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Why don't users on theMotte take the idea of societal collapse more seriously? It's not just things like resource depletion and climate change that could cause something like this. Rather I think there are many layers of various pillars of society going towards the shitter that I think makes some kind of collapse of Western Civilization inevitable. I'll list a few below
Resource Depletion/Peak Oil: Although we seem to have stemmed off global peak oil for about 50 years, it seems like the peak is finally actually coming into sight. Some say 2018 was actually the peak, others say it won't arrive until 2030. Whatever the case, it is an inevitability given the fact that discoveries of deposits have been outpaced by demand for the past fifty years. Barring a scientific miracle like effective hydrocarbon synthesis by bacteria, the alternatives don't look promising. Ethanol from corn has an abysmal energy return on energy invested (EROI). Electric motors are not powerful enough to run 18 wheeler trucks, and even for passenger vehicles, we don't have enough lithium in the whole world to replace the current fleet of cars. It's not just oil: copper is being mined at extremely low-grades (because we have exhausted the high-grade deposits), uranium only has around 100 years of proven reserves, and we've already hit peak phosphorous. Further reading: Art Berman, Simon Michaux, Alice Friedman
Climate Change/Environmental Degradation: Anyone with two eyes can see that climate change is happening. It's not just that temperatures are getting warmer, but variation seems to be increasing as well, which is really bad for parts of our civilization that require fairly regular climatic conditions like agriculture. Here in Maryland we had one of the hottest summers on record, followed by an extremely warm fall. Now we're in the middle of one of the coldest winters in the last twenty years. Even if you don't believe that climate change is happening, other aspects of environmental degradation are harder to deny. For the past few summers we've had massive wildfires across most of the Northern hemisphere, and in California during the winter. Some of these are natural, but many are the result of poor management and ecological practices. We've contaminated our drinking water with birth control, our soils have been largely stripped of nutrients by industrial farming, and microplastics are literarily everywhere. None of this is sustainable
Pandemic risk from industrial agriculture: Although COVID was likely a lab leak, one of the initial hypotheses as to its origin was a cross-over event from bats to humans at bushmeat market. We create millions of such crossover opportunities in our agriculture system every day, and it's only a matter of time before the current bird flu pandemic, which has decimated US chicken and cow populations (spiking the price of eggs to $6 / 12 eggs) crosses over to humans. This has happened before in both 1918 and in the 1960s.
Birthrate collapse: Everywhere that modern Western society touches seems to experience a rapid and catastrophic decline in birth rates to far below replacement levels. There's been a lot of discussion of this issue at least here, and it seems like nothing any government does is effective at turning things around. While declining populations may be good for our resource consumption/pollution problems, without some kind of reversal in birth rates, there will tautologically be a death of Western culture. A somewhat related issue is the general collapse of community in the West, which is talked about a lot in books like Bowling Alone.
Brainrot: modern society is incredibly complex and requires a lot of smart people at the helm keeping the systems that keep us alive going. Many of these people are aging out of the workforce, and there aren't many zoomers and millennials who can replace them. Part of this is an issue of desire: few people want to run a wastewater treatment plant or work as a mining engineer when you can just grift with things like crypto and OnlyFans. But I also think we're all just getting dumber to some extent. I put a lot of blame on addictive technologies on the internet (and so does Jonathan Haidt), but I'm sure there's also crossover with the issue of environmental pollution.
There's many more specific issues I could list, but I think you get the gist. Why isn't this community more concerned about these kinds of issues, as opposed to worrying about AI (which is not profitable, or efficient). I think it may have something to do with TheMotte severely overrating the utility of human intelligence in solving large scale problems, but I'm not sure. Is there something I'm completely missing here?
Further reading/listening. DoTheMath, Rintrah, The Great Simplification.
Personally speaking I don't think about it because I believe AI kills us first.
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