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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.
Solar and wind + batteries are providing an increasing fraction of our energy consumption, including things that used to require oil (electric cars). Society wouldn't collapse if we had to cut our oil (and coal and gas) consumption by 3/4.
Even if this is true, it's a solvable engineering problem.
There's a ton of lithium on the planet. The cost of mining it varies, so the cost of cars would go up if all oil disappeared, but that's not societal collapse.
Even among mainstream progressive climate scientists, and in the IPCC, the consensus is that it's unlikely we're getting the civilization-destroying disaster climate change scenarios. Even if 1 in 10 of the places on the planet people currently live were rendered uninhabitable ... they can just move, that wouldn't come even close to threatening civilization, much worse has happened.
A 50% IFR and rapidly spreading pandemic is theoretically possible, sure. But, like, people would notice very quickly that was the case and stop going outside. It'd suck, but 50% of the population wouldn't actually die, and it wouldn't destroy civilization.
This one's actually a problem - technology can, and has, lowered fertility rates faster than evolution can raise them. AGI's coming sooner though!
I mean, the actual answer is that AGI is going to be as or more significant a transformation than societal collapse, and even if I bought all of those ideas, which I don't, they're all coming after AGI.
This isn't true at all, and I don't think you have an accurate understanding of exactly how reliant modern industrial societies are on fossil fuels. You wouldn't necessarily end up in Mad Max land overnight, but you must have an extremely strong estimation of modern levels of social cohesion. How, exactly, would this 75% cut in living standards be distributed? How would your hypothetical society be able to handle the rise of voices talking about how this is all the fault of those coastal elites/rural poors/rootless cosmpolitans/blacks/whites/mexicans/women/trans/gays/christians/hindus? Don't forget the massive increase in the cost of food and actual famines that would result from the sudden cutting of 3/4 of hydrocarbons that are used to produce fertiliser. If you did not implement sweeping, incredibly unpopular changes to the basic rules and fundamental contracts of society you would experience an involuntary collapse as various power/influence groups compete for their share of the pie.
Would society survive that kind of cut? Yes, it would survive - but if you define "collapse" as an involuntary loss of social complexity (which most writers on the topic do), a 3/4 cut in fossil fuel consumption would immediately qualify.
My take on it is the one proposed by Greer in "riding the climate toboggan". Even if you ignore the long term trends (which won't matter in your lifetime anyway) the short term problems that are encountered along the way are actually quite severe - notice any major natural disasters recently? Fires, storms and floods are all going to be on the rise, and even the doomers don't think that this will end society, but the economic costs associated with these adverse weather events are going to be another piece of pressure adding to the strain.
What were the economic impacts of the Covid pandemic? Sure, society doesn't collapse during pandemics like that - but there are measurable negative impacts from these events, and while those negative impacts aren't a big deal for a strong and healthy society... I don't think we're living in a strong and healthy society anymore, and I don't see it getting better in a world with a changing climate, greater levels of natural disasters and substantially more expensive energy/material resources.
That's a big bet - and for everyone's sake, I hope that not only is it correct, but that the alignment issue is comprehensively solved well before the consequences of these current trends make it a necessity.
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