and sporting goods.

Topological Insulators: Discovered in the 2000s, topological insulators are materials that act as insulators in their interior while conducting electricity on their surface. They have unique electronic properties that make them potentially useful for quantum computing and spintronic devices.

Perovskite Solar Cells: First developed for solar applications in the last decade, perovskite materials have shown great promise in photovoltaic cells due to their high efficiency and lower production costs. Their rapid development from initial discovery to high-efficiency cells was unexpected and they are considered a breakthrough in solar technology.

Carbon Nanotubes: First observed in 1991 by Sumio Iijima, carbon nanotubes are cylindrical molecules that consist of rolled-up sheets of single-layer carbon atoms (graphene). They exhibit extraordinary strength and unique electrical properties, making them potentially useful in a wide range of applications from electronics to composite materials.

Materials science continues to yield surprising insights and novel materials with unique properties that enable new technologies.

Failures of nerve and imagination

In Profiles of the Future, Arthur C. Clarke considers how prognosticators go wrong in two big ways: A failure of nerve and a failure of imagination. To sum up his discussion, peppered by examples of both failures, Clarke offers his now-famous First Law: “When an elderly and distinguished scientist tells you that something is impossible, he is almost certainly wrong.” An expert can quickly identify all the difficulties in achieving something but may lack the imagination or vision to see how they may be overcome.

Clarke’s Second Law says: “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.” This is well illustrated by many examples. I have dozens of them. Here are a few from two books. Arthur C. Clarke’s Profiles of the Future, which I read sometime in the early- to mid-1980s, and Adrian Berry’s superb The Next Ten Thousand Years, which I read in 1987. These books further opened my already hungry mind to possibilities.

Auguste Comte – we will never know anything about the composition of stars. We will never know anything about planets except their geometry and dynamics.

Julius Frontinus, Rome’s leading military advisor in the time of Vespasian: “I will ignore all new ideas for new works and engines of war, the invention of which has reached its limits and for whose improvement I see no further hope.”

Napoleon refused to hear out American engineer Robert Fulton who argued that the blockading British fleet could be defeated by steamships. The first steamships appeared soon after Napoleon’s death.

“What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives travelling twice as fast as stagecoaches?” The Quarterly Review, 1825.

Governor Martin van Buren of New York complained to President Andrew Jackson in 1829 about railroad coaches being pulled at the “enormous speed of 15 mph.” “The Almighty never intended that people should travel at such breakneck speed.”

“Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia.” Dr. Dionysus Lardner (1793-1859), Professor of Natural Philosophy and Astronomy at University College, London. (Not much joy from this particular Dionysus.)

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.” Western Union internal memo, 1876.

“Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” –Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, 1895.

Astronomer Simon Newcomb in 1903: “Aerial flight is one of that class of problems with which man will never be able to cope.” “The example of the bird does not prove that man can fly. Imagine the proud possessor of the aeroplane darting through the air at a speed of several hundred feet per second. It is the speed alone that sustains him. How is he ever going to stop?” — Simon Newcomb, in The Independent, 22 October 1903. This was just a few months before Orville Wright flew the first powered aircraft at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. It was then authoritatively declared that no plane would ever take the weight of a passenger, an assertion quickly disproved when Orville took his brother Wilbur as a passenger on his next flight.

I must confess that in my imagination, in spite even of spurring, refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea. H.G. Wells, in Anticipations, 1901.

The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be. — Simon Newcomb, professor of mathematics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science, 1906

All attempts at artificial aviation are not only dangerous to life but doomed to failure from an engineering standpoint. — editor of The Times of London, 1905.

Okay, but that’s as far as it goes! The engineer Octave Chanute wrote in Popular Science Monthly that “the machines will eventually be very fast… but they are not to be thought of as commercial carriers.” Eleven years later in 1914, the first air passenger service was opened between two Florida towns.

Before World War 1, astronomer William H. Pickering dismissed the idea of “gigantic flying machines speeding across the Atlantic carrying innumerable passengers.”

Then critics claimed that no plane would ever fly faster than 600 mph. In 1947, Chuck Yeager flew Glamourous Glennis at 670 mph.

Similar dismissals followed concerning the possibility of space travel. “[Space travel] is utter bilge. I don't think anybody will ever put up enough money to do such a thing… It is all rather rot.” Sir Richard van der Riet Wooley, on assuming the post of British Astronomer Royal, Time magazine, 16 January 1956.

“Space travel is bunk.” Sir Harold Spencer Jones, Astronomer Royal of Britain, two weeks before the launch of Sputnik I, 1957.

“To place a man in a multi-stage rocket and project him into the controlling gravitational field of the Moon where the passengers can make scientific observations, perhaps land alive, and then return to earth—all that constitutes a wild dream worthy of Jules Verne. I am bold enough to say that such a man-made voyage will never occur regardless of all future advances.” — Dr. Lee DeForest, The New York Times, 25 February 1957.

“This foolish idea of shooting at the moon is an example of the absurd length to which vicious specialisation will carry scientists working in thought-tight compartments. Let us critically examine the proposal, For a projectile entirely to escape the gravitation of earth, it needs a velocity of 7 miles a second. The thermal energy of a gramme at this speed is 15,180 calories… . The energy of our most violent explosive—nitroglycerine—is less than 1,500 calories per gramme. Consequently, even had the explosive nothing to carry, it has only one-tenth of the energy necessary to escape the earth… . hence the proposition appears to be basically impossible.” — A. W. Bickerton, Professor of Physics and Chemistry, Canterbury College, Christchurch, 1926 (and a popularizer of science). Arthur C. Clarke (Profiles of the Future p.22) said of the quote, “It should be read carefully, for as an example of arrogant ignorance it would be very hard to beat.”

“There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television, or radio service inside the United States.” T. Craven, FCC Commissioner, 1961. The first commercial communications satellite became operational in 1965

There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear energy] will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will. — Albert Einstein, 1932.

After helping split the atom, Lord Rutherford announced (1933) that he could see no practical value for his discovery. “He who talks about the liberation of atomic energy on an industrial basis is talking moonshine”.

That is the biggest fool thing we have ever done. The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives. Admiral William Leahy. [Advice to President Truman, when asked his opinion of the atomic bomb project.]

In 1899, the director of the U.S. Patent Office urged President McKinley to abolish the Patent office and his own job – in what must be a unique demand from a bureaucrat – because “everything that can be invented has been invented.”

Marconi was derided when he claimed that radio messages could cross the Atlantic. After all, this would clearly require a radio reflector as large as the North American continent. “Radio has no future.” - Lord Kelvin  British mathematician and physicist, 1897. Lee de Forest was prosecuted for mail fraud for making this claim. De Forest didn’t learn from this and went on to assert in 1926: “While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially I consider it an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming.”

“If I had thought about it, I wouldn’t have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can’t do this.” Spencer Silver on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M “Post-It” Notepads.

My conclusion in the BT Times piece:

Unlike those other important advances that turned out to be real, our lives depend on life extension and biostasis. A very strong burden of proof lies on those who dismiss the idea that we can drastically extend human lifespans and repair and revive well-preserved patients.

Minister of Doom

You have probably heard of Thomas Malthus. He was the man responsible for economics being saddled with the label “the dismal science”. His 1798 book, An Essay on the Principle of Population, made a case for the hopelessness of the battle against hunger and poverty. Based on his survey of history (pre-capitalist, pre-industrial history), Malthus concluded that when the supply of food increases, human population increases faster. Humans cannot exercise self-control and have no way of overcoming this supposedly iron logic.

As he put it, “The perpetual tendency of the race of man to increase beyond the means of subsistence is one of the general laws of animated nature, which we can have no reason to expect to change.”

In Malthus’ simple model, food supplies grow arithmetically or linearly (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) while the number of people grows geometrically (1, 2, 4, 8, 16). Left to their own devices, human populations will explode in size. Two forces counter this tendency, which Malthus named “preventive” and “positive” checks. Preventive checks include delays in or avoidance of childbearing, moral restraint, and legislation. (China’s now-abandoned one-child policy being a heavy-handed example of the latter.) Malthus doubted that preventive checks would do the job.

The more powerful positive checks include war, plague, and famine. If people failed to restrict their reproduction through preventive checks then nature would take over. War would erupt as everyone scrambled for scarce resources, plagues would grow from overcrowding, and people would die as food ran out. Malthus, a man active in the Church, said we should facilitate the positive checks.

“To act consistently, therefore, we should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operation of nature in producing this mortality, and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use.” [Malthus, 1798]

It’s not hard to see Malthus as a comic book villain. His surname begins with the Latin mal-, meaning evil, bad, or diseased. It suggests maliciousness, malignancy, and malintent. While aesthetically fitting, his name actually derives from malthouse, a building in which grains are prepared and stored for use in brewing. At first sight, Malthus might also appear the villain for his explicit opposition to the voices of Enlightenment optimism and progress, such as Condorcet and Godwin.

However, Godwin’s utopia was resonant with the deadly French Revolution, seeing Heaven-on-Earth as coming from radical social change with private property abolished and equality imposed from above by people who are rational, benevolent, and self-sacrificing. The subtitle of the first edition of Malthus’s book makes this opposition clear: Population “as it affects the future improvement of Society, with remarks on the speculation of Mr. Godwin, Mr. Condorcet, and other writers.” (Gunderman, 2021) Malthus understood better than those particular optimists the importance of acknowledging and harnessing self-interest for the benefit of all, rather than relying on the dangerous brew of centralized power and the assumption of self-sacrificing benevolence.

In the imaginary ledger of historical plus and minuses, on the plus side Malthus inspired Charles Darwin in the development of his theory of natural selection. Darwin (and Wallace) saw the work of evolution in the fossil record and comparative anatomy. But how did it get a grip? The Malthusian principle of population entered the picture. In Darwin’s autobiography, he recalls reading Malthus in 1838:

“It at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work.”

You can think of what Malthus calls the “principle of population” as a “steady state” theory. Applied to any population of organisms, this principle says the population is always at or near the limit of the food supply. All the food is always being eaten and there is no extra to feed more people. If Condorcet and Godwin were to achieve equality, “distress for want of food would be constantly pressing on all mankind.” In other words, rather than some being relatively impoverished, all would be absolutely impoverished. Malthus changed his mind in later editions, diluting what he wrote about the principle of population until it amounted to nothing.

Although Malthus was correct in opposing Godwinian forms of optimism, his overall and enduring effect has been to instill a desperate, zero-sum mentality in Western culture. The principle of population acts as a prison within which we regard other people as threats to what we have. It distracts us from understanding what we might create, contribute, and trade. It traps us within a pessimistic, enervating, and anti-humanist worldview. As Brendan O’Neill puts it:

“one of the great political conflicts of the modern era was between those who thought mankind had no choice but to live according to nature’s limits, and that he had to modify his behavior and his procreation choices accordingly, and those who believed that mankind might be liberated from these alleged limits through the application of his wisdom, his imagination, his technology and his labor to create a world in which everyone would live free from need. [O’Neill, 2021]

Today, for anyone with open eyes, it is obvious how wrong Malthus was. Global population has increased from around one billion when Malthus published his book to over eight billion today. In the United States, population has multiplied by approximately a factor of 85 over the same time. And yet the percentage of people starving has fallen. For decades, the absolute number of people starving has fallen. Calories per person has been rising along with population size.

This should be impossible according to the Malthusian population principle. Malthus did not foresee advances in agricultural technology, most starkly realized in the “green revolution”. Unsurprisingly, Malthus did not expect the introduction of contraceptives and did not expect the self-restraint exercised by people who have chosen to limit births to improve their standard of living. People have responded to fewer infant deaths by having fewer children. Wealthier countries tend to have fewer births, not more.

Malthus’ limitationist view of human well-being was exceedingly simple. Later versions have at least given the appearance of greater sophistication, wrapping themselves in the metal cloak of the computer.

From System Dynamics to Limits to Growth, 1972

The method of ‘system dynamics’ was proposed in 1953 by John von Neumann. This enabled the complicated interaction of variables to be handled by a computer and the outcome determined. From the late 1950s to the late 1960s, system dynamics was restricted to corporate and managerial problems. Jay Forrester became a professor at the new MIT School of Management in 1956. His work with managers at General Electric led to his 1961 book, Industrial Dynamics. An acquaintance with the former mayor of Boston led to conversations about how system dynamics might be used to tackle the problems of cities. The result of the Collins-Forrester collaboration was a book titled Urban Dynamics. 

In 1970, Forrester was invited to a meeting of the portentously named Club of Rome, an organization devoted to solving what its members describe as the “predicament of mankind”. Their worldview anticipated a global crisis due to the demands being placed on the earth’s carrying capacity and its capacity for disposing of pollutants by the world’s growing population. Of course, Forrester was convinced that system dynamics could help with the Club’s mission. The second iteration of the resulting model, named WORLD2, was published in his 1973 book, World Dynamics. This model explored interrelationships between world population, industrial production, pollution, resources, and food.

