Technology, after all, is what's gotten us into this mess. It's unlikely to get us out of it.

Just on the surface its total garbage. Why does "the internet" on that graph represent a doubling factor over any of the previous technology? The asssignment of relative values to the "innovations" on that graph are totally arbitrary.

Just my 2 pfennigs,

-G

The debt will not be able to be repaid. Economic growth will not be possible on the scale necessary. Investments mean a return on growth. No growth, no investments.

Replay the 1930's forever.

Progress is unsustainable.

Read this and ponder the reality of it:

LAWS RELATING TO SUSTAINABILITY


First Law


Population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of resources cannot be sustained.


A) A population growth rate less than or equal to zero and declining rates of consumption of resources are necessary conditions for a sustainable society.


B) Unsustainability will be the certain result of any program of "development," whether or not it is said to be "sustainable," that ignores the problem of population growth and that does not plan the achievement of zero or a period of negative growth of populations and of rates of consumption of resources.


C) The research and regulation programs of governmental agencies that are charged with protecting the environment and promoting sustainability" are, in the long run, irrelevant unless these programs address vigorously and quantitatively the determination of optimal population sizes that can be carried indefinitely and unless the programs study in depth the demographic causes and consequences of environmental problems.


D) Societies, or sectors of a society, that depend on population growth or growth in their rates of consumption of resources, are unsustainable.


E) Persons who advocate population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of resources are advocating unsustainability.


F) Persons whose actions directly or indirectly cause increases in population or in the rates of consumption of resources are moving society away from sustainability. (Advertising your city or state as an ideal site in which to locate new factories indicates a desire to increase the population of your city or state.)


G) The term "sustainable growth" is an oxymoron.


There are 16 more laws here:

http://www.design-site.net/bart1mag.htm

Evrika! Technology is just a tool. It can be used for the better or for the worse. As long as the main engine of our society is to make a profit, technology will be used for getting us deeper and deeper into the mess.

Using technology to proclaim humans as Masters of the Universe (as Kurzweil and other technotopians suggest), will eventually destroy us.

We reached a point where technology is controlling us. Because of our lifestyle arrangements and the interdependencies of modern life, we are not able to stop it even if we want. We are doomed to follow the logic to the end: The Singularity.

Unless an external factor will stop us (P.O., asteroid impact, super volcano eruption, etc.), we are trapped in a vicious circle of inventing new ways of destroying ourselves.

The side effects of our "discoveries" and "inventions" and the complexity of our predicament are the only things that really grow exponentially.

We must simplify our life, slow it down considerably and employ some high quality meditation about our terrible situation.

Technology is obviously not the answer to our problems. How many times do we have to discuss about this?

We need to start looking for other tools. Reducing population and resource consumption, living simpler and closer to nature would be a wise step towards a better life. Eradicating the insane growth religion that dominates our society will probably do the trick.

Doomers and cornucopians alike, we know deep down in our hearts the answer to our problems. We also know that solving our problems means the end of our lives as we know them, so we'll probably never do the right thing unless we are forced to.

Instead we try to fix things with more crap like bio-ethanol and nukes, hoping to prolong our consumerist agony until we find a cure.

Rest assured, the cure will not come in the shape of technological advance.

I prefer the term "disorder". Chaos is actually very orderly and deterministic, yet unpredictable. Chaos Theory is another nail in the coffin of dreams like Lorenzo's and Omnitir's of a predictable, controllable world, along with Heisenberg and Newton (who demonstrated that increasingly precise measurements of a phenomenon will change what you are attempting to measure, rendering measurement of arbitrary precision impossible).

(note to self: check to see this hasn't been lifted from "Chaos" by James Gleick)


Please don't lump him in with the pot smokers, it's unfair. To the pot smokers. Like:
Carl Sagan
William Shakespeare
John Lennon
Francis Crick (of the Watson-Crick model of DNA)
Friedrich Nietzsche
Thomas Jefferson
Joan of Arc
John F. Kennedy
Al and Tipper Gore
Norman Mailer
Oscar Wilde
Pythagoras (of the Pythagorean Theorem)
Rudyard Kipling
Stephen King
Lewis Carroll
Picasso
Dali
Hunter S. Thomson
Steve Jobs

This is not to say cannabis is recommended. For every person on this list there are hundreds of stoners who are sitting around doing nothing and ... as a result are a lot less harm to the planet than their capitalism-bound peers who pressure them to "get your act together and make something of yourself". Some of those stoners become people like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dan Quayle, George Dubya, and Charlie Manson.

So, really, as with most things in life, YMMV.


Oh good lord, yes. Disorder a-plenty.

i don't think we're seeing radical advances in technology at the moment.

computers are getting faster, everyobody has iPods, but the general quality of life remains the same or is declining due to stagnant or low pay rises and the skyrocketing costs of basics like energy, fuel, food and water.

moreover, the world seems increasingly violent and unstable in terms of terrorism, war and climate change with its consequent water shortages and crop failures.

edit to add:

Having now actually read the article posted by Lorenzo, 5 years old incidentally, it seems to me to be a product of its time, i.e the 90s/early 21st century boom years.

I particularly liked this section:



and this is another treasure:

True, technology has consequences. But I wouldn't place the blame on our ever-changing world squarely on technology. In other words, if our business culture wasn't so competitively driven to "change or die", technology wouldn't be such an issue. Even when there are no breakthroughs in technology, companies keep trying to change something or other hoping it will give them an edge.

I think that in this discussion we are mixing two different things. IMO you should look to what technology can do to save *a part of* humanity, not *the whole of* humanity.

