People in general don't seem to look at how much "productive" population you need in the real economy to support a given population. Things look pretty fine by those metrics and if the AI claims are to believed about to rapidly get even better. How to motivate and compensate that small number of people in the real economy that supports human welfare is a different question.

Also people appear to be blind to the real material limits that really start to be pushed by large populations. You could end up making life materially worse by trying to "fix" the demographics by adding more humans.

It is only "human readable" since our tooling is so bad and the lowest common denominator tooling we have can dump out a sequence of bytes as ascii/utf-8 text somewhat reliably.

One can imagine a world where the lowest common denominator format being a richer structured binary format where every system has tooling to work with it out of the box and that would be considered human readable.

We directly use a miniscule fraction, indirect use is quite a bit higher since that is used delivering ecosystem services we depend on.

Then there is the question of how much of that potential we want to turn into waste heat inside the atmosphere, which is more governed by how much radiative cooling we have rather than how much energy is incident or available on the earth.

I think that humanity would be limited by pollution and ecosystem destruction before energy for most human scale material wealth. The bit where it becomes tricky is energy does change what how easily and fast you can do things, which may place enough of a real world limit.

It's still a tiny fraction. Plants are surprisingly inefficient users of sunshine. And our use of plants is less surprisingly inefficient.

Of course more efficient usage isn't necessarily a good thing.

It would seem you are still just thinking about the human controlled portions of the ecosystem and not including all the energy used to drive to water cycle etc.

From the outside looking in. It really seems like both fields are working around each other in weird ways, somewhat enforced by backwards compatibility and historical path dependence.

The transition from more homogeneous architectures to the very heterogeneous and distributed architectures of today has never really been all that well accounted for, just lots of abstractions that have been papered over and work for the most part. Power management being the most common place these mismatches seem to surface.

I do wonder if it will ever be economical to "fix" some of these lower level issues or if we are stuck on this path dependent trajectory like the recurrent laryngeal nerve in our bodies.

That is such a good line. Another important note is the time horizon of that error function is often quite short.

They are wrong however. To take the food example, the existence of processed food production creates artifacts like food deserts. If you are privileged these things don't effect you as much as you get more agency.

Just the existence of quick to eat and prepare foods are going to put limits on how long you are going to be given for lunch and dinner. Even if you wanted to prepare fresh food, the system is going to make it difficult since it becomes an unsupported activity in terms of time allowances and market access.

A subjective take that processed quick food is bad or less than the opposite. It is all about new things that optimize the old.

To be clear when i say processed i dont mean tv dinners but that have prepared food that human didnt cook.

I made no judgement about the quality of processed food or where the different options rank in terms access to calories and nutrition, or what is actually feasible. It was simply about how changes can become mildly to severely obligate to certain populations in our economic system.

To me it doesn't look like the powerful have given up power, it seems as concentrated as ever. It is more that the concept of a nation isn't that useful to them under globalization at least not in the same way.

Some of this is due to changes in technology. For example as farming improved with the green revolution shear land area counted for less, and shipping and refrigeration allow longer distance imports.

So rather than land area control you see more localized strategic resource control. Things like mines, oil fields, shipping lanes etc.

Indeed, to go along with your analogy it does feel like we have chosen to go for a "All in rush", rather that try and compound marginal advantage. Sometimes that does work, but is can be a really chaotic where small perturbations can wildly swing the outcome.

To me the most wild thing about our current circumstance is the abstraction away from the real with financialization. Pretending that money basically has unlimited optionality and liquidity in the future without having to manage, maintain and develop the resources, capabilities, infrastructure, and environment for the long future not just the next few quarters.

Especially when it comes to investing for retirement. So much people are delegating their excess to grow the "market" which by in large is destroying the foundations for that very retirement by chasing maximal growth of money while destroying the underlying systems (healthcare, housing, social and environmental stability).

Maybe this is the best we can do due to adversarial constraints and the current system state. But that is a pretty depressing thought.

I think the better rebuttal to that is the existence of many other species that have been around much longer without what we loosely call intelligence.

I think the better take away from the evidence is that humans are really limited and have heuristics that are really exploitable. At large scales that can lead to some pretty counterproductive behavior.

The interesting thing is that some of those same heuristics can be really adaptive at smaller scales. So the question is where is the balance and what sort of systems lead to better global behavior.

I don't think your example of living on other planets is correct (at least as homo sapiens, seeding lifeforms and maybe even intelligent life is another thing), but I think it is in the right direction of that there is so much more that is achievable but we don't have the social co-ordination to approach it in a way that is much better that a random-walk.

Large scale co-ordination and sense making of actual reality is hard.

Requires good stories/music/dance/mysticism. And rituals. And modernized pastoral care.

This is why religions have survived the fall of kings, empires and nations. When system starts collapsing under the weight of its ever building contradictions, they allow for stabilization, repair and continuity.

But with the arrival of the printing press and then the internet info tsunami, those older stories and rituals (which act as sync mechanism for large groups over different time frames - daily-weekly-yearly touch points) start loosing influence. This is happening without a good story/sync replacement (see Philosopher Charles Taylor's The Secular Age).

So look to HBO/Netflix/Pixar or the WWE. One is interactive almost real time narrative/emotion resonance/ritual engineering and the other is a deeper slower process. Those are the kind of spaces where potential breakthroughs will come from. Not the totally clueless science or tech world.

The problem is the draining by taxation, not the absolute number of productive people.

It is far from evident what size of real productive population is needed to sustain a society. With modern tools it does feel like it could be in the realm of sub 10% of the population. This will get even more wild if the techno-optimists are correct.

Depending on how close we are to biophysical bounds trying to increase the population to the historically required productive ratios is just going to make living conditions worse for the average person.