I wonder what Peak Oil people do with the simple fact that the creation of knowledge and the pace of technological change is exponential. What do they do with Kurzweil's technoprogressivist observation:



From his famous article The Law of Accelerating Returns

We know that the energy that reaches our planet is 174 petawatts. Man's current energy consumption is around 0.016 petawatt. So we have some room to play with.

At the current pace of innovation and knowledge production (every 12 months, the amount of technological innovation doubles; every 6 months, the amount of all knowledge ever created in the history of organised cells on this planet, doubles!), I suspect that within a few decades we will be able to harvest enough energy to overcome Peak Oil. The physical energy is there, we just need to find technologies to harvest it and use it.

In fact, when Kurzweil is right, Peak Oil should be a piece of cake to solve. A totally marginal problem.





Just my guess. So the question is: what do Peak Oil believers do with Kurzweil and with the technoprogressivists? They have extremely strong arguments to be optimistic.

I only had to read this:

to realise what a load of techno-utopian garbage this is.

The only thing exponentially growing here is this guy's hubris..

Umm, duh! The derivative of an exponential function is another exponential function. This applies for *any* exponential growth. That would be freshman calculus Lorenzo.

And at the current rate of grass growing, I doubt we will have the fossil fuel platform to stand on to harvest that energy.



History has shown us that it is not population growth that has decimated our enviroment, it is the "trends" of technology.

Also, energy is just one of the limiting factors that determines carrying capacity. Melting of the glacial ice in the Himalayas, due to global warming, will deny over 60 million people access to fresh water in the not too distant future.

Loss of Topsoil.

Loss of Arable land.

Environmental sinks becoming overstressed.

Loss of biodiversity.

Exponential population growth.

Exponential debt growth.

Overconsumption of NPP by humans.

And bottom line; the energy we harvest must be as cheap or cheaper than fossil fuels or the house of cards comes down.

And, on the other end of the spectrum:

physorg.com

The claim that innovation is skyrocketing is, I think, a romantic one -- especially when that claim is used to support the idea that the crises we're facing will simply be swept aside by the tide. What we're currently witnessing is the acceleration of declining returns on investment, both direct and marginal. That it takes more and more energy to produce a calorie of food from disappearing arable land. More and more energy to pump declining water supplies from the ground. More energy to produce energy. And increasingly, disastrously, the degradation of our life support system. Energy, topsoil, water, environment. Everywhere you look. This guy Kurzweil sees Star Trek in our immediate future. I see the cliff through the legs of the lemming in front of me.

It is not necesserely the case, that exponential growth will continue for much longer into future.
"Performance in the past is not necesserely a guideline to performance in the future".

Even if inexhaustible source of energy became available, there are plenty of reasons why progress have to cease sometime in the future, the only question is WHEN.

There are bound to be limits dictated by laws of physics on what actually can be made and what not. Those are tending to be quite generous, however there are also restrictions dictated by MATERIAL SCIENCE.
For example take commercial fusion development projects.
We may learn how to produce sufficiently hot and dense plasma, but it may prove to be impossible to build fusion reactor because suitable construction material able to withstand energetic neutrons for any worthwihle time simply DOES NOT EXIST and cannot be made in physical world surrounding us.
It may also be the case that even if such material does exist, economic implications of its use are simply killing the project and no matter how much you try, you cannot overcome this problem.

With computing progress:
We are already begin to hit barriers making it more and more difficult to increase SPEED of computing.
Circutry, which we can build is not ammenable to work at greater and greater frequencies and at some THz level (for single chip) we are bound to hit some cut off point.
You also cannot make circuits arbitrally small.
At some point quantum effects, sizes of atoms etc will limit this avenue of progress.
Quantum computing? Well, first we have to build systems proving, that concept is viable beyond demonstration scale. Quantum physics tends to be malicious "being". Very often when some wonderful effect is discovered, it is quickly found out that we are somehow prevented from exploiting it for the reason also explained by quantum physics...