Even ignoring peak oil for the moment it is safe to say to humanity has always been segregated roughly in two groups, the 'haves' with the means to control it's destiny, and the 'have-nots' without those means. The relative size of these groups has varied slightly throughout history and will likely reach a peak in the coming half-century, with the haves forming a larger group - also in absolute terms - than at any time before in history.

When you try to imagine how technology and technological progress will affect the way persons in the first group will fare in the coming drawdown-related collapse of humanity one should expect that technology will indeed progress exponentially, heaping largess on that group as increasingly efficient and convenient technologies go mainstream in the wake of ever increasing raw energy prices. People like lorenzo and omnitir will say: told you so!

But the second group will experience an opposite effect from technological progress in a different field, namely military technology, which will likewise become more efficient and convenient in the application of controlling and limiting that group from impinging on the desires of the first group. The steady proliferation of the so-called 'asymetric' battefields and wars in our time are a prelude of what is to come in this respect.

So we may indeed expect technological progress to advance rapidly, even up to and during the downslope of peak oil, but it will probably not lead to a positive solution to the problem of resource scarcity, but rather to more efficient ways to maintain the devide between the haves and the have-nots, where ideally the haves don't notice much of a decrease in resource availability within their direct experience, while the have-nots top-out within the harsh constraints defined by a primitive existence not unlike that of our far ancestors. Furthermore, global warming and other technology-related scourges originating from the activities of the haves will likely consume mostly members of the have-nots, which should ellicit a welcome sigh of relief from the haves who are currently worried about the possibility of recieving a share of those scourges.

Nano, I respectfully disagree with your analysis. I do not think that technology will enable the "Haves" to better insulate themselves from the "Have-Nots." Just the opposite will happen and is happening.

The greater the divide between the Haves and the Have-Nots, the greater the conflict between the two will become. And the more likely it will be that the Have-Nots can grab a little of that technology and turn it against the Haves.

The Haves live in an ordered world with property that must be protected. The Have-Nots can strike at will from their disordered realm and then blend back into it. They don't have to defend anything.

Ultimately both sides lose in the spiral of violence and waste, and the problems common to all don't get solved.

Remember that the Have-Nots have less to lose than the Haves, and are and will always be far more numerous. They are a formidable force, and technology cannot appreciably change these relationships.

Sorry, my bad.

Lorenzo and Omnitir are just technology enthusiasts. Nothing wrong with that.

God bless them! (And in the meantime keep them away from taking decisions in the name of mankind).

Kurzweil's observation of the tendency towards the Singularity is entirely a-moral, devoid of any ethical or moral comment. It is a merely scientific, empirical observation.

There are as many dystopian as utopian scenarios for the what the Singularity will look like, but that's not what Kurzweil is involved in describing. He makes a scientific, a-moral observation.



But if you read the paper well, there are several examples. The convergence of nano-technology and informatics (nano-chips), the convergence of informatics and biology (bio-informatics: from gene sequencing to genetic manipulation and enhancement of organisms), etc... The signs are all around us.

What it will imply for humans is something else. Nobody can tell.

[My opinion: Maybe it's not that important. From a transhumanist perspective it is more important to see what it does to intelligence and life as such. Humans are just an embodiment of life and intelligence. If we can enhance life and intelligence, but humans in their present form have to be sacrificed to do so, then so be it. If we can keep them, then good for us.)

But I was more trying to point to Kurzweil's observation in the context of Peak Oil. Suppose that the trend he observes indeed continues (which is to be expected), then overcoming our energy worries should not be a problem. The energy is there, all we need are technologies to capture, convert and use it.

Exactly, and as I myself wrote (ahem, don't like to quote myself):



In short, there is enough energy on this planet to power humanity several thousand times over (10,800 times to be exact). We are nowhere yet. We are at the beginning of the energy revolution.

To use the terms of the Kardashev Scale (something I just read, umh), we aren't even a miserable Type I society; we are a civilization that is only just beginning to harness the energy available on 1 tiny little single planet. We're nowhere yet. We still have to go through Type II, to harness all the power coming from a single star (our solar system), over to Type III, a civilization that is capable of harnessing the energy contained in an entire galaxy, to Type IV, energy colonization of a local cluster, and Type V, using the power of a single visible universe.

A certain professor in theoretical physics and astrobiology, Miku Kaku (authority argument: holds the Henry Semat Professorship in Theoretical Physics at the City University of New York (CUNY)) , says that it's more likely than not that we ourselves will be able to evolve towards a Type III civilization. Astrobio.net

So I agree with Montequest: we have still some work to do. The energy is there. With the intelligence and technology explosion underway, we'll certainly become a Type I thingie fairly soon.

Except that it is diffused and we don't have the technology to harness it yet on the scale and at the cost required.



The last thing we need is an explosion of any kind with regard to energy that does not at the same time address the other issues of population growth, arable land, topsoil, water, NPP, Global Warming, and loss of biodiversity.

Peakoil is a symptom of a greater disease.

That's right. Even if we could come up with 1:1 replacements for oil and NG, which we can't (much less the "limitless" energy Lorenzo dreams of), it wouldn't solve our ultimate problem; in fact, it would exacerbate it.

How many people here remember the claims that were rampant in the 1950s and 1960s, that technology, automation, and computers would produce a universal prosperity and reduce the work week to three or at most four days?

Anyone here living at a middle class or above standard of living, on three days of work per week...? Four days...? No?

Hey come on!, we have technology, automation, and computers beyond the wildest dreams of those forecasters from the mid 20th century!

In California, it's a ten-day work week, with two adults working full time, required in order to make payments on a house.

Yours truly here typically works 70 - 80 hours a week. I'm sure I'm not the only one on this board who does so.

It's generally cheesy as hell to go around quoting famous lyrics from 1960s rock music as if they were great philosophical statements, but I can't help it this time:

We won't get fooled again!