Given the Club of Rome’s remit, perhaps unsurprisingly the model showed a collapse of the world socioeconomic system sometime during the twenty-first century, if steps were not taken to lessen the demands on the earth’s carrying capacity. In World Dynamics, Forrester wrote: “The Malthusian thesis has been true and at work at all times.” Forrester called for a radical transformation of minds and societies, with wealth to be distributed (by force) equally.

The third version of the Malthusian model, WORLD3, was used by one of Forrester’s graduate students, Dennis Meadows, and resulted in the infamous 1972 book, Limits to Growth. World3 explored past and future relations among population, capital, agricultural production, natural resources, and pollution. There was no mention of technological level, institutional factors, economics, policies, or innovation. The model consisted of 100 variables and 80 fixed parameters.

The report was launched with much fanfare at a widely reported conference in February 1972. The introductory blurb tells us:

“A world where industrial production has sunk to zero. Where population has suffered a catastrophic decline. Where the air, sea, and land are polluted beyond redemption. Where civilization is a distant memory.”

“This is the world that the computer forecasts. What is even more alarming, the collapse will not come gradually, but with awesome suddenness, with no way of stopping it.” Limits project leader Meadows, told Time: “All growth projections end in collapse.”

Or, as Ronald Bailey put it in his excellent critical study: “Billions of people will die horribly in a massive famine and/or epidemic bringing about the collapse of civilization sometime during the next century.” [Bailey, 1993.] Limits’ prophecy foresaw Four Horsemen of the New Age Apocalypse: depletion of nonrenewable resources, decline of food supplies, pollution, and overcrowding. There was no room for hope. If one limit didn’t kill growth, another would. The message has been sustained since. From their 2004 update: In other words, “a few decades into the twenty-first century” (Limits 2004:170) things happen that can be described as a “collapse” or “vast human misery.”

Context and reactions

The timing of the book’s release was impeccable. By 1972, the sense of technological optimism had been largely crushed, economies were stagnating with rising unemployment and inflation, and the Vietnam War was a disastrous failure. The book sold millions of copies, boosted by the temporary success of the Arab oil embargo.

Rachel Carson had done much to set the new tone with her 1962 book Silent Spring which heightened fears about pollution – and caused massive death by leading to the banning of DDT – and launched the modern environmental movement. This was also just a few years after Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (covered in a previous essay), and two years after the deeply pessimistic first Earth Day in 1970.

As Bjorn Lomborg notes, “The genius of The Limits to Growth was to fuse these worries with fears of running out of stuff. We were doomed, because too many people would consume too much. Even if our ingenuity bought us some time, we would end up killing the planet and ourselves with pollution. The only hope was to stop economic growth itself, cut consumption, recycle, and force people to have fewer children, stabilizing society at a significantly poorer level.” [Lomborg, 2013]

The Club of Rome used the release of Limits to Growth as a public relations exercise, launching it with a press conference organized by public-relations firm Charles Kytle Associates and financed by the Xerox Corporation. The story of the hype, along with harsh criticism, appeared in Science a week after the book’s release.

Four years after the publication of Limits, it was disavowed by its sponsors, the Club of Rome. The Club said that the conclusions of that first report are not correct and that they purposely misled the public in order to “awaken” public concern. The Club reversed its position and got behind team growth. According to Time, the Club’s strategy was to jolt people out from the comfortable idea that growth could continue indefinitely. This reversal was ignored. Having frightened everyone, they could tell us the true truth in the mission of this elite to transform the global economy.

Although the about-face was not widely reported, criticism was plentiful. Limits sparked a thunderous criticism from economists. Most of them either saw in it numerous technical errors or rejected its approach and assumptions. They also criticized it for disclosing so little of what the authors did, making close inspection impossible.

John Maddox, then editor of Nature, called the book “sinister”, and Economic Nobelist Gunnar Myrdal of Sweden dismissed it as “pretentious nonsense”. One MIT professor said “What they’re doing is providing simple-minded answers for simple-minded people who are scared to death. And that’s a dangerous thing… This messianic impulse is what disturbs me.”

In an April 2, 1972, article in the New York Times, Peter Passell and two co-authors described Limits as “an empty and misleading work ... best summarized ... as a rediscovery of the oldest maxim of computer science: Garbage In, Garbage Out.” (Or “Malthus in, Malthus out.”) Passell found the study’s computer model to be simplistic while the entire approach underestimated the role of technological progress in solving the problems of resource depletion, pollution, and food production. In his view, the entire endeavor was motivated by a hidden agenda: to halt growth in its tracks.

A team at Sussex University’s Science Policy Research Unit published their review of the structure and assumptions of the models used and published their findings in Models of Doom [Cole, 1975]. They showed that the forecasts of the world’s future are highly sensitive to a few unduly pessimistic key assumptions. They also found that the Malthusian bias of the Meadows’ team’s models failed to accurately reflect reality and that their methods, data, and predictions were faulty. Then the Sussex team tested the MIT team’s models over the 1850-1900 period, the models generated collapse patterns that never occurred.

Also shortly after the publication of Limits, mathematicians Vermeulen and De Jongh analyzed the world model and found it to be “very sensitive to small parameter variations” and having “dubious assumptions and approximations”. “By changing three parameters by 10% each in 1975 the world population collapse predicted by the model is averted.” [Vermeulen, 1976] So, how did the model work and what did it say?

The guts of the model

The World3 model was built to start in the year 1900 using historically available data and then generate trend lines up to the year 2100 showing increases or decreases among population, industrial output per capita, food per capita, “nonrenewable” natural resources, and pollution based on varying assumptions. Trends from 1900 to 1970 were based on available data and then projections made for the following 130 years. The “standard run” of the model assumes “that there will be in the future no great changes in human values nor in the functioning of the global population-capital system as it has operated for the last one hundred years.” [Limits, 123]

Although the resource base in 1970 is about 95 percent of its 1900 value, “it declines dramatically thereafter, as population and industrial output continue to grow. The behavior mode of the system shown in figure 35 is clearly that of overshoot and collapse. In this run the collapse occurs because of nonrenewable resource depletion.” Food, industrial output, and population grow exponentially until the shrinking resources force growth to slow. Population and pollution continue to increase for a time, but the former is ended by an increase in the death rate due to decreased food and medical services.

The authors say that the exact timing is not meaningful to due uncertainties and aggregation, it is significant

“that growth is stopped well before the year 2100. We have tried in every doubtful case to make the most optimistic estimate of unknown quantities, and we have also ignored discontinuous events such as wars or epidemics, which might act to bring an end to growth even sooner than our model would indicate.”

So, the real world will turn out worse than the model suggests! The next run doubles assumed resources (even though they think the original assumption was optimistic) but produces a similar outcome.

If you look at the graph on p. 124 (reproduced above), it clearly shows population growth going up at a constant or accelerating rate as of 2021, with pollution going up at an accelerating pace, and resources clearly plummeting. All of these are wrong. It shows food per capita going down, which is also wrong. In the discussion, the authors note that population growth after 1970 goes up – exactly the opposite of what happened in the real world between 1972 and the present. Okay, but that’s only the standard run. What about the others?

I will spare you, dear reader, from detailing all the modifications to the standard run. The book looks at 12 scenarios. After the standard run comes a group of six “technological scenarios”. These assume new advances in technology or that society would increase the amount of resources available (especially energy), increase agricultural productivity, reduce pollution, or limit population growth. The final set of five “stabilization” scenarios consider what the model says would happen if either population growth, or industrial output, were stabilized.

After considering the first two groups of model runs, the authors tell us that their world model: “has led us to one conclusion that appears to be justified under all the assumptions we have tested so far. The basic behavior mode of the world system is exponential growth of population and capital, followed by collapse.” The authors then go on the attack the green revolution for “increasing inequality.”

To achieve a scenario that avoids collapse and remains stable through the 21^st century, population must somehow be stabilized by “setting” it equal to the birth rate in 1975. The investment rate also must be “stabilized”. Starting in 1975, resource consumption must be cut to a quarter of its 1970 value (which was much lower than that of today), essentially condemning the vast majority to poverty. The economic preferences of “society” are “shifted” from goods to services. Pollution per unit of production is cut by 75% from 1975 levels. To counter the “rather low value of food per capita”, capital is “diverted” to food production at whatever cost, but this leads to rapid soil depletion. Resource depletion and pollution is also decreased by attempts to increase the average lifetime of industrial capital.

I’ve put terms such as “setting”, “stabilized”, and “shifted” in quotations marks to draw attention to these seemingly innocuous words. The authors are saying that, to avoid collapse and achieve a future that’s sustainable for a few decades (but ultimately doomed), nine policies must be enforced on everyone, throughout the world, over the decades without let up. All of these policies require coercion and centralized control.

To avoid collapse – at least in this century – the model tells us we will have to shrink the population drastically from today’s level. We will have to reduce global life expectancy to just under 70 years. Global income per capita can never be allowed to rise above half the level in 1972 USA. Those who say the critics of Limits misrepresent it because not all runs quickly lead to collapse are being disingenuous. The models assert that we can only avoid collapse through the current century by keeping everyone poor and hungry.

Despite that, in the following century collapse will still happen, say the models. We can only trade off time against misery. Or, as the authors delicately put it, “The longer a society prefers to maintain the state of equilibrium, the lower the rates and levels must be.” On the bright side, we can choose whether civilization collapses from excessive pollution, lack of resources, or lack of people. So, that’s nice.

The fatal errors in Limits

Here’s one resource that is not scarce: Good critiques of Limits. Elodie Vieille Blanchard (2010) identifies four major critiques made between 1973 and 1992. A study from The Science Policy Research Unit of Sussex University argued that the assumptions underlying the Limits model were excessively pessimistic. Eminent futurist Herman Kahn and the Hudson Institute argued that Limits underestimated technology’s role in mitigating resource depletion. Scholars at the Bariloche Foundation in Argentina made a similar case but also argued that pollution is easier to control than assumed in Limits.

The Nobel Prize winning economist William Nordhaus argued that Limits failed to comprehend the role played by prices in regulating the use of resources. He also agreed with critics that Limits had undervalued the role of technology in solving problems of pollution and of potential resource scarcity. Impending scarcity leads to higher prices and provokes people to search for substitutes and to improve technologies used to exploit natural resources.

One of the best and most accessible critiques is in chapter 4, “The Depletion Myth” of Ronald Bailey’s Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse (1993). Bailey notes that, “Like all depletionists, Forrester assumed that natural resources are a fixed quantity.” This echoes a point made, among others, by economist Julian Simon. Simon pointed out that “Dennis Meadows predictably went wrong by using the known-reserves concept.” Meadows estimated that the global supply of aluminum would be exhausted in 49 years (i.e., in 2021!), despite aluminum being the most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust.

A related error was to make no allowance for technological progress in the standard run (and insufficient allowance in other simulations). Simon also pointed out that Meadows looked only at high-grade bauxite when lower grades are far more abundant. The affordability of aluminum has gotten better, not worse, in the decades since. You can find trend data at the Human Progress website.

Bailey argues that no exhaustible resource is essential or irreplaceable. The price mechanism not only spurs investment in discovering new reserves of a resource, it also stimulates conservation and substitution. A deeper point that the limitationists or depletionists fail to grasp is that what counts as a resource changes over time. The shipbuilding industry relied primarily on wood until the 1800s. People had started worrying that wood would run out back in the 1500s. Instead, boats were made of iron and steel, and then wood became plentiful again.

Resources never “run out”. As Julian Simon argued in The Ultimate Resource [Simon, 1998], human ingenuity creates new resources as required from the raw materials of the universe. We will never run out of copper because its price will increase as it becomes scarcer, stimulating the discovery of more deposits, more recycling, new methods that use less of it, and better substitutes.

Bailey notes that

“Forrester’s model assumes that ‘as crowding rises toward five times the present population, the death rate is taken to rise ever more steeply and to reach three times the present rate, for a crowding ratio of 5.’ However, countries that are already well beyond Forrester’s crowding ratio of 5 show no increase in their death rates.”

On the contrary, their deaths rate continue to fall.

Pollution plays a major role in Limits. If we aren’t stopped by the other limits, the model says we will choke to death on our own wastes and emissions. The World3 model contradicts the observed facts. As population has grown in the USA and other developed countries, the most dangerous air pollutants have declined. Following the development curve, US water pollution worsened until 1960 but then improved. We see the same pattern around the world.

Bailey notes Forrester’s strange assumption that as capital investment increases, pollution must also increase. Capital investment can reduce pollution as in the cases of wastewater treatment, sulfur-removing scrubbers on electricity generation plants, and improvements in mining and drilling.

