Predictions of Environmental Doom

If current trends continue, then the population will, sooner or later acheive zero growth, end of story. That's what the second derivative means. It's not a question of "If" but "When".

 

My personal opinion is that we're a long way - in some respects at least anyway from reaching any sort of 'critical mass', however avoiding any kind of crunch requires a paradigm shift.

For example, somewhere around here (figuratively speaking) i have a plan for using technology that includes OTEC to produce electricity, fresh drinking water, and useable minerals - including liquid hydrocarbons (and yes, by that I mean crude oil). What I lack is the capital to pilot the project, and any kind of investor with the motivation to provide such capital.

My personal opinion is that if we focused on the right technologies, which I don't think we currently are, then the earth has the capacity to support substantially more Humans than most people consider, without screwing the environment to do so.

 

Actually, more correctly it's a combination of solar thermal and OTEC, but eh.

 

Naaah, I reckon it's pretty straight forward really.

We have three 'basic' needs from which everything else flows - Food, Drinking water, and an external source of energy (electricity, at the moment).

 

Sure, because it's a big country. But imagine how many more trees they would have had to cut down and how much worse the visual pollution would be in their cities if, once the population became affluent enough for a telephone to no longer be a luxury, everyone had a land line.

Tell that to the federal government, arguably the nation's largest employer if you count contractors--who may be uncountable since, last I heard, no one keeps centralized statistics on them! Their managers continue to evaluate performance 100% on how many hours their employees spend in the office rather than on how much they produce, for obvious reasons that I won't elaborate through this corporate server. They, and the legions of private-sector managers who regard them as role models, have taught two generations of American workers how to look busy, which is even easier nowadays with a computer screen on every desk.

• Home health aids. Much of this will be automated, such as observation, feeding and medication. Even physical movement, such as to the bathroom or exercise, will yield to robotics.
• Customer service representatives. What happened? Did India forget to pay its electric bill?
• Combined food preparation and serving workers, including fast food. Still thinking inside the box, I see. Restaurant patrons may value personal service and be willing to pay for it, although their kitchens and maintenance will be increasingly automated. But fast food is an assembly line, and all assembly lines are eventually automated. Moreover, as people spend more time at home and less time driving, the market for fast food will decrease.
• Retail salespersons. We're sexagenarians and do much of our shopping online. Most of the rest is in stores like Costco and Target, where there are virtually no "salespersons." Even my supermarket has full-silicon checkout lines where you scan and weigh your own groceries.
• Office clerks, general. They're joking. The biggest complaint from managers about the workstation revolution is that they no longer have secretaries, file clerks, receptionists and typists. It's been said that workstations don't always improve productivity, a statement you can validate by watching an executive spend half an hour trying to center the heading on a report.
• Accountants and auditors. These guys have proven to not be as reliable, efficient, skillful and honest as we assumed. Even the U.S. Comptroller of the Currency, a direct presidentail appointee, was too busy filling out forms and going to unproductive meetings, to direct his bank examiners to look a little more carefully at the bizarre, counterintuitive phenomenon of subprime mortgages. Besides, they too can work more efficiently with automated tools and online resources.
• Construction laborers. How much new office space will be needed once the telecommuting revolution actually starts to happen? And how much new residential space will be needed when the population begins to stabilize? Not to mention, even "blue collar" jobs have become more productive with the help of automation.
• Landscaping and groundskeeping workers. Homeowners won't be hiring as many gardeners when they spend more time enjoying their gardens and less time driving to work. And this type of "manual labor" has also been made less labor-intensive by modern technology. You see a lot more machinery and a lot fewer people on gardening and landscaping gigs.
• Bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing clerks. Say hello to your new AI.
• Executive secretaries and administrative assistants. The CEO of my company types his own correspondence, updates his own spreadsheets, and even makes his own coffee!
• Management analysts. Again, a job made more productive by software.
• Computer software engineers, applications. Now these people are getting into my own field of expertise and their ignorance is laughable. The functionality automated by the average software project is about twenty times greater than it was when I started in this business and the quality, sophistication and user-friendliness are immeasurably greater, yet the average project team is much smaller thanks to 4GLs, relational databases, structured programming and the demise of batch processing. Besides, if there is any economic sector in which telecommuting is 100% appropriate, it's IT!
• Receptionists and information clerks. Rapidly being replaced by a screen in the lobby.
• First-line supervisors/managers of office and administrative support workers. Once again, a preposterous assertion in one of my own fields of expertise displays the poor quality of the scholarship that went into this table. Another of the biggest criticisms of the workstation revolution is that it has made the position of first-line supervisor obsolete. Everyone does his own timekeeping, schedules his own meetings, coordinates his own workflow, and reports directly to a manager. As a result, the crusty but wise old nag (of either gender) who in the past housebroke us and trained us in the ways of supervision is gone. People are now promoted directly into management without having any of the knowledge, skills or experience that the job requires. I find it amusing that people who insist that computers are not changing the world for the better manage to overlook the many very real ways in which they have caused serious problems along the way.
• Waiters and waitresses. I don't understand why this wasn't included with "food preparation and service workers." As I noted there, many people now "eat out" because they don't have time to cook. The telecommuting revolution will make a big dent in that industry.

In summary, many of the assertions on this list are patently false. And overall, the compilers have caught the world in a state of transition, when the Electronic Revolution is nowhere near its ultimate full impact. Come back in fifty years and count the number of humans who are making hamburgers, analyzing accounting records, caring for the elderly, answering questions, building houses, etc., using the archaic labor-intensive techniques of the Industrial Era.

