This can't go on (2021)

https://www.cold-takes.com/this-cant-go-on/

by vikrum • 3 years ago

94 130 3 years ago

hyperhello• 3 years ago

My difficulty with this piece is that despite mentioning economic growth over and over and over, even extrapolating a comparison to the number of atoms in the universe for some reason, it gives no working definition of it at all.

Is it money? If all the prices and salaries inflate 2x at the same time, the economy is twice as large without really growing.

Is it people? Then this is just the fear there will be infinite people on the planet, which doesn’t happen because of birth control and feedback-regulating to 2.2 children.

Is it that we will all have huge loans, not just home and education, but on everything as the price of living in society and are expected to make regular payments?

What is “the size of the economy” and how is it relevant over a thousand years? Your graph is meaningless penciling without knowing this.

turnsout5• 3 years ago

Came here to post exactly this. If it’s just about the amount of dollars in the world economy adjusted for inflation, then it’s just a graph of inflation and population growth.

Despite the “size of the economy,” skyrocketing, peoples’ lives are not fundamentally different than they were 100 years ago.

duped• 3 years ago

You can't argue that last point and be taken seriously.

TeMPOraL2• 3 years ago

Ultimately, even the amount of matter/energy you need to store a single instance of a number representing the sum of all dollars in the ever-growing economy, will exceed the capacity of observable universe...

rewmie• 3 years ago

Is it money? If all the prices and salaries inflate 2x at the same time, the economy is twice as large without really growing.

I think that the blog post boils down to specious reasoning largely because it focus on "economic growth" but fails to even acknowledge the existence of inflation, not to mention recessions and outright deflations.

gjm113• 3 years ago

I think the claims in the piece are fairly robust to changes in the definition of economic growth. That is: for any reasonable definition of terms like "economy", "wealth", etc., it seems (1) fairly clear that "the economy", meaning in some sense the total amount of actual "wealth", has been growing at a few percent per year on average for quite a while, and (2) monstrously unlikely that "the economy", meaning in some sense the total amount of actual "wealth", can continue to grow at a few percent per year on average for, say, the next 10k years.

(Because, as the author says, that would mean having as much of whatever-it-is-that-economies-are-made-of per atom in the galaxy as we currently have in total.)

So for that sort of growth to continue for that long, something very radical would have to change. (We discover how to teleport arbitrary distances, or to move to entirely different universes, so we are no longer limited by the size of this galaxy. It turns out that humans really are immaterial souls that just live in material bodies, and we find a way to break free of the physical world altogether. At least that sort of level of radical-ness.)

Hence, either the growth we are all used to will have to slow dramatically, or some other radical change will have to happen, or both.

None of this depends on the details of how you define "the size of the economy" -- though, as you say, some particular choices you can make (but that no one ever actually does) would invalidate the argument.

(When people talk about economic growth, they never mean growth in nominal dollars or whatever. That would be silly. They never mean mere population increase, independent of the wealth of that population. That would be silly.)

Supermancho2• 3 years ago

it seems (1) fairly clear that "the economy", meaning in some sense the total amount of actual "wealth", has been growing at a few percent per year on average for quite a while,

It's not clear at all and I certainly don't think that's the case, personally. Dollar numbers went up, population went up (barely - https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/popu...). Wealth was extracted and concentrated, not necessarily grown. The wealth was extracted from more primitive foreign economies as the poor of the US became less attractive for labor. The number of fabs/factories that moved out the US is a telling factor.

skybrian• 3 years ago

I think it does matter which way you think about growth because the bottlenecks differ and the solutions or workarounds differ.

Energy use seems likely to remain a bottleneck? Even if the energy itself became much cheaper, you need to figure out what to do with the heat.

wizofaus4• 3 years ago

for any reasonable definition of terms like "economy", "wealth"...

By today's standards, I'd probably agree. But in 100, 200, 500 and certainly 1000 years time, I suspect we'll have quite different ideas of what economic growth looks like.

thomaslord• 3 years ago

I imagine that economists probably correct for inflation when putting this data together. I can't speak for these graphs 100%, but I think the real issue we're talking about here is not money or people but resources. Resources can be roughly mapped to people, with the confounding factor that each person consumes a different level of resources. As we approach the resource limits of our planet (and potentially nearby planets) that confounding factor becomes less relevant, because we eventually won't have enough resources available for anyone to consume more than they strictly require to stay alive.

NotYourLawyer2• 3 years ago

GDP measures the production of a country. It’s inflation-adjusted (as compared to nominal GDP, which goes up when inflation is high).

