Donate Bitcoin

Donate Paypal


PeakOil is You

PeakOil is You

Anti doomer: The complexity paradox of technology

Discussions about the economic and financial ramifications of PEAK OIL

Re: Anti doomer: The complexity paradox of technology

Unread postby onlooker » Sat 11 Mar 2017, 23:02:55

Very interesting. However, upon analyzing the many facets of our society, we can distill our very complex situation to certain non reducible and incontrovertible maxims. First, humans need energy to be productive or to work. Second, our Economies rely on the bounty of the Earth and so are a subsystem of it. The third maxim flows from the second in that because we rely on the Earth, we must have a symbiotic relation with it so that we help to sustain it, so it can sustain us. The inherent problem in our current situation is one of scale. Our vast population with its needs and wants is overwhelming the ability of Earth to provide for everyone and handle all our waste.
Technology may have a role to play in helping us be good stewards of Earth and in reducing or controlling our population. But in the end, collectively we must decide on a way to tread more lightly upon our planet and implement it. Otherwise, calamity will be unavoidable
"We are mortal beings doomed to die
User avatar
onlooker
Fission
Fission
 
Posts: 10957
Joined: Sun 10 Nov 2013, 13:49:04
Location: NY, USA

Re: Anti doomer: The complexity paradox of technology

Unread postby ralfy » Sun 12 Mar 2017, 04:08:28

I think computers don't make processes less complex. Rather, they make them faster.
User avatar
ralfy
Light Sweet Crude
Light Sweet Crude
 
Posts: 5569
Joined: Sat 28 Mar 2009, 11:36:38
Location: The Wasteland

Re: Anti doomer: The complexity paradox of technology

Unread postby asg70 » Sun 12 Mar 2017, 11:31:07

Computers can increase efficiency. Retail like Wal-Mart in brick-and-mortar and Amazon in eCommerce involves radical efficiency improvements to the complex problem of global supply-chains and fulfillment.

What Elon Musk is attempting to do with the automation of the gigafactory, for instance, is to apply radical efficiency gains in the task of manufacturing, similar to what the assembly line once did 100 years ago.

When you step back you see how humanity has moved progressively from inefficient manual labor to more and more automation. Everything from the loom to the cotton-gin. You can easily see how, taken to its ultimate extreme, work as we know it will cease to exist and we'll either have a society living in the lap of luxury or on poverty row depending on how we adapt as a society.

This is, of course, independent of limits to growth, but the efficiency gains do make an impact on when we go over the proverbial cliff.

BOLD PREDICTIONS
-Billions are on the verge of starvation as the lockdown continues. (yoshua, 5/20/20)

HALL OF SHAME:
-Short welched on a bet and should be shunned.
-Frequent-flyers should not cry crocodile-tears over climate-change.
asg70
Permanently Banned
 
Posts: 4290
Joined: Sun 05 Feb 2017, 14:17:28

Re: Anti doomer: The complexity paradox of technology

Unread postby onlooker » Sun 12 Mar 2017, 11:56:18

Sorry to say but all this technological prowess and efficiency is just translating into humans becoming ever more redundant. Mass populations of uneducated and unskilled of no use to modern industries. Scary to contemplate for many humans. In the Georgia Guidestones (NWO), it says keep population no greater than 500 million. Umm
"We are mortal beings doomed to die
User avatar
onlooker
Fission
Fission
 
Posts: 10957
Joined: Sun 10 Nov 2013, 13:49:04
Location: NY, USA

Re: Anti doomer: The complexity paradox of technology

Unread postby ralfy » Sun 12 Mar 2017, 21:06:02

If there is no "reduction in the complexity of societies," then there's no "simplification of world systems." In which case, machines only make it appear that things look simpler because all of the work is done in the background, and more efficiently. Thus, there is no "complexity paradox."

The catch is that producers will use such machines because more efficiency means greater production, and thus more sales, and with that more profits. Of course, more sales means there has to be more consumption, and more profits leads to even more production.

That means more energy and material resources are needed each time. And given competition, at lower energy costs, which goes against diminishing returns and the physical limitations of the biosphere.

