Do you think peak oil will happen anytime soon? Or ever? How about other depleting resources? Some groups want to talk into going humans extinct, crying about carrying capacity. They are wrong, but why?
Rationalist Roko argues how peak oil et al are alarmist virtue signalling. He emphasizes the distinction between absolute depletion and contingent lack. That is an opposition between absolute and relative scarcity problems.
The implied conclusion is that these problems with resources are contingent. Them being contingent points at a solution set, distinct from the set if it was absolute. You would only want to decrease population in the latter case. The fact that the resource problems we face are contingent does not mean that they’re easy or dismissable.
[Quotes unless indicated otherwise, are all from Roko’s article.]
Why relative scarcity is not that much better
Two things that Roko seems to not emphasise - distance and time.
“Even space for trash isn’t limited, because waste dumps and landfill sites will eventually be mined for usable resources. It just takes energy to transform it back into a useful form, and we have much more of that than we need.”
Contingent problems are still problems: transport
We can see all Earth’s (Universe’s?) resources as feed for humano-machinic assemblage of extraction, processing and absorption.
The places of extraction depend on physical distribution on resources. Extraction happens elsewhere from absorption and processing. Moreover, sustaining the exchange of a good between them takes some energy. Civilizations acheive this with high investment, low maintenance infrastructure (e.g. Roman aqueducts).
Distance matters. One of the advantages of petrol is that it is transportable with low tech. Just barrels, not long cables that electricity needs. This decreased the initial investment into petrol cars at the turn of 20th century.
There’s limits to markets - delivery time puts a limit on possible transactions. Cost of transport is not just fuel, but food rations and risk mitigation. Contingent factors make uneconomicsomething otherwise physically possible. Not all physically possible extractions and absorptions will happen. That was one of Marx's beefs with capitalism, after all.
Still moral failures
Relative scarcity is a big factor. It is powerful enough to make some people live in poverty or starve, while tons of food end up in trash. This specific case is a market failure - lack of market for the goods in question.) Even if we produce enough food for everyone, there is still relative scarcity. Roko says that we divide space equally every person would get many square kilometers. Obviously not every plot of land is worth the same.
Suppose we relocated all land equally ceteris paribus on scarcity and tech. Such configuration wouldn't be stable. Soon we’d get a picture more like what is now, coastal metropolises hosting most of the population. Relative scarcity is persistent and still creates morally undesirable situations. (Undesirable from the POV of the goal of hunger elimination)
Low elasticity of demand = vulnerability to supply shocks
When EROI (estimated return on investment) in a region for some essential good is negative, shit goes catabolic. Some capital gets eaten up, disappears from the region through collateral damage, genocide and outflow of people and capital.
Aggregated demand for a resource necessary to survive is proportional to population size. Take a Pakistan - India border area, where water scarcity is worse than elsewhere. Minimum demand for water is fixed - for survival, and then rises foor furtherneeds such as hygiene. With limited transport capabilities scarcity increases. With enough scarcity, or sudden increase of it (negative supply shock), the game becomes zero or negative sum. The price shifts from coin to blood. Water takes on social exchange patterns of hard drugs.
Local markets are at risk of losing capital when there’s limited supply of essential goods to them.
Interconnectedness
Does snapping away 50% of human population lower GDP by the same amount? Obviously more. The connections are organic and whole systems would crash, not having enough redundancy.
What if we DOUBLE the resouces, but randomize the whole distribution?
I argue that GDP would decrease in the short term. It would be a supply shock for the places from which it disappeared. Newly enriched lands would have limited capacity to reach full productive capacity. Transport infrastructure in general would need to be repurposed.
All currently fragile subsystems of the global assemblage, such as the Pakistan - India border, would get out of equilibrium.
But what could cause such a thing?
New resources - solar energy (possibly even from space), fracking, enrich some places, create scarcity in others. The pulse of resources discovery changes local equilibria in the world chaotic system, resulting in butterfly effect scenarios.
So it's just a social problem, right? We need to shift supply chains a little bit
The fact that something is socially contingent ("social construct ") does not mean that it’s amenable to human will more easily than matter. Social engineering is not trivial.
Forces of nature were deified in the past, and market forces are personified today (Lovecrafitan - Landian view). The social momentum of the machine is a force to be reckoned with, too. Hobbesian monarchists say that this requires one person to be the master of the beast to achieve desirable states of the assemblage.