This is just the worldwide version of GDP.

Sniffnoy4• 3 years ago

My difficulty with this piece is that despite mentioning economic growth over and over and over, even extrapolating a comparison to the number of atoms in the universe for some reason, it gives no working definition of it at all.

This is false. He links to an explanation of what he means by it in the very first footnote. (That link points here, btw: https://www.cold-takes.com/what-is-economic-growth/ )

irrational• 3 years ago

Then this is just the fear there will be infinite people on the planet, which doesn’t happen because of birth control and feedback-regulating to 2.2 children.

Except, it isn’t regulating to 2.2, is it? Many countries are already well below 2.2 and more are falling below that level each year. I assume the population implosion will have some affect on the economy.

ptdorf• 3 years ago

population implosion

This is the real problem. The planet have resources to sustain 11 billion people.

Real wages is consistently declining in the West over the last 50 years, as well incentives to raise children. These economies will stagnate, if not spiral negatively, as less consumers leads to lower financial ability to raise new generations.

Not just the west but also China, Japan, South Korea.

xwowsersx• 3 years ago

August 2021

louwrentius• 3 years ago

HN 2021 discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28053649

rco8786• 3 years ago

I don’t really understand the “atoms in the universe” argument. That has nothing to do with the size of an economy. We don’t need an atom to represent every “bit” of an economy.

swid• 3 years ago

It’s a poor way of phrasing things, but think like this - there are certain physical inputs to the economy. Ores, power, water, stuff like that. That stuff is processed into stuff of greater value, and that adds value to the economy. We can also increase the value by extracting more raw inputs.

So let’s say the economy is growing exponentially, some percentage per year. Either we keep using more raw inputs, or we keep increasing the value of those inputs. That is where the 2% growth comes from.

If we don’t add new inputs, and exponential growth continues, the outputs will grow to such great value that the raw materials are relatively worthless. But that seems wrong to me - if the physical materials are worthless, someone could buy them all and corner the market and charge whatever they want. It can only happen if scarcity is completely eliminated.

dwaltrip2• 3 years ago

Economic growth is strongly correlated with energy usage. Energy requires atoms.

konschubert9• 3 years ago

A number of countries have decoupled economic growth from energy use, even if we take offshored production into account

https://ourworldindata.org/energy-gdp-decoupling

rvbissell3• 3 years ago

Their point was that -- since there are a finite number of atoms in the universe-- it is a given that there exists some upper-bound on growth.

They are intentionally calling attention to that absurd extreme as a rhetoric device, not out of a belief that that's when we'll hit the wall. (It's a safe bet they believe will hit the wall much much much sooner.)

konschubert9• 3 years ago

You can have growth without using more material or more energy.

zuhayeer3• 3 years ago

The limiting factor isn't atoms, it's always been knowledge. Before we knew what coal was capable of, it was just a rock. Knowledge unlocks abundance with the limited resources we have.

mr_toad2• 3 years ago

The number of atoms is finite but the number of states of those atoms is infinite. And the combinations of all those atoms in different states far exceeds the number of atoms.

What probably matters more than the number of atoms is the useful work that can employed in order to arrange those atoms in useful configurations.

The upper limit of economic growth is probably limited by the amount of computation that can be done before the end of the universe.

bloaf• 3 years ago

Fundamentally, the "size of the economy" measures value creation, i.e. the conversion of low value atoms into higher value atoms.

The economy grows by either converting more atoms, or changing the value of the in/output.

Obviously "sustaining more people" requires proportionally more atoms, so exponentially growing population implies exponential economic growth.

What happens in the constant population assumption is an open question.

It could be that our rate of atom conversion also becomes constant/decline. We might become more efficient and grow the economy by increasing the value of the atoms we convert. The economy might cease growing altogether because we reach a technological plateau and need satiety.

But it's also possible that we'll decouple demand from the capitas, and find whole new ways and reasons to increase atom conversion.

Sniffnoy4• 3 years ago

The post links to a followup post where he discusses this point further: https://www.cold-takes.com/more-on-multiple-world-size-econo...

erlich• 3 years ago

There's always gonna be space when you jack into Zuck's metaverse.

user6723• 3 years ago

The singularity approaches, to take your job.

akira25012• 3 years ago

The world can't just keep growing at this rate indefinitely. We should be ready for other possibilities: stagnation (growth slows or ends), explosion (growth accelerates even more, before hitting its limits), and collapse (some disaster levels the economy).

