[ExI] boomerang

[Stefano Vaj]

2011/12/26 spike <spike66 at att.net>:
> We think of epidemics and meteor strikes and so on, but what if a
> catastrophe has a soft landing, kind of the opposite of a soft take-off
> singularity?  What if faith in the world’s banking system erodes until it
> just doesn’t work right, and a progressive poverty settles upon the planet,
> in which rich people are hungry too?

Those are very good questions.

The end of abundance, as "artificial" as this end may be, involves a
less effective employment of available resources and a turn back to
pillage economies, as well as a growing inability to invest in
long-term, high-risk project, which in turn slows down technological
progress, which in turns worsens pressure in order that all available
resources be allocated to short-term protection of our living standard
and stop-gag measures, lowers diversity and competition amongst
different societies (becoming in the process unaffordable luxuries),
etc. Those effects are moreover emphasised by the profound difference
existing between an expanding and a collapsing stage of similar
"objective" wealth.

A whimper, non a bang, might be the explanation for the decline and
ultimate demise of many or most technological planetary civilisations.

This is not "pessimism". It is simply an insistence that no reverse
Murphy Law exists that guarantees that everything that could turn well
will. It shall depend instead exclusively on what we will be making
our future ourselves.

-- 
Stefano Vaj