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TrispusAttucks

Focusing on energy inputs instead of resource consumption allows for more generalized approach to the idea of "limits".

A material shovel produced requires energy in form of human operator.

A Simpsons SD requires energy to play from the electric grid.

All energy is traced back to resource consumption it's just a matter of steps involved.

The laws of thermodynamics are inescapable.

Energy is the value added that ultimately creates what we refer to as the economy.

In summary: The "economy" is indistinguishable from "energy" consumption. That's that hard wall of the limits on growth.

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But even within those examples, the energy use per dollar of value generated varies by large orders of magnitude.

A Simpsons SD card uses a tiny fraction of a watt hour for a half hour of entertainment (valued, in theaters and DVD rentals, at maybe $3-5). Watch the same episode on an old-style CRT TV and you're looking at 50 or so watt-hours.

A Google Search uses about 0.3 watt hours to get you the answer you want. The economic value of it varies based on topic, but if you divide estimated total yearly searches (a couple trillion) by Google's revenue ($257B), you get about $0.12. (Note that at average annual U.S. electricity prices, this electricity costs about 1/300th of a cent, showing the profit involved in turning energy into information retrieval.)

A car commuting to work for an hour consumes about 4 kWh (about 200x a laptop watching the Simpsons, and 12,000x a Google Search), but what's the economic value added? Arguably it's economic value destroyed, compared to if we could just live closer to work, because of the lost time and productivity.

That's why it doesn't really make sense to say that 'the "economy" is indistinguishable from "energy" consumption'. There are many things that generate large amounts of dollars and use very little energy, or even save energy. There are also things that destroy dollars and use lots of energy. By equating the two, you gloss over any distinction or ability to make things more efficient.

You can't ignore energy inputs to required processing components. Those servers at Google required energy to build and humans to operate. Maybe that person in the car was driving to Google to fix a server that processes 1 million queries a day. I'd say they value added to get him there was huge.

I'll just ask this:

Is it possible to create economic value with out using energy?

If it's not, then we're just haggling over efficiency.

> Is it possible to create economic value with out using energy?

Of course. Find a cheaper way to do something. For example, create a motor that is more efficient. It might cost you energy up front, but presumably the reduction in cost would more than make up for the cost (otherwise why would someone do it?)

Agreed.

Unfortunately this leads to the Jevons Paradox [1] where we end right back to increased consumption again.

We can't escape. Economy is energy consumption.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

I don't know. US energy consumption has stayed relatively flat over the last twenty years (down if you exclude renewables) despite economic and population growth

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/

You can't look at the US alone. The economy is gobal.

https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/world-...

The answer to your question is "no", but it misses the point. Of course it's not possible to create economic value without using energy, because living requires energy, and dead people don't spend money, except on cemetery plots. However, "haggling over efficiency" is the entire economy. Basically all of the interesting questions are about trade-offs needed to produce goods & services more efficiently.

Of course things take energy; this is so obvious, it’s a straw man.

The question is how closely economic value correlates with raw energy usage. The answer is: they’ve been diverging for years. A Simpsons SD card does not take any more energy to use than an SD card full of Pauly Shore movies. A Mercedes sedan uses about the same amount of energy as a Honda sedan.

I disagree. I think "economy" is more closely associated with energy reduction. If you can produce something with fewer resources (e.g. energy), you're adding value. Sure you get wealthier in the process and you may to choose to consume more goods even at lower energy used per good, but the net effect is not necessarily more energy consumption

Think of the advancements in goods over the years. Most reduced the amount of energy used. From more efficient materials to cell phones replacing TV, camcorder, audio recorder, book, telephone, etc.

It's called de-materialization and its going on even today

https://hbr.org/podcast/2019/09/dematerialization-and-what-i...

There simply has to be limits to this though, because if there were not, the materials would eventually become (relatively) free.

Think of it this way, if the value of output grows too many magnitudes over the inputs, then essentially the input becomes free, which violates intuition, because those resources are scarce. If the resources are free to me, I will buy them all and raise the price.

Arguing otherwise to me is an indication that you think either the material in question is not actually scarce, or else you realize there is actually a limit to how much value the economy can derive from those resources, but fail to reach the logical conclusion that there is a limit to economic growth.

> Arguing otherwise to me is an indication that you think either the material in question is not actually scarce

The material in question is ingenuity and creativity. That is the real driver of economic growth, not some material

I don't think the input has to be free or even go down in price. Just create more value. For instance, consider cars. They haven't gotten cheaper despite creating a lot more value. They're just better. More efficient, safer, more reliable, faster, etc. Creating value doesn't necessarily mean pushing prices down.

Yes but as a consequence there are more cars in operation so total energy consumption increases.

https://wolfstreet.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/US-auto-sa...

I’m not suggesting you can’t add value, but that it grows asymptoticly towards a limit.

Human ingenuity is scarce and even if it wasn’t, I’m allowing for some things to be not scarce in practice, like information and maybe energy someday.

But concrete / metals / something physical will be scarce, and as long as it is, the rest of the economy cannot tend towards infinity. Otherwise, in the far enough future, this scarce thing would be essentially free.

Exactly. Whenever I see an article like this I think about what the world might be like with ubiquitous nuclear power. How long does the oil in the ground suddenly last you if you're not using it in cars, burning it, etc? How much easier is recycling anything when the power to do so is cheap? And so on and so forth.

Nuclear seems like the only way forward.

This assumes that there's a limit to efficiency. We definitely haven't hit that wall yet.

Theoretical efficiency limits are well known.

The maximum is, of course, 100%. Much as with Amdahl's Law, this imposes a diminishing returns to efficiency over time, and long-term efficiency curves over multiple cycles of technological development exist and are well known within the field. I strongly recommend Vaclav Smil's Energy in World History and Energy and Civilization for multiple instances of these . Typically what's seen within any given technology is an asymptotic approach toward limits, punctuated by newly-introduced technologies which boost the potential efficiency to a higher level. Over time, those also asymptotically approach theoretical maxima.

For energy and motive systems, Carnot, Rankine, photovoltaic, and wind energy conversions all have well-known limits. In cases where efficiencies are high (hydroelectric and pumped hydro), the problem of limited potential sources and/or sites (for generation or storage) emerge.

Thermodynamics means the house always wins.

There's a lot of headroom left in the efficiency of computation, and human development more generally. For example, the marginal cost of R&D is tending towards zero as modeling software enables designers to experiment with millions of potential designs with the same energy that it used to take to develop and test one.

Computation is one place where increased efficiencies seem to have only very limited impacts on other process efficiency. There's also been a tremendous tendency for gains to be eroded through additional ancillary compute tasks, as well as malevolent applications.

Where do you see computation having delivered actual real-world increased efficiencies on the same order of magnitude as the increase in compute efficiencies?

From 1960 to present we've seen 60 years of doubling every 3 years, roughly 20 doublings or a millionfold performance increase.

What compute-driven applications have seen 1-million-times efficiency gains?

What overall economic impact (GDP increases) have these created?

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