Sure, you could prepare for imagined eventualities, or you could do the actual work of improving efficiency, reducing waste and unnecessary middle-men, and removing centuries old bureaucracies that are now absurdly pointless in the face of the internet.

There is an underlying _desire_ for apocalypse encoded in this type of thinking.

mejutoco3• 3 years ago

Good point. Improving efficiency alone can bring increased consumption, not less. I think if we think of the world as regions it is easy to think of regional collapses while the world as a whole keeps growing. We, or at least me, have been lucky so far.

erwald• 3 years ago

"Sure, you could prepare for imagined eventualities, or you could do the actual work of improving efficiency, reducing waste and unnecessary middle-men, and removing centuries old bureaucracies that are now absurdly pointless in the face of the internet. There is an underlying _desire_ for apocalypse encoded in this type of thinking."

OP was written by the person who co-founded GiveWell[1] to make charitable giving more effective, and who while running Open Philanthropy oversaw lots of grants to things like innovation policy[2], scientific research[3], and land use reform[4].

Anyway, more broadly I think you present a false dilemma. You can both prepare for tail risks and also make important marginal and efficiency improvements.

[1] https://www.givewell.org/ [2] https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/innovation-policy/ [3] https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/scientific-research/ [4] https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus/land-use-reform/

Sniffnoy4• 3 years ago

This comment is Bulverism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism) and makes no attempt to engage with whether the linked post is actually correct or not.

akira25012• 3 years ago

I disagree. I'm agreeing with the basic assertion that the future looks grim but that it is ultimately unknowable. As such, putting work in into improving those possible outcomes is better than hopefully preparing for their eventual outcome.

In any case, I'm at least suggesting _a_ course of action.

tomcam• 3 years ago

there aren't enough atoms in the galaxy to sustain this rate of growth for even another 10,000 years

Now I’m getting nervous

konschubert9• 3 years ago

[Growth is] faster than it can be for all that much longer (there aren't enough atoms in the galaxy to sustain this rate of growth for even another 10,000 years).

This assume that growth has to involve atoms.

If we figure out, say, how to make a room temperature superconductor, we don't necessarily need to use more stuff - in fact, we can now build two MRIs with the same amount of atoms that we needed earlier to build just one.

That is growth, without using more atoms.

gjm113• 3 years ago

The argument isn't "economic growth has to be growth in number of atoms".

It's "if the economy grows at say 2% for say 10k years, without anything happening that today's physics says is downright impossible, then at the end of that time humanity will (1) still be physically confined to this galaxy and (2) be so wealthy that we will have as much wealth as the whole present-day economy times the number of atoms at our disposal; hence either (a) that growth will slow dramatically, or (b) something will happen that today's physics says is downright impossible, or (c) some other change will happen that decouples us from our component atoms so radically that it's possible to have a whole present-day economy's worth of wealth per atom or more; none of these options can reasonably be described as "business as usual".

ben_w9• 3 years ago

So you've made each thing of a single atom, and yet still used every atom.

10^86 fundamental particles in the entire observable universe is great, until you have 2% compound annual interest for ten millennia that's giving you 1.02^10,000 growth factor, which is 10^86.

konschubert9• 3 years ago

You can create growth without needing a single additional atom.

Sometimes growth can in fact reduce resource demands.

Growth just means that we learn to do things better.

sempron64• 3 years ago

10000 years is a long, long time. Civilization has only been around for 3-4k years. We shouldn't bother planning further than 1000 years ahead, it's too hard to imagine. Realistically, humanity is awful at planning further than 100 years. Even the most critical infrastructure is built with a lifespan of about 50-100 years and needs to be refurbished.

In 100 years at a 2% growth rate we'd have to grow the economy about 7x.

This seems quite do-able. We would need significant technological advancement but this seems to be happening; there is no technological ceiling. We do not need to colonize space to achieve this, even though it would be nice to colonize space and give us another few hundred years of runway.

There's no reason to assume we can't maintain 2% global growth for the duration of our lifetimes. Whatever is after that we'll have to leave for future generations. Sustainability is important. Controlling climate change is important. I expect the world will look quite different in 100 years and at some point we must trust in the future generations.

Sniffnoy4• 3 years ago

The post links to a followup post where he discusses this point further: https://www.cold-takes.com/more-on-multiple-world-size-econo...

delocalized• 3 years ago

Maybe there's something I'm missing, but I don't really understand the author's focus on monetary value here. The question I would be asking is: how is the capability of the individual changing? There is little point in comparing the value of a journey by horse four hundred years ago to the same journey by aeroplane today. To reduce each to a numerical value feels like a conflation that makes this argument deeply flawed at minimum.

