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Naryan's avatar

This post makes me feel a bit nervous about what kind of behavior might stem from holding these mindsets around abundance and scarcity - especially if the gist of this is misguided (in practice). I'm interested to read the next post.

I think some of the conclusions around energy are missing some super important context that may lead to opposite conclusions. I think Nate Hagens is someone who describes this perspective quite well. A couple points that feel relevant: Much of the trend of energy getting cheaper is that we were historically getting better at extracting fossil fuels, especially when we use fossil fuels to get more fossil fuels. We're seeing diminishing returns, and the 'abundantly cheap' energy we see now is an anomaly as we draw down resources which took millennia of sunlight to accrue. A second point is around renewable energy - the challenge comes with storing energy efficiently. With current battery technology, it doesn't seem like there are enough rare earth metals to make this a viable solution for large scale implementation with our current energy usage habits (Peter Zaihan makes this case well).

In my part of the network, we come from an understanding that the physical world contains natural scarcity, and that the abundance comes in our subjective experience - things like love, beauty, joy, and meaning can become decoupled from material consumption (to a certain extent), and that this is a safer path for humanity to take, rather than to treat energy and materials as abundant and aligned-AGI as the cure-all.

That said, I'm looking forward to the next piece and where you take this train of thought - diversity of perspectives is the best way to understand a complex topic like this one! And I'm also happy to schedule a chat if you'd like to compare notes :)

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Tom Corcoran's avatar

I don’t think scarcity is the main cause of wars. There aren’t many wars that I can think of where scarcity is the main cause—although there are a lot of new arguments that various eras of climate change drove some—like for example the 17th C. But, even then, the stated causus belli was almost always ideological. Once upon a time, most wars were about what we would call glory and plunder. Then many were about religion or ideas of human liberty and dignity. Wars continue now in times of relative abundance—Ukraine is not a war about scarcity, nor is the Syrian conflict. The Libyan Civil War is not about scarcity, though competition over abundant resources are central to it, but about who will rule. AI might make ideological wars more vicious. Anyways, my small quibble—interesting article, thanks.

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