21 Jun 2008
Singularities and Stupidities

My friend James over at within the crainium posted a link to an interesting article at the New York Times by Donald MacNeil taking on the doom and gloom "End of the World" thinkers and arguing that we are approaching an economic "singularity" that will, somehow, save us from ourselves and obviate the problems caused by the depletion of fossil fuels and overpopulation. Exactly what this singularity is and how it will work he doesn't say, and indeed he cannot say, because if he could it wouldn't be a singularity, but his optimism almost wells through the page like a newly struck Saudi oil gusher.

Unfortunately, his article (and the articles he links in support of his premise) are filled with so much fiction and misunderstanding of history as to make the whole premise untenable. Let's take a closer look, shall we?

He starts off with a straw man, trotting out Thomas Malthus and his early 19th century arguments on population and agriculture, and essentially saying "See, this fellow was wrong two hundred years ago when he predicted gloom and doom, therefore those who predict the same today are wrong as well." Malthus was wrong, and discredited, for failing to see the rise of the Industrial Revolution, therefore anyone who predicts disaster today must be failing to see the rise of ... what? Who knows?

Funny thing - I haven't read the name "Malthus" in any of the reading I've done of late on "Peak Oil", even on the most doom laden sites. Perhaps I've merely missed it, but that doesn't make the argument any less specious: should I be pessimistic about the future because so many utopian visions have been disproven? The fact that some person or group was wrong in the past when pontificating about a general premise does not mean that all persons/groups holding forth today on the same topic are necessarily wrong (or right). It's a footnote, not an argument.

Following his trip down memory lane to the early ninetheenth century, Mr. MacNeil proceeds to trot out another modern bogeyman: animal agriculture. This is a subject I know a little bit about:

The whole world has never come close to outpacing its ability to produce food. Right now, there is enough grain grown on earth to feed 10 billion vegetarians, said Joel E. Cohen, professor of populations at Rockefeller University and the author of “How Many People Can the Earth Support?” But much of it is being fed to cattle, the S.U.V.’s of the protein world, which are in turn guzzled by the world’s wealthy.

There are a number of problems with this: first off, it's only in the US and other "modern" agricultural economies that cattle are fed grain - in the rest of the world they graze over non-productive land eating the grasses and weeds that can grow there. The reason we feed cattle grain here is speed - it takes much less time to finish a bovine for slaughter on corn than it does on grass - about half the time, in fact.

Secondly, even vegetarians require protein, and cereal grains aren't exactly a good source of that particular nutrient. Which means more beans and other legumes, which are considerably more intensive to grow that the cereals (which are grasses). Which cuts down on the amount of possible production.

But the most egregious error is one of economics - no body can serious dispute that we can't grow enough to feed the current population - obviously, the current population is being fed (albeit many at a subsistence level). The real problem is distribution. And that requires energy. Lots of it.

In fact, the whole "Green Revolution" requires energy - a subject that Mr. MacNeil's article seems to be studiously avoiding. The fertilizers, tractors, reapers and technology that made the productive explosion in agriculture possible absolutely depend on cheap energy, and in the case of fertilizers, oil. As if to underscore his ignorance of this basic fact, the word "energy" never appears in MacNeil's article at all!

In another article from the Times, this one by John Tierney, also linked by James (in fact, it was the leader link in his blog post), MacNeil's piece is treated as gospel, and then the real fun begins. We're off to the Singularity.

This is Ray Kurzweil's vision, a future in which no one dies, because everyone is uploaded to a computer. Douglas R. Hofstadter, author of the AI classic Godel, Escher, Bach has described Kurzweil’s work as “if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad. It's an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it's very hard to disentangle the two."

Exactly what this "singularity"has to do with economics is not made clear. In fact, Tierney ignores energy as well, and the other article he cites only mentions it once:

The population of smart machines would explode even faster than the economy. So even though total wealth would increase very rapidly, wealth per machine would fall rapidly. If these smart machines are considered “people,” then most people would be machines, and per-person wealth and wages would quickly fall to machine-subsistence levels, which would be far below human-subsistence levels. Salaries would probably be just high enough to cover the rent on a tiny body, a few cubic centimeters of space, the odd spare part, a few watts of energy and heat dumping, and a Net connection.

This is the ostrich approach to peak oil and fossil fuel depletion: if we pretend it doesn't exist, perhaps it'll just go away and we can have all the energy we need to build our immortal machines. And these are the guys who think Malthus was nuts? I want some of whatever they've been smoking.

This whole "everything will come up roses because the human race is so incredibly inventive" strikes me as nothing more than the other side of the "we're all doomed because the human race is so greedy and stupid" coin. If you want a realistic picture, try standing the coin on edge: yes, we're inventive, but our inventiveness has never saved us from major dislocations and disruptions. Yes, we're greedy and arrogant, but that's never stopped us from being humane and compassionate.

The world will not end in twenty years time. But we're not going to dematerialize into uploaded bliss ninnys either. And a little more realism would go a long way towards making the transitions we're going to have to make as painless as possible.

08:52 /Politics | 1 comment | permanent link