Animats• 3 years ago

The world will be dominated by populations either poor or religious.[1]

Note that below 2.1 on that chart, the human population shrinks.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-fertil...

kibwen• 3 years ago

In raw numbers (which is what I assume you mean, given that you linked to a fertility chart), the world is already dominated by populations that are religious and wealth-poor, and this has been true on a global scale for the entirety of recorded history. You appear to just be saying that it will be business as usual?

giraffe_lady• 3 years ago

Or is just voicing the apparently unnerving idea that those groups will achieve power & influence in proportion to their numbers.

lifeisstillgood• 3 years ago

I have always seen the fundamentals of "growth in the economy" as either more efficient use of energy (such as moving from open campfire to heath and chimney). But that begs the question "use to do what?" And that leads us to "human satisfaction". We measure all of this in an entirely anthropomorphic manner.

And so we could "grow" the economy by increasing human welfare - we could in theory keep the economy the same "size" but distribute it differently and still see masssive increase in human welfare (We talk about the chinese miracle of lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty - and yes there is a generation of chinese today whose living grandparent's can talk of picking grains of rice off the dirt just to live another day. Some large measurable percentage of chinese growth was just moving factories and manufacturing from one place in America to another in guandong. It was re-distribution as opposed to "growth".

The point I am not making is that yes de-carbonisation is needed, yes a more sustainable economy is needed, but for human welfare to increase we need to not think of maximising profit but maximising human utility

Cities that are inspiring of urban wastelands, jobs and education, health and politics that benefit all humankind

We will find more "growth" in socialism than capitalism and more happiness in democracy than totalitarianism

Vt71fcAqt72• 3 years ago

It was re-distribution as opposed to "growth"

The amount lost by America (if at all) is not equal to the Amount gained by China. So it is not re-distribution.

CMCDragonkai• 3 years ago

Alot of Americans have this strange notion that Chinese growth was basically equal to US factories being moved there, as if the entire reason why the Chinese economy grew was because the west allowed. It's really quite telling about their world view.

pedalpete• 3 years ago

I think economic growth is the wrong metric to be measuring as it is a number which we ourselves have created, and if we say today there are 10 trillion and tomorrow there are 1,000 trillion it doesn't REALLY change anything.

This doesn't map to the idea of comparing the number of dollars in the economy to the number of atoms in the galaxy. Dollars are not finite, we can make them up, and have been.

Yes, our technological progress has been increasing exponentially, but what suggests there is an upper bound to knowledge? Can all things be known? When all things are known, what does that mean for us?

At that point, we'll be able to answer if we're operating in a simulation or not, and with that knowledge, what do we do then?

zuhayeer3• 3 years ago

This feels like the modern equivalent of Malthusian theory. Many people have had similar thoughts throughout much of history, but human prosperity has always prevailed. Knowledge is infinite, and as long as there is new knowledge to seek, things are never going to stagnate or be over. Atoms have never been the limiting factor, it's been knowledge on what to do with them.

Knowledge makes the existence of resources infinite: https://nav.al/infinite-resources

Pessimism seems like an intellectually serious position: https://nav.al/pessimism

mitthrowaway2• 3 years ago

It certainly can't be infinite. It might be a really big limit. It might be asymptotically approached, and never reached. But even very big combinatorial numbers are not to be confused with infinity.

If there is no limit to prosperity, it follows that not only do you not run out of atoms, you also don't run out of ways to rearrange those atoms that you prefer to earlier arrangements. In that case there is no configuration of the universe that is ultimately the most preferable, which must mean that you have exploitable cyclic preferences.

abecedarius3• 3 years ago

The post makes a case for a radically expanded future as a possibility we can't seriously ignore -- that a "business as usual" future doesn't make sense. Your objection is that you don't expect stagnation. Neither does the writer!

johnnyworker2• 3 years ago

Nobody, nobody, is sitting there complaining about a world in which knowledge is growing.

[..] this machine, which itself is constructed in such a way that it can devour the globe simply by following its own inherent law. By "Victory or Death," the Leviathan can indeed overcome all political limitations that go with the existence of other peoples and can envelop the whole earth in its tyranny. But when the last war has come and every man has been provided for, no ultimate peace is established on earth: the power-accumulating machine, without which continual expansion would not have been achieved, needs more material to devour in its never-ending process. If the last victorious Commonwealth cannot proceed to "annex the planets," it can only proceed to destroy itself in order to begin anew the never-ending process of power generation.

-- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

"Knowledge is infinite" means nothing. Things not stagnating or being over also means nothing, that description would fit any nightmarish scenario, too.

We are destroying the habitats of species at such a rate, we barely have begun exploring the ocean and we will never even know what is already lost for good. Knowledge. We know that inequality is rising at increasing pace, that people starve, that for the first time, future generations have less to look forward to than previous ones... what more do we need to know to do something with that all knowledge? Or is the knowledge what to do with the knowledge some kind of cherry on top reserved for last?

While some say "knowledge" and what a fascinating adventure it all is, I just hear "numbness" and "alienation". Collecting gimmicky factoids about the world at best, factoids about man-made concepts at worst, while not seeing the woods for all the trees. You say pessimism, I say toxic positivity, now what?

I found a fridge magnet in form of the Hebrew letter Shin recently, and because I had time to pass I read some stuff about it, including this:

When the shin is representative of the intellectual dimension, the three lines stand for the three intellectual faculties of the Sefiros: the right line being Chochmah, the flash of an idea; the left line being Binah, understanding; and the centerline Daas, application of knowledge.

-- https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/137093/jewish...

Knowledge without understanding is worse than no knowledge in my opinion, and without application, even understanding is worse than no understanding. Or as MLK put it:

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

jvanderbot2• 3 years ago

The galaxy is a big place. We may stagnate a bit, but if we can cross the interplanetary threshold, I think it's smooth sailing to galactic growth.

ziknard2• 3 years ago

We can't, and never will. The speed of light, and the tyranny of the rocket equation, prevents us from doing this in bulk, ever.

It is delusional to think otherwise. We need to act as if this is our only home.

jvanderbot2• 3 years ago

I disagree. Can't imagine how we'd do it, but I disagree.

imgabe• 3 years ago

How do you even make a meaningful comparison to the "size of the economy"? What was the price of an air conditioner in 1850? Effectively infinite, it didn't exist. Clothing used to take hundreds of man-hours to make and clean and repair and it's almost disposable today. There's so much more like that. If the economy is "bigger" in some sense, it's not just that there's more activity going on, but there are also entirely new types of activities that weren't even possible before. It has nothing to do with the number of atoms available.

phs318u2• 3 years ago

In 1972, the Club of Rome published their seminal report, “Limits to Growth”, which basically concluded the same thing - this can’t go on - and put an outer limit of around 2100 as to when this system will hit the wall (my words).

https://www.clubofrome.org/publication/the-limits-to-growth/

3abiton• 3 years ago

I'm curious about the "my words", is this a reference for not using a LLM?

bee_rider• 3 years ago

I believe they just mean that they aren’t directly quoting the club.

marcus_holmes• 3 years ago

At the end of the Roman Empire [0] a lot of technology was lost, a lot of Europe went backwards in terms of the progress we see. A lot of people died. There was even a climate catastrophe [1].

The Anglo-Saxons told stories of the Giants who built the aqueducts, because the technology for building them was lost.

If you looked at GDP for Europe, it dived. Completely collapsed. Trade between areas of the former Empire ceased. Barbarians looted cities and destroyed infrastructure.

It took us a few hundred years to recover. But we did recover.

So, couple of points:

1. I don't see this collapse in these smooth graphs with the lines going up and to the right of the last few thousand years.

2. Like most graphs that go up and to the right, it's actually a mess of ups and downs if you zoom in. Progress isn't smooth - it's lumpy and sometimes goes backwards. And it's fractal. There's plenty of space there for things to go down as well as up on a macro scale.

3. We're in an "up" bit of the graph. Both in terms of the last few hundred years, and (zooming out) the last few thousand. That doesn't mean the whole graph always goes up and to the right.

So yes, I agree with TFA that "this can't go on" if "this" is portrayed as a smooth progression from barbarism to TikTok. But I disagree that "this" has been smooth. There have been plenty of downs as well. And so "this" can go on if we agree that the value of "this" can go down as well as up, on a macro scale as well as micro.

[0] The Western Roman Empire at least. The Eastern half carried on for quite a while longer. And arguably the Western half turned itself into a church instead of collapsing. But the point remains.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter_of_536

derbOac• 3 years ago

Articles like the one that is the focus of this thread always interest me; even if they're incorrect in their main argument, I sometimes feel like a broader perspective is needed than the post world war era-present perspective that's usually the focus of discussions. Usually it seems they only go back to the 1980s or so, and even less so to the 1950s, and even less so to the 1930s. But it seems some complete history, going back throughout history, is needed?

