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Comment by age_bronze | Hacker News Reader

There's an underlying assumption that economical growth has anything to do with physical limits. Economical growth is a lie we tell ourselves so that innovation has its incentives, while everything else that's there because it must be there (because it will always have a demand), such as energy (but also food, real estate, etc.) just piggybacks with a similar 'fake growth' that really arises only from the fact these things are just as valuable as before. The threat for the lack of supply is just enough to keep businesses that can't really 'grow' still grow. It will still be exponential growth so long as the leading innovation companies are growing and everyone else is just corrected for inflation.

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The less cynical interpretation is that "real goods and services" captures the value people derive from them, rather than some objective measure like "energy consumption". There's no innate reason why we can't figure out more and more valuable ways to do things pretty much indefinitely.

Indeed. Take a look at cars, for example. My little 2.0L engine makes more power than a 1970's V8 behemoth could have dreamt of, while simultaneously getting fantastic fuel mileage with minimal pollutants (in comparison).

It's by no means perfect, but by any objective measure it's providing me with more value at a lower energy cost. Energy cost to operate, energy cost to build, energy cost to maintain. And that trend is most certainly not going to reverse any time soon.

There is a physical limit to the efficiency of a heat engine though. If your powertrain is 25% efficient, you can double it to 50%. But if it's 50%, you cannot double it to 100% unless the engine is operating at a temperature of absolute zero. You're going to reach a point- and current model cars are probably just about there- where the engine is operating about as efficiently as the laws of physics permit, and then you're not going to make further progress. Just google "Carnot cycle" and you can learn more.

>- and current model cars are probably just about there-

Very true, in order to get more progress, one would have to develop systems that are sufficiently different and more efficient at some level which may be odds with how we currently allocate resources.

Such as series hybrids and electric cars. (Dropping complex transmission for batteries, but using a more efficient engine.)

At some point though friction against road and minimum weight for safety and comfort come into play, and once you optimize these you end up with a train. :)

It's the same problem electronics face right now, when they really butt into quantum physics and consequently have huge yield issues - and you can scale horizontally (more transistors) only for subset of problems.

Neither of which are physical limitations, just limitations on our understanding of physics and our ability to apply them to issues of the day. We are always in the process of trying to determine what the limits of physics actually are (modulo a given societies acceptance level of such experimentation and mechanisms to explore such).

We actually know the limits of information density from bottom, that puts a bottom floor on electronics unless someone really figures out new physics. Likewise we know bottom floor for efficiency during transit in atmosphere under same condition.

Breaking both in any major way would require or beget actual teleportation. (Which unlike electricity or moving in atmosphere has not been seen in nature.)

There does exist a series of absolute limits on Earth, such as capacity for growing food limited on sunlight, water and availability of specific minerals. Inserting more planets adds to that limit with a transportation losses... Unknown exactly but bottom floor is easy to figure out for spaceflight and mining (unless teleportation).

You can even limit maximum size of "life speed" cone around Earth which would be the maximum distance we can get things from during lifetime of any person. (Unless immortality or teleportation or high multiplier FTL.)

Such limits are derived from our current understanding, of which one would have probably given a completely different answers 150 years ago based on our understanding then.

>Breaking both in any major way would require or beget actual teleportation. (Which unlike electricity or moving in atmosphere has not been seen in nature.)

Well maybe we haven't seen them because we didn't know how to look… recently declassified FLIR from US navy reporting archives suggest things that we haven't typically seen in nature in the past, can be seen.

>There does exist a series of absolute limits on Earth, such as capacity for growing food limited on sunlight, water and availability of specific minerals.

True, but what is the purpose of any of these things, and do we currently pursue the most efficient ways of doing such for those ends in a way that we cannot think about it anymore?

Correct, the are multiple ways to extend each of the limits, even one based on food, however mathematical limits on complexity exist and are really hard to surpass. On the upside, we're really far from them. Smart matter is not quite in our grasp.

Once we figured out information-theoretic entropy we got tools to set bottom limits on everything. I'm not entirely sure when, but Kolmogorov was quite some time ago. The math is in good company of Shannon and Fischer.

Remember that reducing costs by not doing something has risks. Existential risks in fact. (E.g. reliance on a single source of energy without fallback.)

Kolmogorov was about 90 years ago. Shannon, similar. Neither of their accomplishments will limit future accomplishments and understanding (except those bound slavishly to such frameworks [as good as they may be today in certain applications])

>Existential risks in fact. (E.g. reliance on a single source of energy without fallback.)

Existential risks for oil companies investors or CSP investors?

Now, not to be rude but if you think we are going to break the laws of thermodynamics or other physics then you literally believe in supernatural forces. As in magic.

If you think meta materials violate laws of thermodynamics, impossible to exist "naturally" in the universe and our understanding of the physical laws that govern the universe are static throughout time, then I have a bridge to sell you.

It depends what you call and measure as value.

If it’s production or goods, there’s obviously an upper limit. Even if in distant future, we begin assembling atoms into making novel rare elements, all that process consumes energy and possibly would produce waste. Production is not free. In the exponential limit, we will hit some constraint.

If we are talking about services, we should realise that even they cost energy. Even if we tomorrow think that long distance travel will be replaced by VR, production and delivery of such experiences cost energy.

Fundamental argument is then about energy. Can we keep harnessing it infinitely? No. Even if we make energy efficient processes, Jevon’s paradox suggests we will simply start using more energy.

The only way physical limits can be respected is by limiting the growth of economy and population. (Otherwise if we keep printing money without increase in production, it isn’t really economic growth)

> Fundamental argument is then about energy. Can we keep harnessing it infinitely? No. Even if we make energy efficient processes, Jevon’s paradox suggests we will simply start using more energy.