Bailey asks:

“How could Forrester, the Meadowses, and the Club of Rome be so far off? One answer is that the computer model was designed to confirm what its designers already believed.” As others have shown, the assumptions of the model were tuned to produce the desired outputs. This and similar models share the false assumption of diminishing returns: Additional people who must work and live with the original fixed supply of land and capital implies less income for each person. As Simon, again, explains: This ignores “the contribution of additional people to technological advance through the creation of knowledge and through economies of scale.” [Simon, 1998, 478]

Another issue with the model is that the authors stack the deck by letting some things grow exponentially and others not. In all models, population, capital, and pollution grow exponentially, but technologies for expanding resources and controlling pollution are allowed to grow, if at all, only in discrete increments.

As several critics including Peter Vajk have observed, the model “assumes that the Earth is a closed system, and that throughout this century and the next, the only material and energy resources available for human use will be those of the planet Earth.” [Vajk, 1978] Using a framework paralleling that of Limits, Jeremy Rifkin’s 1980 book, Entropy: A New World View, made the same mistake. You can’t argue for limits by invoking the second law of Thermodynamics because the Earth is not a closed system.

Adrian Berry’s boundary-stretching 1974 book, The Next Ten Thousand Years, poked holes in vital elements of the World3 model. Remarkably, pollution was undefined and represented by a single variable in every model. “How was this pollution measured? By the density of smog over Los Angeles? By the number of discarded beer cans found each year in a given district? By the surface area of marine oil slicks in latitude and longitude such-and-such?” [Berry, 1974]

Resources, like pollution, are lumped together in a single undefined variable. Since “resources” covers an enormous range of known and yet-unknown quantities, how can any sensible claim be made that resources would run out by a certain date? “A Club of Rome model written in 1900 would surely have predicted that civilization would collapse long before 1976.” In 1900, no one knew of the use of uranium or nuclear energy. We knew nothing of plastics, stainless steel, the use of titanium, nor such techniques as welding and superconductivity.

The authors of Limits projected the exhaustion of aluminum, copper, gold, lead, mercury, molybdenum, natural gas, oil, silver, tin, tungsten, and zinc by 2013. In reality, commodity prices have generally fallen to about a third of their level 150 years ago. Bjorn Lomborg pointed out the 98% drop in consumption of mercury along with a 90% decline in price thanks to technological innovations. [Lomborg, 2013] Since 1946, new discoveries and new technologies have increased supplies of copper, aluminum, iron, and zinc more than consumption.

Rather than running out in the early 1990s, oil and natural gas reserves are larger than they were in 1970 despite increased consumption. Shale gas alone has vastly increased gas resources in the US. Canada has potentially record-breaking reserves. The only threat to resources comes from ill-advised energy policies enforced by governments. While Limits sees collapse ahead, even the far-from-cheery Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that global GDP per capita will increase 14-fold over this century and 24-fold in the developing world.

All the trends are in a direction exactly contrary to that projected by Limits. That’s true of population growth, food supply, malnourishment, and pollution. Despite the abject failure of Limits to reflect reality, the mindset it embodies is still shaping the thinking of both the “elite” and the public.

Failure to Learn

In the 1992 follow-up, Beyond The Limits, the authors maintain that Limits was right and only got the dates wrong. This would be like the authors of Dow 36,000 saying that he only got the dates wrong since the Dow crossed the 36,000 line 20 years after he predicted that it would. That’s unfair to Glassman and Hassett. They at least got the direction of the Dow right. Limits got the direction wrong for almost all measures. Suppose a weather forecaster asked not to be judged wrong because the snowstorm that they forecast for tomorrow was off by four months.

The thirty-year up to Limits to Growth, published by the Club of Rome in 2004, and two subsequent modelling studies in 2008 and 2014 from the University of Melbourne concluded that the world is tracking on Limits to Growth’s ‘standard run’ projection. The work, led by Swedish and Icelandic teams, concluded that most of the resources they studied had either already reached peak production or will do so within the next 50 years. Coal production will peak in around 2015-20 and ‘peak energy’ around the same period.

How could they make these claims with a straight face? Historical and current data show that the model was wrong, and their forecasts are already wrong. The coal claim is readily dismissed, as shown in this graph.

In a stunning display of motivated reasoning, a 2020 report published by consulting firm KPMG used updated data to defend the methods and conclusions of Limits. [Herrington, 2020] Herrington (first name, “Gaya”) claims that the BAU2 and CT scenarios best match the data since 1972. BAU is “business as usual 2”. This is same as the standard run but with a doubling of the natural resources. CT is not defined but is an updated version of Limits’s sixth scenario, “World model with ‘unlimited’ resources, pollution controls, and increased agricultural productivity.

This claims the BAU2 and CT scenarios best match the data. BAU2 still shows a collapse, but industrial output doesn’t start falling until about 2035, although food peaks around 2025, and “pollution” continues to rise. The latter doesn’t sound bad, but the model run found pollution skyrocketing, industrial output per capita, food per capita, and population crashing.

The 2020 update has all the problems of the 1972 version. The original Limits was grossly oversimplistic. As we have seen, for example, it has a single factor called “pollution” that pretended to represent something meaningful. In the new version, pollution apparently means carbon dioxide plus plastic. This is not an improvement.

Herrington compounds the errors of Limits by arguing that things are actually “considerably worse than the Club of Rome’s projections”. As you might guess, this is because there is no wailing and crying in the 1972 report about climate change (or “climate crisis”), ocean acidification, and other panics of the day. Herrington has not learned from the last half century and is doubling down with error.

I have to say that I found the 2020 report and some of the other research for this article discouraging. Motivated cognition turns up frequently among those claiming that the thoroughly disproven and discredited Limits may have been wrong about the dates but was essentially correct. “Oops, the math was a bit off. Let’s do use the same assumptions and do it again.” This is the same kind of apocalyptic mindset seen in religious predictions of the end of the world. Faith comes before theory, and theory shapes the evidence.

California preacher Harold Camping first predicted Judgment Day for September 6, 1994. When it didn’t happen, he rescheduled the end of the world for September 29 and then to October 2. Not one to be discouraged, in 2005 Camping predicted the Second Coming of Christ for May 21, 2011 with millions dying daily until the final end on October 21, 2011. This was of a piece with other serial failed doomsayers, such as the Millerites. They even had a term for it: The Great Disappointment.

These endlessly repeated prophecies of doom are not merely amusing mistakes. They cause us to “obsess over misguided remedies for largely trivial problems, while often ignoring big problems and sensible remedies.” [Lomborg, 2013] These dramatic scenarios pull our attention away from the real threats to life and wellbeing. Poverty immiserates and kills huge numbers while around 15 million people per year die of easily curable diseases. The solution to this suffering and death is economic growth. Yet the policies proposed to counter the imagined crisis scenarios destroy wealth and slow economic growth.

References

Bailey, Ronald, Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse. St. Martin’s Press, 1993.

Berry, Adrian, The Next Ten Thousand Years. Jonathan Cape, 1974.

Barnett, Harold J., and Chandler Morse, Scarcity and Growth: The Economics of Natural Resource Availability. Resource for the Future, and John Hopkins University Press, 1963.

Blanchard, Elodie Vieille, “Modelling the Future: An Overview of the ‘Limits to Growth’ Debate.” Centaurus 52:91−116, 2010.

Cole, H.S.D., and Christopher Freeman, et al., Models of Doom: A Critique of the Limits to Growth. Universe Books, 1975.

Forrester, Jay, 1973. World Dynamics. Cambridge, Mass.: Wright-Allen Press.

Franke, Richard W., “The Limits to Growth Study: Some Thoughts about Its Relation to Sustainability.” May 12, 2015, updated February 8, 2020.

Gunderman, Richard. “Malthusian Misanthropy.” AEIR, October 11, 2021

Jackson, Tim and Robin Webster, “Limits Revisited: a review of the limits to growth debate.” Limits2growth.org, April 2016

Herrington. Gaya, “Update to Limits to Growth: Comparing the World3 model with empirical data.” KPMG, Journal of Industrial Ecology, 2020: 1-13

Lomborg, Bjorn, “The Limits to Panic”, Project Syndicate, Jun 17, 2013

Malthus, Thomas, An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers. 1798

McAfee, Andrew, More from Less: The surprising story of how we learned to prosper using fewer resources and what happens next. Scribner, 2019.

Meadows, Donella H., Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, William W. Behrens III, The Limits to Growth: A Report for The Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. Potomac Associates, 1972

Nordhaus, William, “Climate change: The Ultimate Challenge for Economics.” Prize Lecture, December 8, 2018. 

O’Neill, Brendan, “Internalizing Malthus.” Spiked Online, September 24, 2021.

Pielke Jr., Roger, and Justin Ritchie. “How Climate Scenarios Lost Touch with Reality.” Issues in Science and Technology 37, no. 4 (Summer 2021): 74–83.

Simon, Julian L. The Ultimate Resource 2. Princeton University Press; Revised ed. Edition, July 1, 1998.

“Origin of System Dynamics”, System Dynamics Society.

Vajk, Peter, Doomsday Has Been Cancelled. Peace Press, 1978.

Vermeulen, P.J., and D.C.J. de Jongh, “Parameter sensitivity of the ‘Limits to Growth’ world model.” Applied Mathematical Modelling, Volume 1, Issue 1, June 1976, Pages 29-32.

Worrall, Eric, “Claim: 1972 Club of Rome End of World Prediction Still on Track, Thanks to Climate Change.” Wattsupwiththat, July 26, 2021.

Vernor Vinge, Natasha Vita-More, and David Brin

Vernor Vinge died on March 20, 2024, at the age of 79, in La Jolla, California. He had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease. Vernor wrote excellent stories, popularized the idea of a Technological Singularity, and was a lovely person.

To the best of my knowledge, Vernor did not get cryopreserved. He has no chance to see the future he envisioned so boldly and imaginatively. The near-future world of Rainbows End is very nearly here. (Hal Finney reviewed the book in Extropy Online.) Part of me is upset with myself for not pushing him to make cryonics arrangements. However, he knew about it and made his choice.

Among Vernor’s remarkable books are True Names (developed out of a 1981 novella), which I read in 1987 and again last year. This was probably the first plausible portrayal of cyberspace and a tremendous influence on later writers such as William Gibson and Walter Jon Williams. As David Brin notes, the book was “even more prophetic about the yin-yang tradeoffs of privacy, transparency and accountability.” I greatly enjoyed the libertarian background of “The Ungoverned” and “The Peace War”, which he put together as Across Realtime, my signed copy of which I read in 1993 and again in 2001.

I was fascinated by the long-term perspective in Marooned in Real Time, which I read in May 1989. Perhaps his most famous novel aside from True Names is A Fire Upon the Deep, which I read in February 1993. His use of the “zones of thought” to get around the problem of writing science fiction in the face of the Singularity was clever and resulted in a masterful novel. I recommend the sequels A Deepness in the Sky and Children of the Sky. You should also read his short stories, collected in Threats and Other Promises or, more completely in The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge.

In multiple books, Vernor created fascinating aliens – very far from the almost-human aliens of Star Trek. His aliens differ not just in form but in mentality and social organization. Two classic examples are the pack-mentality Tines in A Fire Upon the Deep and the intelligent spider-like aliens in A Deepness in the Sky.

Besides his brilliant science fiction, Vernor was a professor of math and computer science at San Diego State University until he retired to write full time.

Vernor was the first to publicly explain and popularize the Singularity concept. (Before that, in his second published short story, “Bookworm, Run!” in the March 1966 issue of Analog Science Fiction, he explored the theme of artificially augmented intelligence by connecting the brain directly to computerized data sources.) We reprinted his classic essay, “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era” in The Transhumanist Reader. Although he is the person most closely associated with early use of the concept, he credits mathematician I.J. good who wrote of an “intelligence explosion” in 1965:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind... Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control. It is curious that this point is made so seldom outside of science fiction. It is sometimes worthwhile to take science fiction seriously.

The Singularity is really several concepts, more or less closely related. Vernor used the term to refer to a future point where change will be driven so radically by superintelligent machines that we cannot conceive of life after than point.

My use of the word “Singularity” is not meant to imply that some variable blows up to infinity. My use of the term comes from the notion that if physical progress with computation gets good enough, then we will have creatures that are smarter than human. At that point the human race will no longer be at center stage. The world will be driven by those other intelligences. This is a fundamentally different form of technical progress. The change would be essentially unknowable, unknowable in a different way than technology change has been in the past.

An analogy I like to use is Mark Twain and the goldfish. If you have a time machine, you could bring Mark Twain forward into 1997. In a day or two, you could explain everything to him about how the world works (and I think he would love it!). On the other hand, if you were to bring in a gold fish and give the gold fish the same treatment -- try to explain to the goldfish what's going on in 1997 -- the goldfish would remain permanently clueless. That is the difference that I see between current notions of technical progress and the transformation represented by the Singularity. Progress after the Singularity will be fundamentally and qualitatively different than progress than in the past.

