How do you achieve infinite growth on a planet with a finite population and resources? It should be obvious to most, yet the supposed "smartest guys in the room" are the first to stumble through it.
Efficiency gains. How many "resources" are consumed by a piece of software relative to the "growth" that resulted from it? I can now have a machine generate 100 mediocre pieces of art for $20, two years ago each one would have cost $100 and taken a week for an actual artist to produce.
We see it all the time? Google's revenue is up last quarter despite redundancies meaning they have a lower headcount. Adding robotics to a car production line can massively increase the productivity of a single factory despite needing less headcount, often allowing other factories to shut.
Something like Intellij or Copilot can make the entire tech workforce more efficient _far_ in excess of what it cost to make.
By creating something new that is more efficent. Even if we ignore economies of scale as a source of efficency there is a replacement curve in action which would create growth! A situation where they would immediately scrap the old equipment for the same payload and switch to a new more efficient one is extremely rare.
Ininite growth isn't possible, but I genuinely believe near-infinite growth is.
1. Yes, the resources consumed to make software are smaller, but they're still non-zero and will never be zero. So ultimately you're still limited by finite resources.
2. Many things just can't be implemented in software. I would point to A. Housing and B. Food production as things that are pretty hard to optimise. That isn't to say that we can't optimise them at all. We can build smaller houses or taller buildings. And we can transform energy from fossil fuels into fertiliser that increases yields. But growth in these areas is still very much constrained.
And these things are key human needs.
Like, about 150 years ago an American farm could get about 26 bushels of corn per acre. The last few years, we've gotten 174, about 6x more. And that's in a very favourable agricultural zone, chances are it's even greater in more marginal areas!
Source: https://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2022/07/perspectives-on-na...
If you develop a microchip that delivers the same performance but takes 50% less material and energy and cost to manufacture and use, that's growth. 2x growth in that area, to be precise.
As long as we keep thinking of cleverer ways to do things, we keep growing economically. So it's really whether you think human ingenuity will come to a dead end?
The most I can afford to do usually is "leave this role because even though the press and investors are still on board, I don't think it's a good bet anymore." I've done it a few times, I've even been right about whether they'd make a good ROI on those new funds... and so I made modestly more in the new role than I would've by vesting more pointless options or whatever... but I couldn't really short those startups or subdivisions to make a fortune by them failing. While their founders/CEOs made a (small) fortune by failing, but in a big enough way.
For the sake of the argument below, consider that there are two types of growth: 1) "evolutionary" - as you correctly observe it is limited by the availability of the known resources, and 2) "revolutionary" - which discovers entirely new growth potentials.
History teaches us that so far the growth was not limited, but innovation was always a prerequisite for the growth and often unlocks new resources.
Now, it is true that in the past couple of centuries humanity was gifted, through a lot of human effort, with a series of innovations that were accelerating the growth ever since. Truly, we don't know if this will continue as such, or slow down, or accelerate even more, or if we are going to hit a wall before the next scientific revolution.
Finally, indeed it appears that resources are limited at some point (importantly: according to our current understanding of physics). But I trust that for all observable future there is still a seemingly unlimited potential for the growth, as long as we continue to innovate and don't destroy the resources. Sustainability (between the scientific revolutions?) appears to be a new part of the equation and we must take it seriously.
Wrong question. That's systems thinking.
We're dealing with capitalism. You only need to run faster than the slowest competitor to not be eaten by the bear.
Nah, the mistake people make is assuming that everyone actually believed all these companies would grow forever.
A huge part of recent tech valuations has been driven by "greater-fool" type pumping of selling questionable business models and half-baked ideas as fast as possible.