If the problem with scarce resources is just a social challenge, not a technical one it does not mean it’s easier.
‘Ultimatism’ as a POV
Do I agree with Roko’s stance in this article? Yes.
Do I agree with his conclusion? (“[...]the obstacles to progress are not a lack of resources”) Yes.
Do I agree with the conclusion that a reader can get? No.
I just see that it’s a valid thing, when surrounded by a disclaimer what point of view it represents, one not very pragmatic one.
So what is that point of view?
That’s ultimatism, a physical materialist variant in this case.
The below quote, for instance, is a physical fun fact, not a pragmatic stance. Or is it?
“All the different substances and physical resources that we think about - coal, clean water, food etc can be summed up into a single resource called negentropy: sunlight comes in, waste heat goes out, entropy increases and useful work is done (such as purifying water). Surprisingly, physics tells us that the only resource that ultimately matters is the cold nighttime sky to get rid of waste heat, and solar energy coming in from space. Everything else can be made from that! “
You can also see ultimatism in other contexts.
As a mindset it’s used by nihilists / Pascal wager gamblers
> ‘ultimately, what do our lives matter in the vast expanse of spacetime?’
Ultimatism - a POV of extrapolating a trend / relation of value to the furthest point in the future it is imaginable.
That is useful to step in for all people from time to time. Some people (futurists) may use it more, to the extent of it becoming default.
It is very useful to repeal some bad arguments. Yet it becomes fallacious when we confuse the ultimate bounds with our bounds in the present. And that is the danger with reading Roko’s article.
The landscape of possible configurations is limited by physical bounds. Still our possible future configurations are dictated by our state in the present. We can only reach so many from where we are. Set of configurations allowed physically is much larger than the set of configurations reachable within time - energy bounds.
Is there any place where we are actually at physical limits technologically? Where the bottleneck isn't at how our civilizational assemblage is set up? That’s an empirical question, possibly microprocessors are getting small near the limits of non-quantum computing.
If we're not even close on any front, it seems that these limits existing make little difference to us.
If we are with some tech closer to the physical boundary of the possible, that would mean that our civilization-as-machine is also close to the limit.
Earth does not run out of XYZ, that is an empirically correct sentence. But the sentence ‘some countries have increasing scarcity of some goods’ is also correct, and more directly related to what we are doing right now.
Summing up
Not all physically possible extractions and absorptions will happen.
Relative scarcity is persistent and still creates morally undesirable (from some POV) situations.
Local markets are at risk of losing capital when there’s limited supply of essential goods to them.
The pulse of discovery of new resources changes local equilibria in the world chaotic system, possibly resulting in butterfly effect scenarios.
If the problem with scarce resources is just a social challenge, not a technical one it does not mean it’s easier.
We can say: ‘no, we haven’t exceeded Earth carrying capacity. With specific social and technological arrangements we can get out of this.’ It is correct to say that these problems are not with the physical fabric of reality (intensity of physical laws), or physical quantity (amount of resources), but rather with social engineering. It is incorrect to deny the reality of rescource scarity as an problem with potential to increase.
Roko’s reasoning in that article is reminiscent of utopian socialism. It’s one thing to say that a survivor in a desert can dig into groundwater as a possibility. It’s another thing when it's a few meters deep and the survivor has just a spoon.
“If one builds 300 storeys of continuous structure on all the land on earth, one gets about 50 billion square kilometers of living area. This is enough for each of 10 trillion people to have 5000 square meters (about 50,000 square feet - that’s the size of a mega-mansion) to themselves. This could include artificially lit interior wilderness spaces with artificial skies, artificial weather etc that are maybe 10-20 storeys high, and with the significant advantage of being less crowded, safer, having better and more predictable weather and being easier to get to than wilderness we have today.”
It is one thing to say that some machinic assemblage with high population living at comfortable levels exists in the fitness landscape of possibilities.
“In summary, Earth is not running out of resources in the ultimate sense. There are many temporary, contingent shortages caused by wars, incompetence or various institutional failures, but planet Earth can support 10 trillion peopleᶠ in extreme luxury indefinitely without anything running out assuming present-day science is pushed to its maximum potential and is used to provide things that people really want. Those may be unrealistic assumptions, but the obstacles to progress are not a lack of resources”
And it’s another thing to say that the path there from the current arrangements is an easy or straightforward one.