With particle accelerators:
There is apparently no appetite to build bigger and bigger ones even if possible in principle (no money?).

With new medications:
To bring aspirine into the market, R&D expenses were in range of $10-50 thousands in TODAYS money. This was about 110 years ago.
To bring any new medicine into the market NOW takes $500 million or more.
Interestingly those expenses were ALSO GROWING EXPONENTIALLY. If trends are persisting, than after further 100 years it will take $ TRILLIONS to introduce new drug into the market.
Conclusion: For reason of lack of capital NO new medication will be introduced on the market after only few decades more.

OVERALL CONCLUSION: If hungry man walking a labirynth find some food in the corridor it does NOT mean, that the further he goes down this corridor, the more and more food (per m2) is going to be there and he will simply drown in food [singularity equivalent] after only some meters more.
However Kurzweil and "proggress people" are apparently believing, that this is the case.

Lorenzo speaks of knowledge as though it were McDonald's hamburgers flying off a conveyor belt: If we pile up enough hamburgers, a solution to our mess will magically emerge from the critical mass of hamburgers/knowledge.

What is growing "exponentially" is information, not knowledge. A lot of that information is either redundant or garbage, as anyone who closely examines the results of a Google search will realize.

Despite the snowdrifts of information, true innovation that affects real-life people is almost nowhere to be found. The days of the major new inventions, like refrigeration and the telephone, seem to have ended. Instead, what you've mostly got is endless tinkering with existing technology, and ceaseless corporate jockeying for tiny competitive advantages.

For example, a lot of the new drugs are "copycat" versions of older drugs. In your body they do substantially what the older drugs did. In any case, 90% of the world's people can't afford them.

As long as the principal focus remains on profits, you will not see a new golden age of invention.

Even if we had a new golden age of invention, it would be too late to save us from runaway global warming and all the other apocalyptic horsemen charging at us. We have a huge bill to pay, and, notwithstanding the dreams of the Lorenzos of the world, we cannot "innovate" our way out of paying it.

It might be interesting if the law of diminishing returns did not exist, but it cleary does exist and is fully operable. We have discovered no technology ever for which the law did not apply and that includes computer techology. For each and every technological area you have an enlongated S curve of progress. At first nobody knows anything, then as people invest time, thought and resources knowledge in the area grows exponentially. Eventually you atart hitting the limits of growth for that technology and the curve of advance falls back to nearly horizontal and sometimes even a slight decline forming the top of the S.

For example, transportation was muscle power for eons of life on earth. Then the Steam Engine was invented and coupled with RailRoads increasing the speed of transit from 4 mph to 40 mph. Steam engines have material science limits which in the 1800's and early 1900's limited rail roads to about 80 mph max with an average a lot closer to 55 mph.

Then along came the ICE both Otto and Diesel cycle. This disn't do much for land transport but it opened a whole new venue, aircraft! Aircraft with Otto and Diesel engines use propellors as their motive force and between 1903 and 1945 they increased speed from 60 mph to about 500 mph where again they hit a physical limit. As an aircraft approaches the speed of sound the spinning propellor causes all manner of interference turbulence patterns that in effect make it impossible to break the sound barrier. By 1945 homever a propellor driven airliner could now transport people and cargo coast to coast in North America at 350 mph, a huge improvement over the railroads averaging 55 mph.

Then along came the axial flow turbo-jet engine and altitudes and speeds increased again getting you up to 480 mph for average passenger jets and Mach 2 for the Concorde, with military jets like the SR-71 hitting somewhere around Mach 3.7 for sustained periods of time.

Then along came manned rocketry and people are in orbit today at 17,000+ mph. However chemical rockets have severe limits too, you have to haul all the fuel and oxidizer with you and that means for a practicle Earth launched rocket you max out around 25,000 mph. You can coast to the Moon or other solar system bodies at those speeds but it takes a long time to reach anuything beyond the Moon.

