Unflinching, unquestioning, irrational optimism and futurism

Let's take the recent Driverless car news item, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5107615. "This will change everything". Replacing hundreds of millions of cars with these new ones will take billions of barrels of oil for R&D, manufacturing, transport and we haven't solved the fundamental issue of internal combustion engines: they require refined liquid hydrocarbons, and a gallon of gas takes 5.5 litres (1.4 gallons) to produce. Are you guys so caught up with "awesome" technology and "amazing" people that you can't appreciate we're experiencing a fullblown depression thanks to not having cheap energy to facilitate this strange concept of growth any longer? This means your comfortable Bay-area lifestyles have no future. America had a good run, but you're like the dwarves of Dwarrowdelf, you delved too greedily and too deep. Ah well, such is the folly of humans and, indeed, every living creature from yeast through reindeer to homo sapiens.

QED: Peak everything (hydrocarbons (gas, oil, coal), phosphorous, copper, uranium, rare earth metals, iron, enter valuable commodity/resource) will make IT, the Internet, your jobs, your cars futureless.

Is there any reason you think technology can "solve" any of these forthcoming crises? Is it not technology that inadvertently created them? The wheel, agriculture, the green revolution. All solutions, which in turn have created even heavier burdens and problems.

:)