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Comment by paulintrognon | Hacker News Reader

> Human ingenuity is key

That's a bet that many of us are not willing to take. Sure, you can imagine that a future technology we haven't thought of yet will save growth, but I think it's very important to think about scenarios when that won't happen. Are we really wanting to bet humanity's future on just "technology"?

If you read Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed[1], you'll realize that socities that did collapse were over confident. Let's no repeat that mistake.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse%3A_How_Societies_Choo...

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Yeah, and one key issue seems to be how "technological progress" is associated with "anything that uses ever more resources" or these days "anything that has a computer inside, even though there's no good reason that the user would need it".

> That's a bet that many of us are not willing to take.

So don't take it. But don't complain when you end up losing out to people, institutions, and countries that haven't adopted this defeatist attitude.

As for Collapse: Diamond is wrong on many of his specifics (e.g. Easter Islander depopulation) but even in his own framework, collapse comes from a lack of ingenuity, a sclerotic loss of the ability for a society to solve problems.

I'm not saying "let's just despair and do nothing", of course we should focus resources on innovation. In fact that's what we're doing right now. But let's not focus _all_ of our resources on a hope.

Don't you think it's safe to assume that technologies might not save us and that we should work on some alternatives, just in case the first scenario doesn't work?

> collapse comes from a lack of ingenuity, a sclerotic loss of the ability for a society to solve problems.

So you're saying that the _only_ way of preventing collapse is by technological advance? And that we should not try to make sociaty sustainable without growth, or at least to do some reasearch on how that might be possible?

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