My Entry for "Project Hope Competition #3 for all content creators"
I found the Project Hope contest at this link:
https://steemit.com/hive-175254/@josevas217/project-hope-competition-3-for-all-content-creators
The prompt is here:
Technology made large populations possible; now large populations make technology indispensable." José Krutch.
Immediately when I think of the prompt I think of Malthus:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
Malthus was an economist that said that population growth is exponential while the growth in food production or resources was linear. He predicted that the world was headed toward massive starvation and that people should start thinking about limiting population growth. This was in the late 1790s.
What Malthus did not predict was that people would eventually invent synthetic fertilizers before we ever got to the point of mass starvation. Hence, the technology made population growth possible. This theme would keep repeating itself throughout history as we would have time periods of famine and explosive technological growth.
There would be new technologies and or new production processes like during the "green revolution" that would keep increasing the carrying capacity of the earth's population.
However, like all production processes, once you remove one "bottleneck" or production "constraint" a second constraint will then reveal itself. The original constraint was nitrogen and so fertilizers were invented.
The next constraint was on the biology of the wheat itself. If you use a lot of nitrogen the wheat would grow too tall and the wheat would fall over and be damaged and so during the "green revolution" they developed varieties that grew shorter and they introduced machines to solve the labor constraint. This allowed for the production of wheat at greater and greater scale.
The problem with this production process was that it was heavy in machinery and synthetic fertilizers and both the machines and synthetic fertilizers use a lot of fossil fuels and release a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere. The technology needed to feed the world population and keep the current population alive is also warming up the planet and endangering everything on earth. The new constraint is climate change.
So what do you do? Do you stop using the machines and fertilizers (technology) and let people starve to death? Do you keep using these technologies and destroy the planet by global warming? We are completely depended on fossil fuel technologies to stay alive now.
I am not predicting mass starvation like Malthus. My hope is that we will come up with new technologies that will feed the worlds populations and not contribute to global warming. My hope is that the new technologies won't solve one problem and create two new problems.
For sure you did great with a well elaborated article thanks for sharing since the world basically depends on technology I guess new improved mechanization method will be put in place in other to balance up the world 🌎 in terms of global warming, and other related pollution.
This is an interesting time that we are living in. I am really curious as to what new technologies people come up with to help solve climate change.
Thanks we hope much better improve system will be introduced.
Very relevant point.
One possible solution could be that innovations cannot be just specific to the problem at hand.
Upcoming Innovations must fulfil a lot more criteria than just one issue.
Example: While resolving the issue of crop production we cannot undermine the harmful effects it could bring to global warming.
Innovation must have to be multidisciplinary.
I agree. We need to take a multidisciplinary approach and consider diverse perspectives if we are going to solve these problems. Climate change is a social, economic, political, and scientific problem just to name a few branches of knowledge.
Hello @therecantonlybe1
What you say about the exponential growth of the population and the linear growth of food is a great detail to consider for future generations. And I agree, it seems that every technology that is created brings with it other problems that need to be solved. Like a kind of vicious circle.
Thank you very much for participating.
Linear food growth vs exponential population growth is more Malthus and technology does have the potential to grow food in an exponential kind of way. We do live in a time where the amount of food produced in the world is enough to feed every single person. There is just a problem of distribution and equity. Americans have so much food that half of it is thrown in the trash and even the amount that does get eaten is often too much food already and that why you see weight related illnesses on the rise like diabetes. In economics this is a major problem when you see oversupply in one area and shortages in another. It implies inefficient economics. Thanks for your comments.
The same thing happened to the communists who believed that the world would be a kind of great factory until the workers were freed from that slavery, a madness if we think about it. Personally, I believe that if the population needs something, technology will make it possible, it doesn't matter if it's more food or a vaccine in less than a year, "if it's needed, then science will make it possible.
For sure, communism lead to a lot of starvation in China and the former Soviet Union. Ironically, though its communistic mechanisms that are leading to a hardware revolution in China right now. To be clear, China have adopted some capitalistic reforms that have raised a lot of Chinese people out of poverty. You see this in places like Shanghai.
However, they still hold on to some communistic principles such as in the area of intellectual property rights. The United States favors patent protection for intellectual property while China favors open source in their intellectual property rights and forced technology transfer.
Open Source is not new, as the United States started the open source revolution in software a long time ago, but China has an open source revolution in hardware. The U.S. open source is voluntary and the Chinese open source is mandatory. Open source is very anti market. It drives intellectual property toward almost zero price and that is why in the U.S. we don't really pay for operating systems and apps any more. Google and Facebook are two of the largest companies in the world and they charge users for any of their services. You get to use stuff that you didn't buy that's communism in practice if not in principle.
China has open source in hardware which has driven down the price of hardware to extremely low levels. This open source hardware has led to China being the hotbed for hardware innovation and hardware manufacturing.
The United States has more software innovation, but again that is due to us adopting open source in software a long time ago which is a very communistic value. The moral of the story is that science is not communist or capitalist. Science is just science and probably a mixed system of communism and capitalism is optimal for science.
The results will speak for themselves when China takes both a hardware and software lead-especially in the area of Artificial Intelligence where forced data sharing will make Chinese AI better than US AI because they will just have bigger training data sets than our "Big Data". They also have 5 times the United States population so their algorithms will be able to mine more data from more users and consolidate more of it because of force data sharing via the government. Thanks for commenting!