And will continue to do so, but not indefinitely. The Industrial Revolution was well underway in 1890, but even then the majority of Americans were still trapped in the food production and distribution industry. A hundred years later more Americans schlep, sell and serve food than actually grow it, and even their jobs are being steadily automated. Unfortunately often in ways that make us cringe, such as "factory farms."

As production and marketing become more automated, it stands to reason that service will eclipse those occupations. Nonetheless, the production, manipulation, analysis and distribution of information will be the dominant industry. This will be one of the major factors in the redefinition of economics, as more people produce what they use--Toffler coined the word prosumers. This covers everyone from the homeowner who does his own remodeling using today's nearly idiot-proof tools, to the teenager putting together his own iTunes playlist for his next party (he doesn't even need to transcribe his vinyl to cassettes in real time, as we had to), to the vacationer who plans his own itinerary and books all of his own flights, hotels and tours, to the registered charity whose clerks manage their own ad campaigns and finances without professional help.

Of course. Just because we use fewer people to make food doesn't mean that the Neolithic Revolution is over either. But just as agriculture, despite still being a major component of the human race's GDP, is no longer our largest employer, the same will happen to manufacturing.

Much of that production is driven by consumption. Not only are there more people every year who were born with none of those things, but their parents are more prosperous so they can buy them those things. This is why the Baby Boom drove both our culture and our economy for a couple of generations. Everything from hula hoops to rock and roll to motorcycles to universities to liposuction to baby carriages built like little Volvos to relief from ED and menopause and, ultimately, to nursing homes, was built to satisfy the insatiable demands of that explosive market.

When the death rate equals the birth rate, and begins to exceed it, there won't be as much manufacturing.

Sure, they picked and chose the Industrial Era technologies that suited them. But they built very few factories and their railroad network was a joke.

The Industrial Revolution was about far more than mechanized farming. The printing press was the catalyst for public education and universal literacy. Workers whose productivity was multiplied by technology had larger incomes and "discretionary income" came into existence as well as leisure time and recreational travel. Educated people who could read the wealth of printed material available began to agitate for democracy, and they had the means to relocate if they didn't like the place where they were born. This is why throughout the South teaching Afro-Americans to read and write was at least discouraged and at worst a capital crime.

Even before the Civil War, German immigrants performed controlled tests and proved that free farmhands being paid fair wages produce more product per dollar than slaves. The aristocrats in the South simply did not want to live in a democracy where their underlings had no reason to call them "sir" and "ma'am" and cater to their every whim. This continued long after the end of the Civil War.

Well sure. Every Paradigm Shift is a mixed blessing. I'm sure many of the people in Neolithic agricultural villages yearned for the good old days when they were sleeping under the stars, going on exciting hunts, and working a 20-hour week. The Bronze Age made life easier with its incredible selection of precise tools, yet some of those tools were the first "weapons of mass destruction" (metal blades, spearpoints and armor) which made war as we know it possible. In fact the fuller picture that these mixed blessings create tends to suggest that the effects of new wealth do indeed greatly parallel the effects of the old wealth.

Nonetheless, democracy has been a steadily evolving motif since the Neolithic Era, and the power of electronics has already accelerated the spread of democracy (or at least a kinder version of a competing system such as the strangely successful hybridization of Confucianism with communism in China), so there's no reason to doubt that our species will continue to learn how to override instinctive behavior with reasoned and learned behavior, keeping civilization on its 12,000-year, nearly monotonic progression toward a single, harmonious world community.

BTW, the definition of "wealth" itself may very well change in a post-industrial society. It will certainly include more abstractions and fewer physical possessions than it does even today.

That's because they haven't been trained for it, formally or by immersion.

You're joking. It's ready to explode. Look at all the data warehouses that haven't been built yet, and then multiply that by any arbitrary factor to cover the ones that we haven't even thought of.

There may not be as much programming as we know it today, because programming has become easier. But data collection can, theoretically, continue indefinitely, especially when you count metadata. And don't forget the prosumers, people who build their own databases and processes for exploiting them strictly within the bounds of their own lives. My wife and have a quotation database that we have been accumulating since the 1980s when it was on paper, gleaned from TV shows, movies, other sources, and our own gems of wisdom. We use it in our own writing, but moreover we use the gems in it to help guide our lives. This is somewhere around 1,000 entries and does not greatly overlap any of the online resources.

Look at the compendium of wisdom on SciForums. No one is buying or selling this stuff, but it still enriches our lives. It is a form of "wealth" that is owned communally.

This was dismissed fifty years ago, when it seemed that the human population would continue to double with every generation. If we could somehow move half of humanity to Mars, thirty years later both planets would be packed tight and we'd be looking for two new ones.

Population growth is not slowing because of lack of space. It's slowing because as societies become more prosperous their members are no longer driven to procreate at their maximum rate. Remember, at some level the procreation instinct was programmed to ensure survival of the species. As excess population growth threatens that survival, that instinctive behavior is being overridden by reasoned and learned behavior. This has been the history of our species, the only animal with a large enough forebrain to be able to override its instincts on such a large scale.

Huh??? Throughout the Western world, the birthrate has already dropped below replacement level. The only thing that's propping up our social security PonziSchemes is immigration.

 

Blasted baby boomers LOL

 

Moderator Note:
Three off topic posts deleted, one for trolling, two 'feeding the troll'.

If you want to preach, do it in the religion subforum, this is the earthscience subforum, and I have a very limited tolerance for preaching.

 

Without going into too much details, this is my problem. Brilliant mind, big, original ideas, no clue where to start.