Thus, we have an economic system coupled with technology that wants an abundance of resources and a biosphere that won't allow it.
User avatar
ralfy
Light Sweet Crude
Light Sweet Crude
 
Posts: 5569
Joined: Sat 28 Mar 2009, 11:36:38
Location: The Wasteland

Re: Anti doomer: The complexity paradox of technology

Unread postby ralfy » Tue 14 Mar 2017, 08:11:07

Squilliam wrote:
The complexity paradox is based on the concept of entropy. To maintain a higher level of order within a thing there must be a corresponding increase in disorder around that thing. So whilst maintaining a high level of technology increases the entropy (pollution) in the surrounding landscape it also helps to improve the conversion efficiency of inputs -> outputs and hence helps to reduce the level of pollution. Technology thus requires high entropy, but it also reduces entropy.


I don't see that reduction in pollution.
User avatar
ralfy
Light Sweet Crude
Light Sweet Crude
 
Posts: 5569
Joined: Sat 28 Mar 2009, 11:36:38
Location: The Wasteland

Re: Anti doomer: The complexity paradox of technology

Unread postby onlooker » Tue 14 Mar 2017, 08:35:25

I don't see that reduction in pollution.

Yes, I agree. What I see technology doing is above all increasing the efficiency by which we convert natural capital to goods, services and their representation money. So, in that context rather than reducing pollution it is increasing the speed and volume of that pollution. And in the meantime, we continue to draw down natural capital and resources which are NOT renewable in a time frame of concern to humanity. I do not think we can deviate too far ever from the central notion that Earth is a closed system and we have limits to sources of resources and the sinks where our waste goes. Too continue anywhere near this rate of resource extraction and throughput requires that we have some miraculous way to eliminate or absorb our wastes, too come up with a almost unlimited source of clean energy, or to have some mechanism to creates prime resources like air, water and soil out of thin air.
"We are mortal beings doomed to die
User avatar
onlooker
Fission
Fission
 
Posts: 10957
Joined: Sun 10 Nov 2013, 13:49:04
Location: NY, USA

Re: Anti doomer: The complexity paradox of technology

Unread postby asg70 » Tue 14 Mar 2017, 23:38:10

onlooker wrote:Sorry to say but all this technological prowess and efficiency is just translating into humans becoming ever more redundant.


True, if you buy into the idea that the worth of a human life is only equivalent to their contribution to GDP.

BOLD PREDICTIONS
-Billions are on the verge of starvation as the lockdown continues. (yoshua, 5/20/20)

HALL OF SHAME:
-Short welched on a bet and should be shunned.
-Frequent-flyers should not cry crocodile-tears over climate-change.
asg70
Permanently Banned
 
Posts: 4290
Joined: Sun 05 Feb 2017, 14:17:28

Re: Anti doomer: The complexity paradox of technology

Unread postby ralfy » Wed 15 Mar 2017, 01:43:48

Squilliam wrote:
That is such a limited perspective. I am aware of all of this. The concept I don't believe you're factoring into your estimations is the concept that technology can also increase efficiency and reduce waste. We can take the same resources with greater technology and stretch them significantly further. There are major systems within our own economic ecology that can stand to gain significant efficiency boosts in the coming decades through the application of rapidly advancing technology. When modern buildings can use 80% less energy than older buildings for instance you have to acknowledge there is significant scope to improve the current status quo. The reason why a modern building can use such a small amount of power is how we can invest our skills into technology to make it portable and leverage it amongst a far greater scope. When you pick up a science textbook for instance you gain access to hundreds of thousands of hours worth of skilled labour amongst a wide range of fields. Computers not only increase our own intellectual leverage, but they also let us access the skills of others.


But technology is used in a global capitalist system and not an "economic ecology." That means the purpose of efficiency is not to conserve but the complete opposite: increase production and sales to ensure more profits. In fact, decisions on investing in more efficiency are gauged on returns, which in turn are paid for through increased profits. The same goes for reducing waste.

Similarly, if it is cheaper to outsource production to countries which do not regulate as much concerning pollution, then businesses will opt to do that (which is actually what many of them have been doing for decades).

That's why pollution has been going up together with economic output, which in turn is driven by more technology. That increase in output cannot be maintained, however, due to limits to growth:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... g-collapse

Thus, there is no "complexity paradox of technology." Rather than make processes simpler, technology actually does them more efficiently.

