Will Our Civilization Survive the Age of Extinction?
There Are Four Futures Before Us. Which Will We Choose?
Where does our civilization go from here?
I see four scenarios unfolding. They don’t all have equal probabilities. They represent very, very different risks. And everyone should be thinking about them — you can define your own, really, the point is just to think — because our lives will turn out very, very differently accordingly.
My first scenario is — let’s call it The Fairy Tale. This is the one that my colleagues — economists — still believe in. Economists invented this…thing…called “TFP” many, many years ago. Do you know what TFP is? It stands for “Total Factor Productivity,” but what it means is something…astonishing. It’s an assumption. That magically, innovation will basically solve tomorrow’s problems…forever. This assumption is left over from the industrial revolution, where, I imagine, you could bet that someone would invent a washing machine, then a dryer, then a computer, that Moore’s Law would hold forever, and everything would get…faster, cheaper, better…into infinity.
You can being to see, maybe, why I call this one The Fairy Tale. Are things still getting cheaper? LOL — checked your bank balance lately? Or maybe, like me, you’re terrified of that. Things are getting way…
