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.
> How do you achieve infinite growth on a planet with a finite population and resources?
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.
You can some gains this way, but they're limited in a couple of ways:
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.
"Infinite" growth is funny, cos infinity is funny. Eventually there's gonna be some hard cap, but for all we know that's thousands of years away, so it's not really worth talking about. But we're still getting way more efficient at growing food and building infrastructure.
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!
If efficiency gains were the secret go (infinite) growth, then companies would be able to grow their business without growing their workforce, building more factories, warehouses, etc.
They are the "secret". But efficiency gains (from methods, skills, technology) are usually harder to get and implement than scaling gains. Building a new factory is a known factor; investing in a new ecosystem of manufacturing machines, less so, especially if you have to retrain your workforce. But companies absolutely grow their business without using more resources.
Ininite growth isn't possible, but I genuinely believe near-infinite growth is.
That is an overabstracted viewpoint that assumes they just crank up a variable. How do the efficiency gains take place in the first place?
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.
I don't follow your logic. Just because companies could grow their businesses without increasing their workforce it doesn't mean that they couldn't achieve a higher rate of growth by increasing their workforce.
My point is if it were possible we should see at least some examples of it happening. So far it is an often recited conjecture without any practical proof, so I remain sceptical.
> My point is if it were possible we should see at least some examples of it happening.
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.
What if the metric driving your stock is engagement and you've managed to somehow maximise it? How do you continue to grow when there's a finite number of people in the world and a finite number of hours in the day? There's also a finite number of ads you can show before you've enshitified your product and start shedding users, and a finite number of ways you can make efficiency gains when it comes to serving them (including layoffs).
Growth doesn't intrinsically have to have anything to do with population or resources. Growth is fundamentally about ingenuity.
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?
Most of us aren't in the position to make that bet.
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.
> How do you achieve infinite growth on a planet with a finite population and resources?
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.
You squeeze people into living in conditions that make cattle in a factory farm today look good. As for convincing them? That's what propaganda is for.
Its easy. There are finite limits but if you aren’t near the limits your growth is indeed unconstrained especially if the pool of resources is incredibly deep.
If that was the case then GDP wouldn't be able to grow faster than the population. The fact that GDP per capita growth is a thing disproves that idea. And no, the GDP per capita growth of the past 50 years wasn't by simply using more natural resources either. Efficiency gains and new technologies and ideas can lead to growth as well.
The mistake people who ask this question make is assuming that growth must be contained on a single planet. As they used to say in a previous generation, mankind's destiny lies in the stars. And we don't get there by worrying about limits or by rejecting the idea that a better future is possible. Stagnation is a choice. Decline is a choice.
Really, we should be buying Google/Meta/Microsoft/etc stock because they will have interplanetary profits in [future]? I think there's a lot of other companies (both existing and not-existing-yet) that would capture a bunch of that growth first anyway.
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.