And because the use of technology involves one which dominates the rest (i.e., the ability to create "wealth" using numbers in hard drives), then there is no decrease in pollution or conservation of resources as well. Instead, there is a drive for increasing output (thanks to greater efficiency) and consumption (to pay for investments in efficiency) to guarantee more profits (the reason for investing in efficiency), and based ironically on the technology of credit: more virtual wealth created to drive economic output, in turn to create even more virtual wealth to churn back into the system.
User avatar
ralfy
Light Sweet Crude
Light Sweet Crude
 
Posts: 5569
Joined: Sat 28 Mar 2009, 11:36:38
Location: The Wasteland

Re: Anti doomer: The complexity paradox of technology

Unread postby efarmer » Thu 16 Mar 2017, 12:21:53

It seems you see the whole issue as one of sheer prouductivity, enabled by technology and robotics, and industrial agrilculture. This is a fine top level view when you drop out minor details like the people who live in such an envrironment. That minor detail, the people, they become service workers, the health care system becomes a product we all know they have to buy, so the market moves in and attempts to place the price of healthcare above lodging, it sells them minutes and bandwidth, and they seem to jump at the notion of "how much does this cost me a month" and forego any long term view of life. The end game really is productivity can soar under automation and vast industrial agriculture and negate the ability of the people within nations to buy the products any longer. The end game seems to be a host of global corporate entities all tooled up and searching the globe to see where people have the money to buy their products. When wealth is concentrated in 1 to 5% of a population, that 1 to 5% can automate and industrialize and dominate, but they have disenfranchised the consumers of their products via economic leverage. The balance in the equation is stewardship by nations and regions for their people balanced against the pure efficiency pursuit that tends to duck the messy situation of people, taxable wages, insurance and benefits, and societal balance. Until you hit this end game, the path is extremely lucrative, the political influence is for sale to preserve the gambit, and the investors all come out smelling like a rose. We have built a untenable society on the back of the cheap petroleum exploit of the last 80 years, wherein technological advances on the back of cheap fossil fuels has wrought miracles and monstrosities in exploding rings of suburbia, thousands of miles of strip malls, millions of big plastic sided oriented strand board contrivances on cul de sacs, and millions of people like shock monkeys Twittering and Facebooking what they ate lately, what they want to eat or see on video, while waiting to get out of their cul de sac onto the feeder road to the strip mall artery that connects to the highway commute. Couple the extreme inefficency of the living situation with the automation and industrialization trends that won't need these people any longer and you see the end game of the fossil fuel exploit in America. People who are not needed except to consume not having the money to buy the fabulous products of the almost workerless production miracles .
User avatar
efarmer
Intermediate Crude
Intermediate Crude
 
Posts: 2003
Joined: Fri 17 Mar 2006, 04:00:00

Re: Anti doomer: The complexity paradox of technology

Unread postby onlooker » Thu 16 Mar 2017, 14:34:55

Well said Efarmer. And again, how do you Squil counter the Limits to growth arguments that I, Ralfy and Efarmer are making?
"We are mortal beings doomed to die
User avatar
onlooker
Fission
Fission
 
Posts: 10957
Joined: Sun 10 Nov 2013, 13:49:04
Location: NY, USA

Re: Anti doomer: The complexity paradox of technology

Unread postby ralfy » Thu 16 Mar 2017, 15:37:19

Squilliam wrote:These aren't opposites. The movement of production from the west to the east wasn't hunting higher efficiency. Infact the higher efficiency producers are all in the west (hence the story of our relative wealth). If you consider the ultimate inputs, outputs and conversion efficiency of those with respect to the negative externalities produced like pollution we do it better, and are improving all the time. Hence the economic ecology of the west being better than many other countries such as China. If you are willing to work 10 hours and produce slightly more than what another person does in 6 it doesn't mean you're a 'more efficient' person. Comparatively speaking you may get the job, but it doesn't mean you're better at it. The fact that China's growth is coming at the expense of the environment is policy issue rather than a pollution/economic issue.


They are the complete opposite of each other because conservation means decreasing resource use. Higher efficiency in capitalist systems means doing the opposite. That's why resource availability has been dropping while economic output has been rising worldwide, together with pollution. See the graphs in the article I shared for details.

The rest of your paragraph proves my arguments. The U.S. and other countries outsourced because labor costs were lower elsewhere and environmental regulations were lacking, leading to lower overall costs. The use of the dollar as a reserve currency, and then later the petrodollar, only encouraged that movement. The same petrodollar allowed for heavy borrowing and spending to create an "American dream" where less than 5 pct of the world's economy was consuming at least a fifth of world oil production.

There's your "economic ecology": funny money creation to fuel a consumer spending economy.