Do you or anyone here on HN have some good, quantitative references for something like World GDP per capita over all of human history? Obviously that's difficult but it seems as if some rough estimates could be obtained.

I looked in the linked article but didn't see anything quite like what I was looking for. But I might have missed it.

This is the only thing I could find offhand that's what I'm looking for, but I wondered if there's something more peer-reviewed:

https://delong.typepad.com/print/20061012_LRWGDP.pdf

I think the data in there is roughly consistent with the assumptions of the linked post but it's hard to find concrete estimates.

Then there's stuff like this which is what you're pointing out:

https://www2.econ.iastate.edu/classes/econ355/choi/rankh.htm

It too is what I had always read and learned in history courses but without concrete economic figures.

xg15• 3 years ago

We're used to the world economy growing a few percent per year. This has been the case for many generations.

This is a thing that has been puzzling me for a while. Isn't "growth by a few percent each year" already exponential?

E.g. if you had a constant economic growth of 1% per year, that would mean that this year's GDP would always be 101% of last year's GDP, which is exponential growth.

So even with a "constant" relative growth rate, the plot of "absolute" GDP over time would eventually become a hockey-stick curve - things would be expected to get weird at some point if the steepness of the curve crosses some threshold.

ziknard2• 3 years ago

Every time my CEO speaks in an all-staff meeting, the subject is growth. Growth is the main theme and entire substance of the meeting.

I think he is insane. So is anyone who is in favour of perpetual growth in a finite environment.

Apparently, our political leaders are also in favor of perpetual growth. So is the media.

They should all be locked up in an institution for the criminally insane.

walleeee• 3 years ago

It’s hard to make a simple chart of how fast science and technology are advancing, the same way we can make a chart for economic growth. But I think that if we could, it would present a broadly similar picture as the economic growth chart.

This is a common feeling but I think it is wrong. Consider the following intuition pump (due to astrophysicist Tom Murphy, one of whose blog posts is cited in the article). Take someone from 1880 and plop them down in 1950. Take someone from 1950 and wizard them into the modern day. Who has a harder time understanding the world? The one from the 50s may think our little black rectangles look a bit silly, but would suspect immediately that they are telephones and operate by radio. On the other hand, you'd have to teach the 19th century-dweller nearly all modern physics from the ground up.

Of course our understanding of some fields (e.g. biology, artificial intelligence) has grown by leaps and bounds since 1950, but it is hard to argue these advances have changed the face of the earth or our civilizational prospects in the same way.

ben_w9• 3 years ago

I think the 1880s person might have an easier time with smartphones.

Tell them we figured out how to bind souls from beyond the veil into magic mirrors, and they'll immediately understand how it can show arbitrary images, video, sound, simulation.

Show a smartphone to someone from 1950 who just saw the atom bomb a few years earlier and might have read Foundation — where Hari Seldon is introduced as being so mathematically inclined he not only has a calculator, but has used it so much the numbers have worn off the buttons — and they won't understand how a device the size of a single vacuum tube can create novel art in the style of the great masters (or whatever Spock's line was in the episode where they met an immortal who had actually been many of the great artists in Earth's history; gen-AI is certainly already causing upheaval, we have yet to find out if this will end up with something analogous to the way the industrial revolution lead directly to the invention of Communism), and best everyone at chess, and speak 40 languages (contrary to what you say, I believe this alone has changed the world significantly), and take photographs (let alone video), and have a built-in library of tens of thousands of books (true story: I got my dad a 1 gig USB stick at his request, when I gave it to him my gran asked how many books it could store, I said "about 600 the size of the Bible" and she was incredulous).

Society may have learned a lot in that time, but it's been a very long time since any one of us saw the whole thing.

And if you do the same with medicine rather than hand radio, you get most DNA research from double helix on, successful organ transplants, the end of smallpox, MRI, IVF, oral contraceptives, and some vat-grown organs.

What we do to mice would make us seem like either gods or demons, and I'm not sure which.

GM food is pretty significant, too.

amadazia• 3 years ago

The rothschilds already said that we are going to pay several years ago. Pandemics, refugees, natural disasters. They will ruthlessly use any of these to their advantage. And it is these bloodlines that need to be wiped from the human race.

This can't go on (2021)

Related Stories