My wife, Natasha Vita-More and I met with Vernor in San Diego in 1997 as well as at a conference (on space, if I recall). Natasha interviewed him and published his thoughts in Create/Recreate. This would have been after he wrote A Fire Upon the Deep but before A Deepness in the Sky. When asked if had changed his mind about when the Singularity might occur, he said that his estimates had not changed and “I’d be surprised if it happened before 2004 or after 2030.”  He also said, “I do not regard the event as being a certainty; it is simply one of the more plausible scenarios.”

He also considered whether the Singularity can be prevented and what happens to creativity with or without the Singularity.

NVM: Shall we push the Singularity Curve, or attempt to prevent it?

VV: If the Singularity can happen, then I doubt if it can be prevented. There are certain things that may or may not be possible to do with technology. If they can be done, they grant immediate and enormous advantages to the groups that bring those advances about. Trying to prevent the Singularity by laws or public disfavor is essentially futile. If such measures guarantee anything, it is that the law passers and the abstainers will be the losers.

(At the same time, a crash government program to force progress to go faster than what a myriad of independent researchers can do, would probably not be helpful. There have been some spectacular examples of large sums of money being spent trying to force the technological curve, with unsatisfactory results.)

When Natasha asked him about creativity and the arts in the future, Vernor had some interesting thoughts:

VV: Imagining what creativity and aesthetic issues might be for early posthumans is very intriguing. For these creatures, creativity and art might be among the most pleasurable aspects of the new existence. I believe that emotions would still be around, though more complicated and perhaps spread across distributed identities. In writing stories, I have tried to imagine emotions superhumans have that humans don't have. Creativity may be entirely different from before, and this would depend in part on what types of emotions are available.

A more concrete conclusion comes from our own past: before the invention of writing, almost every insight was happening for the first time (at least to the knowledge of the small groups of humans involved). When you are at the beginning, everything is new. In our era, almost everything we do in the arts are done with awareness of what has been done before and before. In the early post-human era, things will be new again because anything that requires greater than human ability has not already been done by Homer or da Vinci or Shakespeare. (Of course, there may be other, higher creatures that have done better, and eventually the first post-human achievements will be far surpassed. Nevertheless, this is one sense in which we may appreciate the excitement of the early post-Singular years.)

But here is a very different possibility: maybe the self-aware part of a superhuman would not be bigger than human. This situation is fairly imaginable. It's an extension of our own situation: the part of us that is self-aware is probably a very small part of everything that is going on inside ourselves. We depend on our non-conscious facilities for many the things. (It's amusing that some of these non-self-aware facilities, such as creativity, are also cited as things that differentiate us from the "nonsentient" world of machines.)

I am already missing Vernor’s writing and his personality. I wish he had been cryopreserved so that there would be some chance that I would enjoy him again. As it is, I say another painful goodbye to a remarkable mind.

Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash

In a recent blog essay, I looked at the beliefs of people around the world about progress. Despite clear data showing improvements in all the trends about which people were surveyed, in every country unwarranted pessimism was rife. I looked at some causes of falsely pessimistic beliefs.

Summary:

In this article, I am going to look at past predictions and forecasts that turned out to be excessively pessimistic. I will especially pick on butterfly ecologist Paul Ehrlich since he has been so influential, so wrong, and so persistent in his errors. We will look at a famous bet between Ehrlich and economist Julian Simon and extract some lessons from it. Finally, I will examine the Simon Abundance Index – an excellent measure of the improving state of the world.

Faulty Forecasts

Pessimism has been with us for a long, long time. Some of it is understandable given the context of the time. In the early Industrial Revolution, England was rapidly burning its way through forests for fuel. It must have seemed inevitable that wood supplies would be exhausted. An apparently safe prediction would be to foresee the end of the iron industry as England was mostly stripped of forestland in the first half of the eighteenth century. Wood for charcoal fuel was running up against the need for wood for shipbuilding. But along came coal. And the steam engine. And so on.

Pessimism can easily co-exist with recent major progress. Consider Northern Europe and North America in 1830. Enjoying the longest period of peace in a generation, they benefited from a flow of inventions, discoveries, and technologies. Matt Ridley notes that the term “technology” was coined in that year.[1] He points out some of those innovations: steamboats, cotton looms, suspension bridges, Portland cement, the Erie Canal, the electric motor, the first photograph, Fourier analysis. Surely, a time for optimism!

And yet, around 1830, opponents of the Liverpool to Manchester railway “forecast that passing trains would cause horses to abort their foals. Others mocked its pretensions to speed: ‘What can be more palpably absurd and ridiculous than the prospect held out of locomotives travelling as fast as stagecoaches!’ cried the Quarterly Review. ‘We trust that Parliament will, in all railways it may sanction, limit the speed to eight or nine miles an hour.’“

Remarkable progress was experienced from 1875 to 1925 in Europe including an unprecedented rise in living standards. This time saw the spread of electricity, cars, typewriters, universities, movies, vaccines, and indoor plumbing. Despite this, many intellectuals obsessively worried themselves and others with thoughts of imminent decline, degeneration, and disaster.

The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894

A 128-year-old example may seem amusing today, but it was taken extremely seriously in the day. It is also notable because the logic behind the fear is the same as that behind many more recent supposed crises.

Around the time that the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, the streets of London were trafficked by over 11,000 hansom cabs, plus several thousand horse-drawn buses, each using 12 horses per day. Altogether, the city was traversed by over 50,000 horses daily. That does not even count the other horse-drawn conveyances delivering goods. An average horse would produce 15 to 35 pounds of manure daily along with 2 pints of urine. (New York could boast of 100,000 horses and about 2.5 million pounds of manure a day.)

The manure drew in vast numbers of flies which spread typhoid fever and other pathogens. As if massive quantities of poop and pee were not enough, working horses live only about three years. Dead horses were hard to move so it was common to let them rot until they could more easily be sawn into handy-size pieces to carry away. In 1894, The Times newspaper predicted: “In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure.” This became known as the ‘Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894’. Now, I have not checked the volume calculations, but have no reason to doubt that projection given its simplistic straight-line projection.

The situation seemed so dire that it was debated at the world’s first international urban planning conference in New York. No solution was offered. Urban life was surely doomed. As we all know, “peak poop” was soon reached, and nobody was buried in it over their head. Henry Ford figured out how to build cars (automobiles) affordably and electric trams and motors buses replaced horse-drawn buses. Worldwide, horses ceased to be enslaved to our transport needs and motorized engines took over with far less noisome emissions. Unlike horses, motor vehicles have become vastly less polluting over the subsequent years.

Keep shoveling the manure

More recently, we have seen plenty of remarkably intelligent people make predictions that turned out to be hilariously (or soberingly) off the mark. In 1950, Albert Einstein warned that “only the creation of a world government can prevent the impending self-destruction of mankind.”

English novelist and chemist, C.P. Snow, wrote in 1961 that “within, at most, 10 years, some of those [nuclear] bombs are going off. I am saying this as responsibly as I can. That is the certainty.”

Joseph Weizenbaum, an MIT computer scientist, stated in 1976 that “I am completely certain … that by the year 2000, you [students] will all be dead.”

Hans Morgenthau, an influential international relations theorist, declared in 1979 that “the world is moving ineluctably towards a third world war—a strategic nuclear war. I do not believe that anything can be done to prevent it.” I have to admit that in 1979 I feared the same thing. However, I was only 15 at the time and the Cold War was warm.

According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and their Doomsday Clock, humanity has been at a few minutes to midnight for 75 years! We have been this close to extinction every year, year after year after year. When I checked the clock in 2021, I found that the clock had been set at 100 seconds to midnight – the closest ever. It will all be over, any time now. I should note that the editor at the Bulletin does acknowledge that there is basically no method behind this alarmist madness. It began as a reflection of one person’s subjective feeling and remained that way.

Eco-pessimist Lester Brown has a consistently poor record. In 1974 he predicted that a turning point had been reached and “farmers can no longer keep up with demand”. They did. In 1981, he said “global food insecurity is increasing”, but it was not. 1984: “the slim margin between food production and population growth continues to narrow”. Still wrong. 1989: “Population growth is exceeding farmers’ ability to keep up.” Nope. 1994: He declared that a turning point had been reached and food production per person would plummet. Right after that assertion, the price of wheat fell to record lows, and stayed there for a decade. [Ridley, 2010, p.300]

In their 1967 book, Famine, 1975!, William and Paul Paddock claimed that mass starvation was inevitable and we should leave hopeless cases such as India and Egypt to starve. When those countries instead improved, they argued in 1975 for a ban on research into increasing food production in high population growth countries. Apparently, they badly wanted their prediction to come true and would help it along if they could.

As the chart below shows, food production in India, as well as China and the world, has continued to increase. Checking the food news in India, I find this: “India is expected to produce a record 305.4 million tonnes of grain in 2020-21, an increase of 8 million tonnes from last year’s record harvest, according to a report from the Foreign Agricultural Service of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA)… Government wheat stocks have ballooned on back-to-back record harvest, the USDA said. Stocks are estimated at 60.3 million tonnes as of June 1.” [Reidy, 2021; 117-118]

At the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate… that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”

Watt echoed other voices going back decades. In 1919, the U.S. Geological Survey warned that world oil production would peak in 1928. In 2005, Princeton University geologist Ken Deffeyes predicted peak global oil in 2005. Instead, global production has risen steadily from about 32 million barrels per day in 1965 to 95 million in 2018. In 1980, global proven reserves were estimated at 684 billion barrels – about 30 years supply at that year’s rate of extraction. We have since extracted 983 billion barrels, but proven reserves have nearly tripled to 1.7 trillion barrels – enough for 50 years at the current rate. [Bailey, 2020]

What is wrong with excessive pessimism?

Of course, there are bad optimistic forecasts. But these seem to be vastly outnumbered by bad pessimistic forecasts. Most of them seem to be apocryphal and taken from science fiction. While optimistic forecasts usually do not cause much trouble (except for overly bold companies and their own money), overly pessimistic forecasts can spur desperate actions with numerous unintended consequences. If one worrying trend is exaggerated it will distract attention and resources from more urgent and important trends. Also, getting things repeatedly wrong undermines the credibility of institutions and experts.

When the bad things in the world are overdramatized, people fall into a constant, heightened sense of crisis and stress. Those who declare tipping points and demand action “now or never” elicit feelings that lead to stress or apathy. The call to urgent action leads you to think less critically. This in turn means supporting costly and counterproductive policies. For instance they may—as some writers have urged—deny help to the poor due to fear of overpopulation. They may block nuclear power and GMOs even though they can help with climate and hunger and the environment.

When overly dramatic and implausible scenarios are baked into models, those models become used by business and government to make decisions. This leads to actions being proposed which are costly, ineffective, and drain our ability to tackle more realistic problems.

We should remember something emphasized both by Julian Simon and Hans Rosling: Things can be bad and getting better. By failing to look at the long-term trends showing improvements, we over-focus on what’s bad and distressing, imagine it is worse than it is, and assume that it is getting worse still.

Let us look at a famous bet, this being between an optimist and a pessimist, the former with a good understanding of the economy and the latter… not. (If you are already familiar with the bet, you may still find something new in this section.)

The Simon-Ehrlich Bet Re-Examined

Any useful thinking about the trajectory of human wellbeing will have to consider the availability of resources. Dystopian visions of the future typically involve a world of starvation, poverty, and energy shortage. More hopeful visions see a world in which there are plentiful resources to provide for the needs and wants of everyone. When considering the future, the former, catastrophic view has been promulgated over many years by Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, his most famous book being The Population Bomb. The hopeful view has been given foundation by economist Julian L. Simon, author of the classic The Ultimate Resource.

Simon and Ehrlich disagreed over the nature of the relationship between abundance of resources and population growth. As a neo-Malthusian, Ehrlich argued that population growth would lead to scarcer resources and far higher prices. Simon argued that the opposite was true: As population increased, the price of resources would decline in the long run. Short-term price spikes would spur four responses among people: they would consume less, search for new supplies, invent and discover substitutes, and recycle. These four actions would result in long-run prices that were even lower than before the spike.

Ehrlich had published a claim that “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000”. When this scenario did not occur, he responded that “When you predict the future, you get things wrong. How wrong is another question. I would have lost if I had taken the bet. However, if you look closely at England, what can I tell you? They're having all kinds of problems, just like everybody else.” Reality has continued to bounce off Ehrlich without making any impression.

Frustrated with a debate that did not lead anywhere, Simon challenged Ehrlich to a more realistic wager. He offered “to stake US$10,000 ... on my belief that the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run”. Simon challenged Ehrlich to choose any raw material he wanted and a date more than a year in the future. If the inflation-adjusted price fell over that period, Simon would win; if they rose, Ehrlich would win. Ehrlich picked copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten. The bet was agreed on September 29, 1980, with September 29, 1990, as the payoff date.

Between 1980 and 1990, global population grew by more than 800 million – the greatest one-decade increase of all time. This looked like the ideal conditions for an Ehrlich win. But by September 1990, each of the selected metals had fallen in price. Adjusted for inflation, the real price of the basket of metals had fallen by 36%. In October 1990, Paul Ehrlich mailed Julian Simon a check for $576.07, acknowledging Simon’s winning of the wager.

