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Comment by djannzjkzxn | Hacker News Reader

If we can modify our desires for growth to be oriented toward metrics that don’t scale with physical resource consumption, we can solve this problem. Such sustainable growth metrics could include miniaturization or quality increases in physical goods, or even changes in some information good. And the happy news is many parts of the economy are already undergoing this transformation. You can read about the decoupling of GDP and carbon emissions for some interesting research on this topic.

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No, that won't help (except, as with every other technological innovation, to delay the day of ultimate reckoning). Quantum mechanics imposes fundamental limits on miniaturization, and the second law of thermodynamics (and the Landauer limit) imposes fundamental limits on efficiency gains.

What about information and quality? I see no reason why a species couldn’t sit around coming up with increasingly fashionable jokes until the heat death of the universe. I think that’s where we are headed.

It is entirely possible that what you are suggesting is the beginning of an answer to the problem. But it is not immediately obvious to me that our current social structures will support an economy based on people inventing good jokes. I think that will take some kind of radical change, and thinking about what shape that kind of radical change might take is exactly what I'm hoping to encourage people to start doing. So kudos to you for thinking along these lines, but I don't think that actually solving the problem will be quite as simple as writing a good one-liner.

Nothing would make me happier than to be proven wrong about this.

What I hope for, is that as the information economy continues to grow, its political power will eventually exceed that of physical industry. At that point, it will be possible to put in place policies like a carbon tax that will reduce environmental harms while further weakening the political power of the harmful industries. Ultimately we could cap and tax or cap and trade all sorts of environmental harms, not just carbon emissions. Wealth would accrue to companies that generate economic value while society determines the total level of allowable environmental harm (which could be negative).

I think other approaches like “rise up and destroy capitalism” would protect the environment faster if successful but have less chance of success.

That sounds like an eminently sober assessment of the situation. My concern there is that the information economy seems to be growing its own set of harmful externalities, at least by my own quality metric, which places a high value on personal freedom. But one problem at a time I guess.

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