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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

Just a nit: Greenspun is wrong about food production technology. Food scarcity is no longer a problem: we have enough to feed everyone in the world, and make some of them fat.

Distribution is an issue in some places, but production is a solved problem.

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It's not exactly a nit. Greenspun's worldview has been proven wrong for two centuries.

Also, Greenspun seems not to be aware that wealth is correlated with improved environmental conditions after a certain point.

If this short post had something to offer besides unnuanced hostility, I might be more inclined to forgive its errors.

Production is solved for now, but our solution (at least in the US, as I understand it) depends on abundant supplies of fossil fuel and fossil water, which are not going to be around forever.

So, there is plenty of work to do to see that this problem stays solved.

Abundant supplies of fossil fuel's are in use because they are cheep. Zero technological advances are required to provide a stable food supply for 20 billion people. It's actualy difficut to find the maximum stable food supply with current technology over the long term.

For example: "there are 1.3 billion cattle in the world today"

Now some of them are a net food source because they feed in areas that humans can't. But, effectively feeding cows costs the world well over 1 billion humans worth of food.

Topsoil does not actually get destroyed. Rivers just deposit it as silt which can be recovered.

etc.

Topsoil does not actually get destroyed. Rivers just deposit it as silt which can be recovered.

Interesting. Silt also piles up behind dams. http://www.google.com/search?q=irn+dams+silting Perhaps dam silt could be even-more easily recovered.

feeding cows costs the world well over 1 billion humans worth of food.

RBST can reduce that impact. http://www.google.com/search?q=rbst+efficiency

rbST reduces carbon footprint of dairies

The present study demonstrates that use of rbST markedly improves the efficiency of milk production and mitigates environmental parameters, ...

fossil water is not an issue - aquifers are constantly replenished with rainwater (and manual recharging via pumping treated water back into the aquifer...a debatable idea). At least that's the case in the mid- and north-west. Coastal and dryish states may vary. I seem to remember seeing somewhere that Los Angeles was putting an evaporative water purification plant in, which would give the aquifers in that area a rest.

fossil fuel, however, is still an issue.

Greenspun is also wrong about what singularity is. Afaik its the point where human as intelligent agents build a better intelligent agent than ourselves. That new agent will do the same ,leading to agents of increasing intelligence. There isnt a date fixed on that event (as he says) and the debate is still whether this is posible or not. You have an interesting essay on that at http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/WER2.html

Yeah, I thought it wasn't in 2030, but has been defined as $now + 20 years.

Can food production technology stay apace with a couple billion Chinese and Indians starting to eat like Westerners (lots of beef, which requires tremendous amounts of grain and water to produce)?

That's not a scarcity problem but a scarcity of luxury problem.

Scarcity of luxury is by definition a subset of scarcity, so it is a scarcity problem.

Sure, we could all live on beans on rice, but people don't do that unless they have to.

But Greenspun's claim is that technology has done nothing to ease Malthusian limits, and he's wronger now than he's ever been. At the time Greenspun wandered into this fray, the concern was over human starvation. The situation really is much, much better, to a degree that is hard to fully appreciate.

Don't worry, they won't eat more than what is produced.

Are you sure? Hint: agflation.

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