Matter settled? Hardly! Losing a clear bet stings. It was not surprising that advocates of neo-Malthusianism wanted to dismiss the outcome. Alas, they had something to go on since Simon agreed to a bet that was improperly advantageous to the Ehrlich side, even though they did lose in this case. Some researchers examined historical prices of those five metals and came to a different conclusion.[1] Kiel et.al. looked at prices in 98 ten-year intervals between 1900 and 2007 – during which time world population quadrupled. They found that Ehrlich would have won the bet 61.2% of the time with an average return of 10.5%.

So, matter settled now? No!

Commodity prices over a decade are a poor measure of long-term scarcity or abundance. The prices vary greatly with economic cycles. Simon made a mistake in using real prices (prices adjusted for inflation). In his book, The Ultimate Resource 2, Simon points out several alternative measures of the cost of a commodity. You can look at the nominal price or the real price. You can look at the price compared to average wages. Or you can compare it to household income. Even inflation-adjusted real prices are not the best measure because you are looking at the cost of a commodity relative to the cost of money. If real earnings have gone up more than the cost of money, the commodity is more affordable. In discussing copper, he wrote:

“The most important measure is the price of copper relative to wages. This price has declined very sharply.” “Every measure leads us to the same conclusion, but these calculations of expenditures for raw materials as a proportion of total family budgets make the point most strongly.” [Simon 1998, 31,33]

Pooley & Tupy reviewed data from 1900-2019. Understanding that what matters is the real price of resources compared to real earnings, they used time prices – how many hours of work it takes to pay for a fixed amount of a resource.[2] They found that Simon wins the bet 54.2% of the time with an average return over this 110-year period of 2.22%. Given the war clause in the original bet, the researchers ran the numbers excluding the years for World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the War on Terror. Simon would win the resulting 73 ten-year bets 69.9% of the time with a return of 18.0%.

During that 119-year period, the time price of the five-metal basket of commodities fell by 87.2% despite a huge growth in both US (330%) and global population (375%). Put another way: “The time required for a blue-collar U.S. worker to earn enough money to buy one basket in 1900 would get him or her 7.84 baskets in 2019.” Although nominal prices of the basket increased by 2,909%, over the same period blue-collar hourly income increased by 23,485%.

Simon and others have found the same result for numerous other resources. On p.167 of The Ultimate Resource 2, Simon shows the falling cost of oil, coal, and electricity relative to CPI and to US wages.

While Ehrlich took a static view of resources, Simon understood that resources do not really exist until people find them and put them to use. What happens when the price of a resource rises? Human ingenuity and intelligence driven by the market incentive to control costs lead to a search for new supplies and spur innovations that allow us to substitute or do more with less. In Simon’s view, this will lead to prices lower (in real terms) than in the past.

I do not think that has to be true in every case. With real prices, the cost of resources is just measured against the value of money. But what matters to us is whether we have to give up more, the same, or less of other goods. Measuring cost by earnings makes sense. Real prices can be a quick guide to whether something is truly getting cheaper or not – especially when prices are low and stable – but it is affordability that matters.

Ehrlich’s Failed forecasts

Failed forecasts and predictions from doomsayers are abundant. They are a resource that seems truly endless. Ehrlich has been a remarkably rich source of forecast failure. Here are a few founded on his assumptions of fixed limits and scarcity:

“What will we do when the [gasoline] pumps run dry?” After that question, gasoline became cheaper than it had in decades.

Ehrlich on DDT: “The US life expectancy will drop to forty-two years by 1980, due to cancer epidemics.” But both cancer incidence and the death rate from cancer fell steadily, falling 16% between 1950 and 1997, accelerating after that. US life expectancy at birth went up from 70.5 in 1967 to 74.4 in 1980 to 79.1 recently.

1975: “In the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” In 1968, in 34 out of 152 countries the food supply was under 2,000 calories per person. In 2017, that was the case in only 2 of 173 countries.

“India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980.” [The Population Bomb] By 1974, India was a net exporter of wheat.

Figure 1: Daily per capita supply of calories, 1934 to 2013

“Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born. By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” [“Eco-Catastrophe!” 1969] In reality, between 1950 and 2000, barley, corn, cotton, oats, and wheat became three times cheaper when compared to wages. World food prices fell by half from 1960 to 1995.[1]

“Dr. Ehrlich predicted… that the oceans could be as dead as Lake Erie by 1979. Today Lake Erie is palatable, and Dr. Ehrlich is not.” (P.J. O’Rourke, Parliament of Whores)

“Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” [From a 1969 magazine article.] “Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come. And by ‘the end’ I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.” [Ehrlich on CBS News in 1970]

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” [Mademoiselle, April 1970] A claim made in 1970, just before an agricultural revolution that rapidly increased the world’s food supply.

Famine since 1970 has been unrelated to food supply. Famine resulted from wars and political problems, including the Cambodia starvation of 1970, African famines in the 1980s and the DR of Congo in the 1990s, Ethiopia in numerous decades, and so on. Fewer people die in famines over time.

Figure 2. Famine victims by continent since the 1860s [OWID2]

Famines aside, fewer and fewer people are undernourished. Certainly, there is plenty of room to improve availability and affordability of nutritious foods (and not just calories). Again, things can be bad but getting better. According to the FAO, the percentage of the global population who are undernourished has fallen from just over 50% in 1945 to 20% in 1985 to about 11% in 2015. Here are daily calories per capita over the last several decades:

China: 1934: 2230. 1961: 1439. 1990: 2515. 2013: 3108.

India: 1950: 1570. 1970: 2111. 2013: 2559.

World: 1961: 2196. 1990: 2621. 2013: 2884.[1]

Undernourishment, percentage of population[2]

Ehrlich told readers of the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.” At that time, he also warned that “[i]n ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.”

In a 1971 speech at the British Institute For Biology, he predicted that: “By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people. If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” New Scientist magazine approvingly drew attention to his speech in an editorial titled “In Praise of Prophets.”

Ehrlich provides an exceptional example of how not to behave when thinking and communicating about possible futures. He often attributes some combination of stupidity and scientific ignorance to those with whom he disagrees. Alluding to Simon’s book, The Ultimate Resource, saying ‘The ultimate resource – the one thing we’ll never run out of is imbeciles.” He often uses words like “ignorant,” “crazy,” “imbecile,” and “moronic”.

Ehrlich has been evasive in acknowledging errors he made, while being intellectually dishonest in taking credit for things he claims he got “right”. Despite being demonstrably and repeatedly wrong, somehow people continue to quote him approvingly and his books sell in large numbers. When confronted with his failure to revise his predictions, in 2009 Ehrlich actually responded: “perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future.” Even someone as green-friendly as Bill Gates recognizes the errancy of Ehrlich’s judgment. [Gates, 2013]

The Simon Abundance Index

Inspired by Julian Simon’s work, The Simon Project has developed a thorough and highly informative framework for measuring progress. Is progress too subjective or culturally relative to measure? Steven Pinker argues that it’s not:

Most people agree that life is better than death. Health is better than sickness. Sustenance is better than hunger. Wealth is better than poverty. Peace is better than war. Safety is better than danger. Freedom is better than tyranny. Equal rights are better than bigotry and discrimination. Literacy is better than illiteracy. Knowledge is better than ignorance. Intelligence is better than dull wittedness. Happiness is better than misery. Opportunities to enjoy family, friends, culture, and nature are better than drudgery and monotony. All these things can be measured. If they have increased over time, that is progress. [Pinker, 2018]

The Simon Project looks deeper into the relationship between population growth and resource availability using the new concept of the Simon Abundance Framework. This framework deploys three core concepts: Time Price, Price Elasticity of Population, and the Simon Abundance Index.

Figure 3: The Simon Abundance Framework

Time price: As we have seen, the time price denotes the amount of time that an average person has to work in order to earn enough money to buy a commodity. The Simon Project features a chart showing the percentage changes in the time price of 50 basic commodities between 1980 and 2022. It’s too big to reproduce here but take a look; it shows the increase in affordability for 50 commodities. Over the past 42 years global resource abundance has grown at a compound annual growth rate in of 4 percent.

Things can become more affordable in two ways: Through a reduction in the money price, and through an increase in hourly income. The time price captures both the price fluctuations and the value of labor. The most recent update “found that the average time price of 50 commodities fell by 65.5 percent between 1980 and 2022. Commodities that took 60 minutes of work to buy in 1980 took only 20.7 minutes of work to buy in 2022.”

Put the other way around, you could buy 2.9 times as much of that basket in 2022 compared to 1980. “The compound annual growth rate in personal resource abundance amounted to 2.7 percent, implying that personal resource abundance doubled every 26 years.”

Price Elasticity of Population (PEP): This is a measure of whether population growth increases the availability of resources. This was Simon’s view; Ehrlich could never grasp how it could be possible. Elasticity in economics is a measure of a variable’s sensitivity to a change in another variable, the variable most commonly being price or cost. The researchers derive a PEP value of -1.016. This indicates that the time price of their basket of 50 commodities declined by 1.016 percent for every 1 percent increase in population. “Over the past 38 years, every additional human being born on our planet appears to have made resources proportionately more plentiful for the rest of us.”

Simon Abundance Index:

The Simon Abundance Index (SAI) measures the change in abundance of resources over a period of time. The SAI is the ratio of the change in population over the change in the time price, times 100. The base year is 1980 and the base value is 100. The latest calculations (2022) find the value of the SAI is 520.1. Seen another way, the Earth was 4.2 times as plentiful in 2022 as it was when Ehrlich and Simon commenced their wager.

In terms of the Abundance Framework, we are experiencing superabundance – “a condition where abundance is increasing at a faster rate than the population is growing”. We have seen compound annual growth rate in resource abundance of around 5% and doubling of global resource abundance every 14 years or so.

Figure 4: The Simon Abundance Index (1980-2022)

Note that two or three years ago, the Abundance Index was even more impressive. The COVID years knocked the measure down but we can expect a recovery from 2023.

Continued improvements in abundance and well-being at the recent rate are not inevitable. As population growth slows and reverses, we may slip out of the super-abundance zone into accelerating abundance or a lower zone. If fear of the future leads the world increasingly to regulate energy and production, and to artificially restrict supply and innovation, the trend could reverse. The conditions for continued progress deserves a dedicated essay.

For a vast survey of the trend toward greater abundance, see the recent book, Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet, and the related website humanprogress.org.

In my next essay, I plan to zero in on perhaps the most influential doomster work, the 1972 report from the Club of Rome: Limits to Growth, and its 2021 update. I will look at why gloomy projections went terribly wrong and consider some of the economic forces that give us a basis for more optimistic or “possibilist” projections.

References

Bailey, Ronald. “Happy Earth Day: A Reprise of Failed Doom.” Reason, April 22, 2016.

Bailey, Ronald, & Marian L. Tupy. Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know. Cato Institute, 2020.

Ehrlich, P.  The Population Bomb. Cutchogue, NY: Buccaneer Books, 1968.

Gates, Bill. “An economist and a biologist test a theory. The story of the ‘wager of the decade.’” Gatesnotes.com, December 12, 2013. [Accessed August 7, 2021]

Goklany, Indur M. (2007). The Improving State of the World. Cato Institute, 2007.

Johnson, Ben. “The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894.” Historic UK, accessed August 5, 2021

Kiel, K., Matheson, V., & Golembiewski, K. (2009). “Luck or Skill? An Examination of the Ehrlich–Simon Bet. Faculty Research Series”, Paper No. 09-08. Worcester, MA: Department of Economics, College of the Holy Cross.

McClintick, D., and R. Emmett. “Betting on the wealth of nature: The Simon-Ehrlich wager.” PERC Reports, volume 23, issue 3, p. 16 - 17

Posted: 2005

Moore, Stephen & Julian L. Simon. It's Getting Better All the Time: Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years. Cato Institute, 2000.

Myers, Norman, and Julian L. Simon. Scarcity or Abundance?: A Debate on the Environment. W. W. Norton & Company, August 1, 1994.

Norberg, Johan. Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future. Oneworld Publications, 2017.

Perry, Mark. “The numerous wrong predictions of doom, gloom, poverty, starvation, and environmental destruction. “18 spectacularly wrong predictions made around the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, expect more this year.” AEIdeas, April 21, 2016.

Pinker, Stephen. Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Penguin Books, 2018.

Pooley, Gale, and Marian Tupy, “Luck or Insight? The Simon–Ehrlich Bet Re‐Examined”. Economic Affairs, Vol. 40, Issue 2, pp. 277-280, 2020

Reidy, Susan. “India’s grain production to reach new record highs.” World Grain, July 22, 2021.

Ridley, Matt. The Rational Optimist. Harper-Collins, 2010.

Simon, Julian L. The Ultimate Resource. 1981.