Fission rockets have been designed and tested that can double that, but people are afraid of the consequences of a catostophic accident so they have not been used to date on spacecraft. Ion rockets have also been developed and used that are extreamly more efficient, however their specific impulse (I^sp) while huge leads to a very very low accelleration, around .001g of accelleration. You can gto anywhere in the Solar System in 10 years with an ion drive, but do you really want to spend 10 years in space going to Pluto and back?

Even if we overcome all these difficulties by developing a fusion rocket drive you will still be limited by time dialation and the light speed limit.

There are limits to every technological advance, mature technologies like propellor aircraft have tested the limits and settled back to a reasonable speed for prop craft. Jet aircraft have tested the limits and settled back to a reasonable speed for passanger aircraft far below the Concorde speed. Computer technology is now testing the limits of chip theoretical maximums and the pace of change is much slower than it was even 4 years ago. Once they figure out the optimum cost/benefit size and speed of silicon chips the industry as a whole will adopt that standard and the pace of change will slow to glacial. Unless and until someone invents a better cost/benefit material than silicon chips we are near the top of the curve for computer tech from a hardware point of view. We are at the point of diminishing returns on investments. Companies are not charities, they will not keep investing billions to increase profit margins by millions, to do so leads to bankruptcy.

What appears to be "exponential" growth is only the front side of a logistical curve, and possibly the beginning of a chaotic process. Resistance to unending organic growth is seen in every other living process we can model or analyze.

Immortality? You know, I really liked the Highlander series and the first movie, but this is the real world.


Hope he's not too famous. I could imagine how if this article survives into the future that his fame would turn to infamy and his descendents might be hunted down with dogs.


I'll be a math geek and add that the derivative with respect to x of an x^n function where 0 < n <= 2 may be linear in its growth, zero, or be growing at an exponentially decreasing rate, such as the derivative of ln(x). Derivatives of x^f(x) and chaotic systems are obviously way beyond the scope of this thread.

"Exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth" does not impart meaningful information, just hot air meant to mislead.

Growth of any kind requires input. Unending growth would require humanity to eventually consume the universe so that lorenzo can have an ipod implanted his brain, a virtual 200' movie screen grafted on his eyeballs, and gigabit transgalactic internet.

True, but the Law of Accelerating Returns exactly states that the number of mass used technologies and the fields in which they operate grow exponentially.

So each technology suffers under its own law of diminishing returns, but the proliferation of new technologies is in fact so enormous, that the effect you mention becomes entirely marginal and of no influence to the unstoppable Progress towards the Singularity.

I'm more a follower of the theory that peak inventions was in the late nineteen century (as in 1800s).

Yeah, and the "singularity" in this case is our collapse.

So where is all this terrific progress, Lorenzo? If this billowing of technology is taking place and the effects are so wonderful, shouldn't the world be getting better already? Shouldn't we see evidence of the phenomenon described? Instead, the storm clouds continue to gather.

Whatever "progress" we're seeing is the result of the tragic transmogrification of the world's natural resources into short-term economic gain.

Exactly. As I noted in this thread I wrote some time back:



Unbridled Technology and Peak-oil; Cause and Effect

I'm highly skeptical of Kurzweil, and anyone else who goes in for the idea of personal immortality via nanotech or AI. To my mind that stuff is religion, in the sense of a philosophy that is concerned with the personal relationship with death & dying. In that context, immortalism via technology is fairly primitive and undeveloped as religions go; two clicks away from being a cargo cult.

Those utopians have strong arguements only as long as exponential growth curves don't hit a ceiling somewhere and go crash. That's another "singularity" for you, and far more likely than some miraculous transition into a world without death or hard labor.

Elijah Jones is right on target: we have taken on new technologies like apes attracted to anything new and shiny, rather than taking the slow road and assimilating our discoveries carefully and making thoughtful decisions about how to use them.

Coyote: good item there about Huebner.

I'll become a techno-optimist the very moment an effective long-lasting male contraceptive pill is released onto the market at a price that any government in the world can afford to provide it to all of their people at cost zero. Something that drives the sperm count down into the "infertile" range and holds it there for a good long while, would be nice.