If we look at the way the economy is set out there are significant numbers of 'low productivity' workers working in the 'service' sector. This is because a significant part of the economy is so damn efficient that it wouldn't matter if 70% of people don't show up to work because economic output would not fall by much at all. Again it is an issue of policy at a political level rather than an issue of the economy. A lot of workers simply replicate in the monetary economy what was once done in the non-monetary economy. Furthermore inequality in incomes means that it is relatively cheap for high income workers to essentially employ a bunch of servants at low cost to do things they could easily do themselves (or wouldn't consider important enough to bother with). High incomes force efficiency from people/businesses, and low incomes the reverse.


That's also connected the first point. Labor costs were rising, and more people no longer wanted to work in factories and farms. Instead, they wanted to work in the service industry and then use large amounts of credit created to buy cheap good from China. Meanwhile, Chinese workers were saving, and then later with the rest of the world started copying the U.S.

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-22956470

That's the same U.S. that has less than 5 pct of the world's population but had been consuming around a fifth of world oil production.

Thus, the economy was so "damn efficient" because it was borrowing and spending heavily form the early 1980s onward:

http://blogs.reuters.com/rolfe-winkler/ ... s-of-debt/

Virtual wealth is still tied to actual wealth. There can be no disconnect between the two because there is a constant conversion between them. If debt rises and the economy doesn't grow, then the debt won't get repaid. There is no real 'crisis' of debt, there just is a need to rationalise the divergence between the two.


Virtual wealth refers to credit. Actual wealth refers to goods and services that money can buy. Those same goods and services require material resources and energy.

The current credit market is many times larger than even global GDP. That disconnect has been taking place for years.


Sure technology is no panacea. The world is having problems, but those problems are a question of 'how' we run the economy more so than 'what' we run the economy on. Capitalism isn't the problem. It's crony capitalism whereby large businesses are capable of distorting the market and the political system for their own ends. Large corporations in the west are not significantly different compared to large state owned enterprises in China for instance except in terms of how they are owned. Technology keeps making the equations tighter in terms of those inputs/outputs tighter, but like a kid with a trust fund and a coke habit we keep blowing it. The paradox still stands because we are moving from a complex globalised system back towards a less complex and yet higher development model. Knowledge and technology are more portable than people, so we will likely see a movement back towards local production of goods/services because robotics/computers are leading a third industrial revolution that makes the comparative advantage of low wage economies much in the same way that subsistence farming cannot compete with industrial agriculture on an open market due to the sheer productivity differences.


Capitalism with competition is how the global population runs the economy. How it runs the economy determines what it is run on. What determines that are profits and returns on investment, both of which are churned into the same economy to make even more profits and returns. And since that involves increasing sales from increasing production (which requires increasing resource and energy use), then it requires more complex systems, including "robotics/computers".

That's why there is no move from a complex global system to a less complex and localized one. The "robotics/computers" used even for "local production of goods/services" required extensive supply chains to manufacture and even to ship. The same "robotics/computers" are not only made using complex processes they also don't make processes simpler. Rather, they make them faster. And as businesses competing with each other dream of even faster "robotics/computers" to provide even more "goods/services" to more people, then the process involves not only more complexity but less localization.
User avatar
ralfy
Light Sweet Crude
Light Sweet Crude
 
Posts: 5569
Joined: Sat 28 Mar 2009, 11:36:38
Location: The Wasteland

Re: Anti doomer: The complexity paradox of technology

Unread postby onlooker » Thu 16 Mar 2017, 16:04:24

And to finish that very clear and accurate explanation by Ralfy, if we decided to alter course from our capitalist industrial world Economy that would put into imminent and immediate jeopardy the life and well being of many people who rely on the mass food production system which relies on on fossil fuels. Not to mention that our vast ubiquitous transportation system ships needed food and medicine to many around the world and also runs on fossil fuels.
So efficiency , technology and productivity are in fact at its core ways to improve and extend our current capitalist industrial world Economy and mode of civilization. The Oil Industry is now in dire straits because essentially oil and other fossil fuels are inherently non renewable finite resources. Our planet's life support systems and consequently our human systems are already facing deadlines on their continued viability because of the huge strain and impacts of our species and its mode of existence. We cannot continue like this much longer as neither Earth nor our huge population will allow it. Yet even totally disengaging will have disastrous consequences
"We are mortal beings doomed to die
User avatar
onlooker
Fission
Fission
 
Posts: 10957
Joined: Sun 10 Nov 2013, 13:49:04
Location: NY, USA

Next

Return to Economics & Finance

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 60 guests