Simon, Julian L. The Ultimate Resource 2. Princeton University Press; Revised ed. Edition, July 1, 1998.

Simon, Julian L. Population Matters: People, Resources, Environment, and Immigration. Transaction Publishers, January 1, 1990.

Simon, Julian L. “Bunkrapt: The Abstractions That Lead to Scares About Resources and Population Growth”. “Or: Why Do Politicians Think Green?” Extropy: The Journal of Transhumanist Thought #11, 1993.

Simon, Julian L. The State of Humanity. Wiley-Blackwell; 1st edition, January 9, 1996

Tupa, Marian and Gale Pooley, 2022. Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet. Cato Institute.

The Simon Project

Simon Abundance Index

Our World in Data

OWID2

OWID3

“The Peculiar Blindness of Experts.” The Atlantic, June 2019.

[1] OWID 3; Bailey, 2020, p.16.

[2] Source: Norberg, 2017, p.20.

[1] [Moore, 2000, p.197; Goklany, 2007 p.23]

[1] [Kiel 2009; McClintick, 2005]

[2] [Pooley & Tupy, 2020]

[1] Ridley, 2010, 283

Here’s the first-ever guest post, thanks to Mike Perry! I’ve Known him for decades, and he's stepping up to inject some fresh thoughts into the blog while I'm off to Panama diving into the world of beneficial AI. Brace yourselves for a deep dive into the scarcity-or-abundance debate and the "Limits to Growth" saga when I'm back.

Dive into Mike’s tale, and you'll catch echoes of Nick Bostrom’s “Fable of the Tyrant Dragon.” Mike sparked the flame that Nick turned into a firestorm. Both stories pack a punch, skewering the unimaginative and challenging us to dream bigger.

A massive shoutout to my 500+ subscribers! You smart readers have doubled since last July — you're the ones who keep me writing. Keep tuning in for more mind-bending insights!

This story originally appeared in Venturist Monthly News, Apr. 1989. A second, slightly updated version, with some editing suggestions by Robert Ettinger, appeared in Physical Immortality, 1 Q 2004. This version (Feb. 2024) is again lightly edited. The story was inspired by the author’s (determined) opposition to regarding obligatory death as somehow a benefit or even something “beautiful.” The illustration was adapted from a work of 19th-century graphic artist Gustave Doré.

“You requested audience, apprentice Gorn?”

“Yes, O Great Wizard Snorrl, Lord of Galaxies, Ruler of Many Worlds, King of Evolved Immortals … .”

“Enough! What can I do for you, young fellow?”

“I’m having trouble playing God.”

“Not an uncommon thing, your first billion years (to invoke our ancient and honored time unit) … What is your problem?”

“They don’t respect me.”

“Your charges? Tell me about it.”

“Well, first I made this world, got it peopled with intelligent life, in a nice setting I had made with forests and meadows, creatures that crawled and flew and leaped and galloped, all the usual things … .”

“You got a genome permit?”

“Oh yes, all straight evolved life-forms, nothing tampered with already. …”

“Very good. Go on.”

“So then I went among the inhabitants, did good things, healed the sick, fed the hungry, spoke kind words, and … well, they … .”

“Put you to a painful death?”

“Very. Only the backup information saved me, and they would have eaten that if they could, the miserable vermin. Why if you could have seen—”

“Tell me about it later. How’re they doing now?”

“Oh, fine, just fine, ought to be applying for membership soon, which means I’ll be in a jam for overpopulating … .”

“I wouldn’t worry too much, this time. How about your next world?”

“Yes, I did made another one, and that time, I naturally tried to avoid the public spotlight, went around in secret, showing myself to a few only. …”

“And … ?”

“Well, mostly they didn’t believe I existed. And they’ll be applying for membership soon, too, and … .”

“Argh! … So twice in a row you’ve lost control after only a few thousand years.”

“Uh, about 900 years in the last case.”

“Oh, my. Well, as you know, you only have one more try at this thing. Maybe you ought to get out while the getting’s good, to avoid discredit. Take up cosmological eschatology or something respecta—”

“No! I want to build a world of primitives and keep them that way as long as possible. I want to lord it over them, century after century, millennium after millennium. I want them to sing my praises. I want it to be a long time before they become dissatisfied enough to develop and apply for membership and start playing the games we play … .”

“Still haven’t grown up, eh? Well, the rules entitle you to one more shot.”

“So what you suggest is … ?”

 “If you really must know … .”

“Of course, why did I request audience?”

“Yes, I suppose you must have your way. Well, this’ll sound crazy, but about the best strategy is to give ’em a good, severe beating every day of their lives.”

“What?”

“They’ll fear you, they’ll respect you, and they’ll love you.”

[Long pause.]

“Yes, I admit there’s a certain logic to that, but I’d have to be many places at once … use robots, of course! Big, metallic buzzing things with wings for hot pursuit and pincers for grasping and whiplash antennas for striking hard. And I know just the creatures to clone and try it on … picked up some genomes on a nice blue planet, a pretty place with a single, large satellite, I can even recreate some of their original language and culture—their year is almost the same as ours, by the way …”

“I see your mindwheels are whirring, so I’ll leave you be.”

“Yes, I must start building this world at once … .”

*        *        *        *        *

Ten thousand centuries later the Daily Globe, a leading newspaper on the world created by Gorn, reports:

WEIRD SCHEME TO DEFEAT JUST PUNISHMENT; SCIENTISTS SCOFF; ETHICISTS HOWL; LEGISLATORS VOW TO STOP IT.

A group claiming that Just Punishment is “unjust” say they believe it can be “defeated” through science. Simon Burr, spokesman for the self-styled “Committee for the Overthrow of Physical Abuse” (COPA) claims “the robots that administer our daily beatings could be destroyed through technological means,” and cites an example where a robot was held at bay for more than an hour while its intended “victim” escaped. Scientists, however, take a dim view of Burr’s proposal. Jeffrey Snag, senior researcher at Applied Mechanical and Aesthetics, a firm specializing in technology for improving the quality of life and justice, says, “The idea of interfering with such superlative machinery is just patently absurd. There’s no prospect for defeating the robots in the foreseeable future—they are simply too swift and powerful. Besides, why try for an empty ‘freedom from abuse’ anyway? What good would it do? Recently we’ve developed some tight fitting clothing to better distribute the force of the blows, and that’s what I consider progress.”

Other voices are being raised in defense of Just Punishment and similar practices among humans. Helen Bopp, spokeswoman for the Committee for Ethical Bruising, declares that “beatings are beautiful, pure and simple. I just bubble with warm feeling over the worth of welts.” She is “looking forward to an expanded role for impact therapy in human life,” and argues that “a little hand-to-hand combat from time to time could usefully augment the blessings of Just Punishment.” Asked about COPA she indignantly concludes: “Our whole society is predicated on the assumption of daily beatings which we humbly accept as a foundation of our being and a springboard for spiritual growth. When you consider all the benefits—the stability, the security, the certainty—of knowing this meaningful experience will always be with us, I don’t  see how anyone can raise an objection.” Another CEB official, Dr. Morris Tribe, takes the threat of COPA “very seriously, despite the scientific hurdles they must still surmount,” and worriedly adds: “The ending of Just Punishment would deprive us of a precious part of our humanity. I greatly fear the consequences.”

However, John Crue, a construction worker, admits he is “not entirely happy with the punishment we get for the crime of being alive” and further remarks that “being whipped like a horse by giant flying things may have its advantages, but I like it better when they stop. I don’t know how I’d adjust to no beatings, but I do consider it from time to time.”

Still, some authorities are so distressed by what they perceive as an affront to the natural order that they are taking legal action. Recently the Department of Proper Behavior filed felony charges against COPA for obstructing due process and attempted sabotage. COPA attorney Anthony Sharp denies that his organization has broken the law, arguing that “laws protect human lives and property but there is no law specifically forbidding the sort of practice that COPA is engaged in. The robots are not human property nor an endangered species. To interfere with or even destroy them is no violation of law but simply an exercise of constitutional rights.” But DPB officials are sure COPA can be challenged on legal grounds. As Chief Administrator Wilbur McTwitch put it: “The framers of the Constitution wanted to promote individual rights, but the rights of the individual must ever be subordinate to the machinery of great Gorn. I think there is legal precedent to act against those who would attempt a change on so fundamental a level, and if not it could be established. I am looking forward to this case.”

(Dall-E still can’t spell!)

First of all, thank you to all my subscribers. Earlier today, the numbers of subscribers reached 500, up from 250 on July 15 of last year. Ever since last June, subscriber growth has been steady with a slight acceleration this year. I’m especially grateful to my 13 paid subscribers since (so far) they don’t get anything extra other than knowing that they are supporting and encouraging my writing. From now on, I’m going to restrict comments on most pieces to paid subscribers only, to give at least a little incentive.

I wrote the current essay in 2021 and present it here with minor revisions and updates. It was part of a series on how the world is “Getting Better”. The first of these was my January 20 piece examining the strange divergence between objective measures of the world and people’s beliefs about it. Soon to come: A close look at the battling frameworks of scarcity and abundance, and a critical analysis of The Limits to Growth – a book of enduring and baleful influence.

Life extensionists are battered with endless supposed reasons to avoid the future. One of the ever-popular reasons is the claim that we are rapidly running out of resources, especially energy. And if not energy, definitely oil. The peak oil discussion illustrates some of the points made in my Getting Better series, including the abundance of scarcity panics, excessively pessimistic forecasts, and the failure to allow for technological advance and the effects of incentives in the market.

My point here is not to argue that we will never reach a peak in oil production. At some point we probably will, and it will not be a problem. If you keep the predicting the same thing over and over again, after enough time you may hit the mark. Every year, some commentators make a fairly accurate prediction of the stock market’s performance for the year ahead. That doesn’t prove their models were right or that they are smarter than everyone else. No one gets those predictions right consistently.

When I wrote the original version of this in mid-October 2021, oil prices had risen to levels not seen since 2014 and continued to rise to almost $112/barrel in inflation adjusted dollars. This seemed high at the time but was well below the June 2008 peak of $126.33 (inflation-adjusted price of $177.26). The current price is very close to the average inflation-adjusted price since 2000 of $76.30. Whenever oil enters one of its higher periods, we start hearing a lot about “peak oil” and “the end of oil”.

What exactly is “peak oil”? It can refer to the maximum level of consumption in a country or in the world. It can refer to the maximum level of consumption or production of oil per person. Mostly it refers to a level of oil production higher than any in the past and higher than any to come in the future.

Peak oil is sometimes used to mean or to imply two other things: The end of oil; and the end of fossil fuels. Pessimists may point to a supposed peak in oil production and take that to imply that we will run out of oil completely – and sooner rather than later. This does not follow. The production of a commodity can peak and then decline but never reach zero. In fact, that is typically the case. Like most commodities, certainly including oil, some reserves are relatively easy to exploit while others are increasingly difficult and expensive. As the price rises, the less accessible reserves will be tapped. At the same time, economic activity shifts away from the commodity – perhaps by reducing activities dependent on it, or by replacing it, or by recycling it, or by becoming more efficient.

Others take peak oil as a stand-in for the end of all fossil fuels. The demonization of fossil fuels comes out of an essentially religious belief in which human activity is evil and should be minimized, the Earth is all-good, and carbon resulting from human activity and carbon emissions are especially evil outcomes. (The devotees of this religion usually avoid the give-away word “evil” in favor of “greedy”, “rapacious”, or “destructive”.) This religion even shares with Catholicism the idea of buying “indulgences” but, in this case, they are called “carbon offsets”.

The only fossil fuel perhaps seen as worse than oil is coal. Just like oil, people have been declaring the end of coal for many decades – for even longer than oil. In 1865, Stanley Jevons predicted that England would run out of coal by 1900, and that England’s factories would grind to a halt. Jevons was not stupid. Far from it. He was a brilliant man with major achievements in economics (including founding the “marginal revolution”), logic and, geometry. He stated his gloomy conclusion in The Coal Question (1865).

Although he got that wrong, he also expressed the idea that is still known as the “Jevons paradox”: increases in energy production efficiency leads to more, not less, consumption. This has usually turned out to be correct, at least until recently. I will return to this idea in a later piece in the Getting Better series.

Failed predictions of peak oil

The claim that we have reached peak oil production and that production will fall has been around for over 135 years. 1885 got this tradition off to a strong start. In that year, the US Geological Survey declared that there was “little or no chance” of oil being discovered in California. The Pennsylvania State Geologist asserted that “the amazing exhibition of oil was only a ‘temporary and vanishing phenomenon – one which young men will live to see come to its natural end.” Also in 1885, John Archbold, original partner of John D. Rockefeller in Standard Oil boasted: “I’ll drink every gallon of oil found west of the Mississippi.”

1919, Oil and Gas News: “In meeting the world’s needs, however, the oil from the United States will continue to occupy a less and less dominant position, because within the next two to five years the oil fields of this country will reach their maximum production and from [then] on we will face an ever-increasing decline.”

