| The Silicon Edge: Don't Worry, We'll Make More  Dear Daily Prophecy Reader,
I think it was an episode of the Twilight Zone. I am hazy now on some of the details but the general idea was that a bunch of criminals hook up with a mad scientist to steal $1 million in gold (worth a mere $35 per ounce back then) and then put themselves into artificial hibernation for a century, planning to wake up rich and free. It all goes surprisingly well except that, having gone to bed greedy, some of the thieves wake up grumpy and proceed to kill each other. But the survivors look forward to their golden prospects — only to discover that in this improbable future gold has become worthless because science has long since discovered how to synthesize the stuff. Perhaps someone invented blockchain. Rod Serling's criminals end up in their hell for the usual reason: they have been seduced by the materialist superstition. This is the belief that wealth comes from things, not thoughts; from vaults, not virtues; that the riches of one person causes the poverty of others; that we have been born into a satanic world of war, all against all, to survive only by grabbing more than our fair share of a pittance doled by a miserly deity amused to watch us fight for the scraps. The temptation is best expressed as the lust for guarantees, the desire to make sure, to be able to "count on it" as the starving miser counts his gold. Compared to thoughts, things seem so sure and solid. Surely this is the anxiety that drove all socialist dreams of a central plan. The wish to guarantee the future, to fight off the chaos that threatens from every side, when it is actually in the apparent chaos, the upside surprise of entropic creation, that salvation lies. So Easy a Caveman Could Do It? Most of the world has long lost its faith in the old socialist central planning. Replacing it, as my colleague John Schroeter points out brilliantly in his book Moonshots (co-authored with Naveen Jain) is a new faith in "sustainability." Epitomized by newly fashionable ESG investments (Ethical, Sustainable, diversely Governed), sustainability is as beguiling as the socialist dream must have been before it was tried at the cost of more than a hundred million dead in the last century. The ideology of sustainability rests on two ideas which can kill even more people than socialism. - There is a finite and roughly approximated limit to the resources (always described as "natural resources") available to support human life.
- Since resources are finite, our only available course of action is to use less of them, delaying their final, fatal depletion, and relying on those most apparently "renewable" or sustainable, such as sunlight.
Among many other weaknesses, John points out that if premise number one, "resources are finite," is true, then solution number two, "use less," is futile. By how much should we reduce our consumption? Ten percent, which sounds difficult enough, thereby extending our prospects from 100 years to 110? Even the amount of sunlight that reaches the earth is finite. If sustainability is our best answer, humanity is unsustainable. As John points out, essentially every government on earth and the public relations department of nearly every major corporation is committed to sustainability as the plan. To the prospect of Armageddon, they reply with one resounding, defiant voice: "Recycle!!!!" | 
To end your Gilder's Daily Prophecy e-mail subscription and associated external offers sent from Gilder's Daily Prophecy, 
No comments:
Post a Comment