NPC wrote:
I am glad this is back up. I've checked the link once every few weeks for quite some time and was always disappointed until now. I hope Kofi is feeling better and up to regaling us with more facts soon.
I think technology is becoming important as population grows. Effectively, any sufficiently large system will have a significant number of byproducts/externalities. Cataloging and tracking these on a systemic scale (and working around them) would be nearly impossible at our current populations without technology. That said, it could be argued that population has grown to current levels because of technology. I tend to think of humanity as a slime mold. They have some very basic awareness of the whole, and how their actions affect the whole, but overall are only concerned with their immediate awareness. If you get a few billion entities like this, resources can become exhausted very quickly. The oft-celebrated idea of "markets" supposedly reacts to these sorts of things without requiring collective awareness, but I think we're seeing how little useful information prices actually convey. I believe economic transcendence will operate on the backs of new technologies.
So maybe Kaczynski was right, but there are things in motion we simply cannot stop and it's better and embrace and build new solutions and systems instead of trying to hold back the tide.