The thing about infinity is that while it is a limit, it can always be approached based on ones understanding. And I would not state that our knowledge and application of energy collection/generation (and even energy itself) is fairly limited.

>The only way physical limits can be respected is by limiting the growth of economy and population. (Otherwise if we keep printing money without increase in production, it isn’t really economic growth)

I disagree (and debt monetization != printing money), naturally markets and systems will correct. They always have, even when people try to distort it and keep them from correcting.

>naturally markets and systems will correct.

Markets and systems obviously correct, but the key question is at what cost and to whom. Imagine for a moment that we find ourselves in a situation where energy is limited. Markets will correct themselves by making it expensive, but who'll suffer the most is the poor (while markets might have been reacting to overconsumption by the rich).

Saying markets will correct themselves is like saying things sort out themselves. They do, but usually who takes a hit isn't fair and ethical (as was evident by 2008 crisis).

> If it’s production or goods, there’s obviously an upper limit.

Is there? I have a difficult time imagining any meaningful inherent upper limit to the value of creative works. Perhaps you intend a narrower point?

Creative works are ultimately embedded in physical world. If our exploitable physical world is limited, there is indeed an upper limit to the value of creative works.

Just like we're facing the prospect of peak oil, is it really hard to imagine that we could face the prospect of physical limitations imposing themselves upon creation and distribution of creative works?

You're absolutely right. The limits of the physical world certainly impose limits on the physical creation and distribution of creative works.

With that said, is it perhaps possible that creation and distribution might not quite be the same as value in every scenario? A given mass of aluminum can be formed - and recycled - into a functionally infinite series of unique artistic works. I can see no reason why the hard limits of the physical world you so wisely point to would inherently force an upper limit on the value of the artwork.

Have I misinterpreted you? Or perhaps I fail to understand your points correctly. Can you help me? I seem to have suffered a failure of imagination.

Yes, in current and recent economic regimes, the primary way of providing more value is simply by doing more of the similar valuable work. Instead of manual production of a shirt, a factory worker makes orders of magnitude more.

Increasingly though, modern economies are shifting away from this sort of work. Instead of the energy-constrained primary and secondary sectors, more things are being done on the knowledge and attention-constrained tertiary sectors.

Like, economic growth through giving people better advice is much less energy constrained than you're suggesting. There's still some limits, but overall it's not something that needs anything as drastic as economic growth limits for their own sake.

Yes, it is true that providing a service or an information consumes less energy than materials.

The real issue though is not about absolute amount of energy. The author is talking about exponential growth - the one where every year economy must grow as a percentage of existing base. At any base, even with a majority service based economy, exponential growth will hit a bottle neck.

For example, take this (from https://www.energuide.be/en/questions-answers/do-i-emit-co2-...)

>In 2018, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) account for 6 to 10% of global electricity consumption, or 4% of our greenhouse gas emissions. And this figure increases by 5 to 7% each year!

This year-on-year growth is unsustainable, no matter how small the base. At 7% growth, the greenhouse emissions will double every 10 years. We're really bad at wrapping our heads around exponential growth.

The argument that we will find more energy efficient ways to do a certain activity misses the point because for a growing economy, even that efficiency gains will get outstripped by scale. And there's Jevon's paradox too whereby efficiency actually increases resource consumption. So as Internet bandwidth expands, it's not like per-capita Internet usage remained the same. We simply increased our hunger to consume the available bandwidth.

I'm well aware of exponential growth, and I'm not talking about energy efficiency. I'm talking about how economic growth is not fundamentally coupled with the material resources we consume. Like, for a long time, food production was pretty well coupled with population - if you figured out how to grow more food in your country, you'd increase its population but not its living standards. That got disconnected in the industrial revolution, and the link between your standard of living and energy consumption is increasingly getting disconnected today in modern economies.

If by "pretty much indefinitely" you mean "one or two human lifetimes", then sure. Our horizons are so compact these days. Certainly not for thousands of years, running the math gives absurd results for any growth rate.

So a cure for a disease is just some 'big economic lie'?

You started off right (i.e. it's not about material limits) but then I think you missed that material value can be created out of thin air.

As long as humans are innovating and improving their conditions, then 'growth' as we understand it continues.

The iPhone is not 'great' because of the amount of physical material we put into it.

The numbers we put growth it are a function of other, relative things, but the fact remains that value is being created.

Yeah, as far as I understand, there's nothing preventing you and me just trading the same money back and forth at ever increasing speed, creating economic "growth" without physical limits.

Taxes.

There are physical limits on how fast you can do that.

Bremermann's limit, (or some extension of it?), says that the minimum amount of time needed for a system with average energy E to change to an orthogonal state, is inversely proportional to E (specifically, pi * h_bar, all divided by 2E ).

So, assuming that “I have the money” and “you have the money” are orthogonal (collections of) states, then there is a maximum rate at which the system can switch between those states.

You might say “well, what if we just count the number of transactions that ‘should’ have happened, instead of counting the number of actual events where the money changes hands”, but that seems to obviously not reflect actual benefit?

If me and another person turn away from you, and then turn back, and claim that we exchanged ownership of a dollar bill I’m holding 2^64 times while we were facing away from you, the obvious response would be “no, you didn’t.”.

Of course, we've seen a similar type of fiction already in the history of economics.

"This piece of paper represents a chunk of gold!"

"No, it doesn't."

“Represents” is a tricky word.

Though, whether one can exchange a particular paper for a particular amount of gold is not a matter of pure imagination.

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