1937: March 9, 1937, Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported that Capt. H. A. Stuart, director of the naval petroleum reserves, told the Senate Naval Affairs Committee: “We have been making estimates for the last 15 years. We always underestimate because of the possibility of discovering new oil fields. The best information is that the present [United States] supply will last only 15 years. That is a conservative estimate.”

1939: The US Department of the Interior said that American oil supplies would last only another 13 years.

1941: US Department of the Interior: “American oil supplies will last only another 13 years.”

1956: Hubbert: “M. King Hubbert of the Shell Development Co. predicted [one year ago] that peak oil production would be reached in the next 10 to 15 years and after that would gradually decline.”

1977, US Department of Energy Organization Act: “As a nation, Americans have been reluctant to accept the prospect of physical shortages. We must recognize that world oil production will likely peak in the early 1990’s, and from that point on will be on a declining curve. By the early part of the 21st century, we must face the prospect of running out of oil and natural gas.”

1980, Dr. Hans Bethe, winner of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics claimed that the world will reach peak oil production before the year 2000. Then production of oil worldwide will drop to zero over about 20 years.

1998: Scientific American stated: “Predicting when oil production will stop rising is relatively straightforward once one has a good estimate of how much oil there is left to produce.” (They predicted the peak within ten years; that was 20 years ago.)

Many of these predictions are from May, 2018, and Novak, 2014.

Note, in the above, the assumptions that a peak will be followed by “running out” and a “drop to zero”.

Actual oil production has defied all these forecasts and continued its climb. In 2023, the USA produced more oil than any nation in history. Production is Canada is also surging.

Hubbert’s Peak

Of the failed predictions above, by far the most discussed is the one by M. King Hubbert. Hubbert projected a bell curve for oil production in the United States. The peak of the curve was to be reached in 1970 at 3 billion barrels per year. He wasn’t too far off with this peak estimate, at least for a few decades. The actual (temporary) peak came 17% higher at 3.52 billion barrels per year or 6402 terawatt-hours (1971). After bottoming out at 3515 terawatt-hours in 2008, oil production returned to annoying peakers by moving up to new heights, with 8833 terawatt-hours in 2022.

Hubbert also projected future world oil production but didn’t achieve even a temporary hit. He expected world production to peak at 12.5 billion barrels per year in the year 2000 or close. As of 2023, world production was over 37 billion barrels per year.

In a 1989 interview shortly before his death, Hubbert acknowledged that his model was not only wrong but far from scientific. The only way his model came close was if restricted to the USA and to “conventional” oil production. His peak oil prediction assumed the total recoverable reserves in the US and our offshore came to only 150-200 billion barrels. (The recent Department of Energy estimate is 400 billion barrels.) That estimate was made before the shale boom beginning in 2006, such as the Bakken and Eagle Ford sources. These are conventional sources. But Hubbert also failed to allow for unconventional sources, and these are far larger than conventional.

The Bell curve that Hubbert used was the wrong function. The actual logistic curve has a long fat tail due to secondary and tertiary oil recovery. By limiting his projection to conventional oil, he missed all “heavy oil” such as the massive reserves in the Venezuelan Orinoco and the Canadian “tar” sands. His estimate also failed to factor in technological advancements such as fracked shale oil.

Universal agreement on the definition of “conventional oil” is lacking. ”Conventional oil” has been defined as viscosity API>10, produced from a reservoir with >5% porosity and permeability >10 millidarcies. That excludes all the heavy oils and fracked oils. Others define any it as oil less dense than water, or as oil from higher permeability rocks. Yet others count ultra-deep-water production as unconventional because of the associated high costs. For purposes of usable energy, it doesn’t matter what is conventional or unconventional. The definition game is merely a way of making a prediction come out correct.

Technology, ingenuity, and determination

Although the oil industry is often demonized today, its history illustrates the life-sustaining, energy-delivering effects of technology, ingenuity, and sheer determination.

The excessively pessimistic oil projections suffer from many of the same problems as other predictions of hard limits and “running out” of resources. They take currently proven reserves and assume that is all we have to work with. They may add up “economically feasible” reserves based on current exploration and extraction costs. More generously, they may estimate “total recoverable reserves”. Or they may add up proven reserves. None of these are the likely actual total resources.

Oil discovery and production has always been highly dependent on technical and procedural innovations. Exploration technologies have developed from ancient “spring poles,” to steam-powered percussion cable-tools, to modern rotary rigs with diamond bits that can drill miles deep into the earth. In 1802, drillers took 18 months to drill through rock to reach 58 feet using a spring pole. Today, the Z-44 Chayvo Well in the Russian Far East has a shaft 40,000 feet deep. This is the equivalent of 15 times the height of the world’s tallest skyscraper, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. [Desjardins, 2017]

Engineers and entrepreneurs brought us from spring poles to cable-tool drilling and the wooden derrick. They added steam power and smart mechanical engineering to the mix, as well as rotary drilling, the tri-cone bit, wireline logging, coring and rock core analysis, surface mapping, reflection seismic mapping, horizontal drilling, water flooding, and the slick water frack and microseismic monitoring. The history of the extraction of this resource stands as a stunning story of human achievement. For more historical detail, see the article by the perfectly named Wells. [Wells & Wells, 2006; also, May 2021.]

Predicting the future of oil production is a risky business. Overall trends seem safer than short-term forecasts, but new discoveries can be of such a magnitude that they throw off the trajectory of a trend – and may completely derail it if the discovery is technical rather than geological. In 2016, the largest ever discovery of crude oil was made under parts of West Texas in the “Wolfcamp shale” formation. The US Geological Survey (USGS) estimated 20 billion barrels of accessible oil, as well as 16 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 1.6 billion barrels of natural gas liquids.

“The fact that this is the largest assessment of continuous oil we have ever done just goes to show that, even in areas that have produced billions of barrels of oil, there is still the potential to find billions more.” Those are the words of Walter Guidroz, program coordinator for the USGS Energy Resources Program. He attributed that potential to the introduction and refinement of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, and correctly noted that “Such advances can have significant effects on what resources are technically recoverable.” [Collier, 2016]

Beware of estimates by government agencies of what the oil industry will find and produce. They typically underestimate drastically. For instance, the government originally forecast that Alaska’s North Slope would yield 10 billion barrels. It had produced 16 billion barrels by 2016 and already developed areas are expected to produce around 30 billion barrels. Many areas of Alaska have not been explored for oil, including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

The 2016 USGS estimate for undiscovered oil in the Bakken play of Montana and North Dakota is 25 times larger than the same agency’s 1995 estimate. In 1987, the MMS (now the BOEM) undiscovered resource estimate for the Gulf of Mexico was 9 billion barrels. Today it is 45 billion barrels. [Middleton, 2016]

World oil production.

What are “reserves”?

The concept of “proven reserves” can be useful for corporate planning in the near-term. It is not an accurate way of understanding long-term availability of a commodity, and even less accurate in understanding the services we derive from a commodity. Proven reserves are defined as “the quantity of energy sources estimated with reasonable certainty, from the analysis of geologic and engineering data, to be recoverable from well-established or known reservoirs with the existing equipment and under the existing operating conditions.”

Proven reserves are classified as having a 90% or greater likelihood of being present and economically viable for extraction in current conditions. Within the oil industry, proven reserves are also referred to as P1 or P90. Contrast this with “probable reserves” which are crude oil reserves calculated to be at least 50 percent likely to be recovered through drilling. Then there are possible reserves, defined with misleading precision as those that “refer to oil reserves for which the estimated likelihood of successful extraction is between 10% and 50%—assuming that existing equipment is used and the extraction is carried out under typical conditions. [Chen, 2021]

Beyond all of these are total recoverable resources. This depends on what is considered recoverable – something that changes over time, just like the amount of time after clinical death before someone can be revived.

From Julian L. Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2

Here’s a simple way to think about it. The total amount of oil in the Earth changes little year-by-year. But three more relevant measures of oil do change:

• How much oil we know about.

• How much of that oil we can technically extract.

• How much of that oil is economical to extract.

[Book, 2021]

Economics of discovery

Technology can affect what is economically recoverable. It is equally true that economic factors can affect what is technically feasible.

In a market system where prices are allowed to signal, suppliers constantly seek to increase supplies so they can sell more. At the same time, they are reducing prices so they are not undersold. Direct and indirect users of commodities are trying to reduce their consumption so as to reduce costs. The higher the price of a commodity rises, the stronger the response from suppliers. This may mean more intensive usage of existing technologies, or the creation of new technologies and methods to locate, extract, and refine the resource. Higher prices also stimulate the search for substitutes.

As conventional oil becomes less available, its price will tend to rise. (Price increases may be restrained by economizing or by substituting.) The rising price signals to firms that they should look more intensely into alternatives. Conventional oil can be replaced with production of liquids from unconventional sources such as tight oil, oil sands, ultra-heavy oils, gas-to-liquid technologies, coal-to-liquid technologies, biofuel technologies, and shale oil.

Peak oil forecasts are made using technical-material forecasting rather than economic forecasting. Technical forecasts divide the ‘known reserves’ accessible by current methods by the current rate of use and derive the resulting ‘years of consumption left’. Technical forecasts fail to allow for the large effect of changing prices on supply – the supply that is economically viable. [Simon, 1998: 27; 45.]

When forecasts are based on material principles bounded by supplies of the resource available at current prices and using existing technology, the result is predictable: A projection of rapidly dwindling reserves. In reality, the long-term trend is decreasing scarcity due to heightened incentives to discover new reserves and to invent superior methods of extraction. Contrary to what most people believe or expect, the ratio of US reserves to US production has also generally increased. Look at historical charts and you will find that reserves go up rather than down. Furthermore, they go up not just in total but as a ratio of rising consumption.

When prices rise, more companies enter the market and increase supply. Existing companies deploy more expensive discovery and extraction methods and develop new techniques. When prices fall, the less efficient companies either go out of business, merge, or shut down until better times. The remaining companies are forced to become more efficient. When prices go back up, the efficient companies will be highly profitable.

Rising consumption and rising reserves

If we are currently at or close to peak oil, you would expect reserves (even conservatively measured “proved reserves”) to be falling. Are they? According to the latest BP Statistical Review of World Energy, proved U.S. reserves in 2000 were 30.4 billion barrels. In 2020, reserves had increased to 60.8 billion barrels. Globally, reserves increased from 1,300.1 to 1,732.4 billion barrels.

In 2000, we used 25.2 billion barrels of oil out of the proven reserves of the time. At that rate of consumption, a simple extrapolation would suggest that we had just under 52 years of proven oil left. In 2019, the closest pre-pandemic year, we used 31 billion barrels – a 23% increase over 2000. Based on proven reserves of 1,732.4 billion barrels, we now have 56 years of supply left. 7.7% more supply-years left while consuming 23% more! We have used more oil over the last two decades and yet oil has become more plentiful. [Book, 2021]

Looking beyond “proven reserves” to technically recoverable oil equivalent (at prices seen recently), conservative estimates come to over eight trillion barrels. History suggests this is too low an estimate. We are already seeing vast new prospective areas being opened up by advancing deep-water drilling and production technology. This doesn’t even count unconventional sources.

The peak oil contingent believed that the shift to unconventional oil sources such as shale and tar sands would be more costly, slower to come to market, and more environmentally damaging. This turned out to be backward. U.S. shale oil production ramped up with the fastest increase in a 3-year period ever – a startling and impressive outcome from the combination of price incentives and technological development.

In response to their predictions being falsified, peak oil advocates keep increasing their estimates of recoverable resources while shifting out the date of the peak. They also say that they are looking only at conventional sources. If we are interested in the services provided by a commodity rather than the material itself, this is not what matters. Even restricting the forecast and its evaluation to conventional sources, the peak claim is wrong. Much of the growth has been from natural gas liquids and shale, but conventional oil reserves have also expanded. You can see this in the graph from Lynch, 2018.

have to find oil before you can produce it” and if it’s there, it will be produced. Technology could not improve recovery because, in the words of Jean Laherrère, “Technology cannot change the geology of the reservoir, but technology (in particular horizontal drilling) can help to produce faster, but no more…”  [Laherrère, 2012.]

Ultimately recoverable

We’ve seen that “proven reserves” isn’t a very useful long-term measure. It’s a far too restrictive and overly cautious concept. On the other hand, most people would say that the other extreme would be represented by total crustal abundance – the total amount of a material that exists in the Earth’s crust. As resource economist Julian L. Simon put it:

Proven reserves are a ridiculously pessimistic floor for forecasting. At the other end – a ridiculously optimistic ceiling – is the total amount of a material that exists in the Earth’s crust. The most economically relevant measure is that of ‘ultimately recoverable resources’.

What we consider “ultimately recoverable” depends both on how much of a commodity is physically present and on both the level of technology and relative prices. Simon noted that the US Geological Survey presently assumes that ultimately recoverable resources “is one hundredth of 1 percent of the amount in the top kilometer of the Earth’s surface… Even this ‘ultimately recoverable’ estimate will surely be enlarged in the future when there are improvements in mining techniques or if prices rise.” [Simon, 1998]

Former forecasts and subsequent diverging outcomes should teach us a little humility. (Should but will not.) Especially when confidence surrounds what can “never” happen. Looking at the giant fields in the Gulf of Mexico, operations that were not imagined a few decades ago, what might we find in the 85% of the US Outer Continental Shelf that has never been explored? We must also be cautious about confidently declaring that we can never extract more than, say 5% or 10% of oil in a reserve. In the mid-1990s, it was widely believed that the recovery factor in the Bakken formation would be no more than 1%. The USGS now assumes 10%.

No end to oil

We will never run out of oil. That’s my prediction.

A material peak in the production of oil will happen. (Peak oil production per capita probably occurred in 1979, as advanced economies became more efficient.) As we’ve seen, when it will happen is far more uncertain than the peak oil advocates believe. It’s also probably further away than they believe. And, much more certainly, production will not suddenly drop off a cliff once the peak arrives (and sticks). As it becomes harder to find, so long as governments allow markets to work, changing prices will encourage new discoveries, new technologies, economizing, and substitution.

Eventually, we will probably reach a point where the diminishing returns of technology at prices people are willing to pay will not keep up with oil-related energy demand. The market will have generated alternatives to oil for the services it renders. Oil will never run out; we will use less and less of it because we no longer need it. This was true of the forests in England in the early Industrial Revolution. It will be true of the USA and the world in the future. Oil will become obsolete before it can run out. As Dr. Christof Rühl, chief economist of BP, wrote:

Physical peak oil, which I have no reason to accept as a valid statement either on theoretical, scientific or ideological grounds, would be insensitive to prices… In fact, the whole hypothesis of peak oil – which is that there is a certain amount of oil in the ground, consumed at a certain rate, and then it’s finished – does not react to anything... Therefore there will never be a moment when the world runs out of oil because there will always be a price at which the last drop of oil can clear the market. And you can turn anything into oil if you are willing to pay the financial and environmental price. [BP, 2008]

Declining oil production can become a problem due to bad policy. We are seeing that in many Western countries right now, including the USA. In the US, the current administration has set about hindering fossil fuel production. This includes blocking new pipeline construction, ending fracking and drilling on federal lands, and various other regulations to make production more difficult and expensive.

Policies that constrain “above ground” factors such as the availability of staff, expertise, technology, investment security, and funds can constrain supply. Avoiding such policies will allow oil to be exploited and to be moved away from without inflicting painful economic suffering – suffering which most strongly affects the poorest. Those trying to bring on peak oil sooner should understand that crude oils have provided human civilization with a stunning reserve of chemical energy. The energy density of oil is approximately 45 MJ/kg, nearly twice as much energy as coal for an equivalent mass. Crude oil has enabled billions of people to emerge from poverty. We will move away from oil but let’s not demonize it in the meantime.

The final word goes to Indur Goklany from his excellent book. [Goklany, 2007: 100]: “Perhaps the end of oil will come about sometime in the future but whenever it comes, it will only be a footnote to history, just as the end of blubber is today.”

Postscript: Peak oil spills

One area where we are far past peak oil is not one pessimists will mention: oil spills. Oil spills peaked decades ago and have been declining both in number and total amount of oil spilled. In the 1970s, the average was 24 oil spills per year. Since 2000, the average has been less than three. In the 15 years from 2000 to 2014, a total of 234,000 tonnes were spilled. That sounds bad. But it is far less than the annual amount spilled in the 1970s. In the period from 1970 to 2014, the quantity of oil spilled fell by 99%.

References

Book, Joakim, 2021. “In Defense of Cornucopianism.” HumanProgress, November 10, 2021

https://www.humanprogress.org/in-defense-of-cornucopianism/

BP, 2008. "BP: Preisschwankungen werden wahrscheinlich zunehmenen.” Interview (in English) mit Dr. Christoph Rühl, Mittwoch 1". Euractiv. October 2008.

Chen, James, 2021. “Proven Reserves.” Investopedia, May 24, 2021.

Collier, Kiah, 2016. “More recoverable oil in West Texas than previously thought.” Texas Tribune, November 15, 2016.

Desjardins, Jeff, 2017. “Visualizing the World’s Deepest Oil Well.” Visual Capitalist, March 20, 2017.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-worlds-deepest-oil-well/

Goklany, Indur M. (2007). The Improving State of the World. Cato Institute, 2007.

Hubbert, M. King, 1956. “Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels.” Presented before the Spring Meeting of the Southern District, American Petroleum Institute, Plaza Hotel, San Antonio, Texas, March 7–8–9, 1956.

Jevons, William Stanley, 1965: The Coal Question; An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines. Macmillan & Co., 1965.

Laherrère, Jean, 2012. “Jean Maugeri part II.” Peakoil.com, October 16, 2012.

May, Andy, 2018. “The End of Oil and Gas.” Wattsupwiththat, July 7, 2018.

Novak, Matt, 2014. “We’ve Been Incorrectly Predicting Peak Oil For Over a Century.” Gizmodo, 12/11/14.

Simon, Julian L., 1998. The Ultimate Resource 2. Princeton University Press; Revised ed. Edition, July 1, 1998.

Wells, B.W., and K.L. Wells, 2006. “Making Hole – Drilling Technology.” American Oil & Gas Historical Society, September 1, 2006.

https://aoghs.org/technology/oil-well-drilling-technology/

Transhumanism is often associated with the pursuit of immortality. I am not going to argue that this is entirely mistaken. In contrast to some transhumanists I avoid using the term – at least without clear qualifiers. I will distinguish between meanings of “immortality” and explain why I resist the term. Finally, I argue that transhumanism is compatible with immortality but does not require it or depend on it being achievable.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s I wrote a column for Cryonics magazine titled “Immortalist Philosophy.” These columns investigated aspects of the philosophy of personal identity, leading up to my doctoral dissertation on the topic, published in 1995. These delved into issues of mortality, immortality, the nature of death, and the meaning of life, in pieces such as “Deathism and Immortalism.” in Cryonics #128, Vol.12, No.3, March 1991 and “Individualism, Awareness of Death, and Immortalism” in March 1992. I also discussed the role of technological prediction, the rights of AI and augmented persons, and the idea of uploading.

Although I have used the term “immortality”, I have not done so for around 25-30 years. Even back then I defined immortalism as “the belief in the desirability of, and a striving for, an unending life” and I talked of “the pursuit of immortality”. These imply immortality as a goal – something to move toward – but not necessarily a goal that is fully achievable. Aim at immortality and you might end up with a thousand or millions years of life but death still lurks and lunges.

It also true that many transhumanists use the I-term. I know of no survey that investigates how many transhumanists favor vs. resist the term. I have been trying to persuade my I-using colleagues to drop the term with modest success but the term definitely remains in use. There is even an “Immortality Institute” which, though not explicitly transhumanist, surely includes those who would use that label.

Also true is that important precursors to transhumanism used the term. I am thinking of the Western and the Chinese alchemists for whom immortality was one of a few central goals. We have achieved their goals of flight and – at great expense – transmutation of elements. Immortality remains a work in progress.

Before we can decide how appropriate or unhelpful this term is, we must first distinguish between senses of the word. In doing so, I found it useful to create a couple of new terms.

Types of immortality

Biological Immortality: The least objectionable version of immortality is biological immortality. This is a term used by biologists to refer to a state in which the rate of mortality from senescence is stable or decreasing. It is a condition in which an organism does not age, or in which repair and rejuvenation processes keep up with aging processes. Biologically immortal species such as the jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii do not die of age.

Given that “biological immortality” is accepted in biology I cannot object to it strongly. Unfortunately, there is no single word for it that clearly distinguishes it from other kinds of immortality. I have no beef with transhumanists talking about immortality so long as it is clearly specified as biological immortality. This is something that we know exists in the animal kingdom. We can probably achieve it, given enough time and research.

Despite scientific acceptance of the term, it has been challenged (see the Handbook of the Biology of Aging) because it can be a weak kind of immortality, not fitting long-established uses of the term. An organism can be biologically immortal because they experience a negligible increase in the rate of aging at very old ages. In other words, the increase in the mortality rate may be negligible or zero. This is often referred to as the late-life mortality plateau.

It is not much of a comfort to know that your mortality rate is no longer increasing if it is already exceedingly high when you reach the plateau! The mortality rate may stop increasing when it reaches 50% per year, but your odds of surviving even a few more years are poor. That is why I prefer not to use the I-word even with the biological qualification.

Superimmortality: We never have to die. Either we are practically invulnerable or we are backed up in multiple places so the chances of being completely destroyed are vanishingly small. (In fiction, a good example of this is Marvel’s Eternals. Their bodies can be destroyed but their personalities are maintained and reembodied using Celestial technology.) Super-immortality is also the kind that gods are supposed to have. (They may also have the next kind, although religious texts do not typically address this.) It could also refer to supernatural or religious immortality, although presumably God could terminate your existence. Apparently, in parts of superpower fandom this is called “absolute immortality.” I will stick with superimmortality because absolute immortality does not distinguish between this and the next kind.

Superimmortality as a prospect for humans (or the posthumans we may become) requires accepting certain philosophical views about personal identity. Absolute invulnerability probably only exists in comics. However, we might overcome the lack of total invulnerability by backing up our personalities and having a mechanism to reinstantiate that personality in a new physical embodiment.

If you consider personal survival to require psychological continuity rather than physical continuity, then superimmortality might be achievable or approachable by using backups. Mathematician and self-described immortalist Michael Perry has calculated the requirements for surviving indefinitely in this way. A sufficiently long gap between backups could mean that a large part of your personality is destroyed and “you” are reset to an earlier stage. Depending on the extent of the gap and difference between stored personality and most recent personality, you could consider this partial death.

Hyperimmortality: We might also call this ultraimmortality. This is the scary kind of immortality, um, immortalized in literature. This is eternal existence with no exit. You will live forever whether or not you want to. You cannot die. I agree this “no exit” state is a nightmare state. The confusion of this form of immortality with other forms is a big part of people’s dislike of the term.

Two classic sources portray this disturbing type of immortality. In old myths, Tithonus is the lover of Eos, goddess of the dawn. Eos asked Zeus to give Tithonus immortality. Eos, lacking in foresight, forgot to ask for eternal youth. Zeus, being a dick, grants the request and poor Tithonus lives on but gets older and older and ever more debilitated and demented. This has been called The Tithonus error.

…but when loathsome old age pressed full upon him, and he could not move nor lift his limbs, this seemed to her in her heart the best counsel: she laid him in a room and put to the shining doors. There he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all, such as once he had in his supple limbs.

Similarly, in Jonathan Swift's 1726 satirical novel Gulliver’s Travels, the struldbruggs do not die but they do continue aging. We see a reflection of this fear in the opposition to anti-aging research which stupidly assumes that we want to extend life without regard for its quality. Some anti-aging advocates therefore prefer to talk of extending healthspan rather than lifespan.

Problems with immortality

My major problem with using the I-word is that it groups together different concepts, one of which is deeply unappealing. Hyperimmortality is perhaps incompatible with transhumanism which embodies the push to expand our options. If someone has in mind hyperimmortality, your use of the I-term will elicit negative reactions. To the extent to which people associate anti-aging with hyperimmortality, they will oppose it.

Another major reason I avoid immortality is its religious connotations. One of the core purposes of religion is to protect us psychologically from the realization of our mortality. Cheer up! Death isn’t really death. This approach turns away from reality in order to sooth our existential fear. Avoidance does not help us solve the problem. Yes, we can avoid this conflation by talking of biological or physical immortality. Even so, the connection to religious belief is strong and taints rational efforts to push back aging and death.

Non-religious transhumanists will be tempted into something approaching the religious dogma of immortality. The prospect of personal extinction and the extinction of everyone we love will tempt us to pull back from uncertainty and proclaim that, come the Singularity, we will be immortal. No ifs or buts. This is too falsely certain for me. It could also encourage passivity. If we are certain to conquer the ultimate enemy, why should we work toward the goal?

Finally, I dislike the word because it is too easy to make the “immorality” typo! This is not the most profound objection, but I find it insidious and annoying.

Transhumanism and immortality

Transhumanism is a striving to perpetual improvement in oneself and for everyone who wants it. Biological immortality is a sensible and feasible goal. We can also strive toward superimmortality. Whether we can get all the way there is a matter of debate. Since transhumanism is a philosophy that recommends a push for longer and healthier life without limit, it is obviously compatible with some forms of immortality but does not require them. We can be transhumanist even if we expect immortality in any form to be out of reach.

In the end, whether you like the immortality word or not, let us agree to do all we can to defeat aging and biological death. Fight the eternal enemy. Push it back and back until death becomes an unfamiliar face, invading only on the rarest of occasions.