We are sitting on a giant ball of matter. None of our resource use is actually using up material, we are just transforming matter.
We might be running out of resources that are cheap and easy to transform (eg cheap oil), but all of these are problems we can fix with enough energy. And eg solar power is going to provide more and more cheap energy. Fusion is also going to come to the rescue in a few decades (and we already had nuclear fission for ages.)
The economy is pretty resilient. Not even a global pandemic left all that much of a mark three years later.
> Take any resource that goes into a chip, and contrive any reason we'll have to consume significantly less of that resource. How do you solve that?
With substitution, economising and ingenuity. Eg early transistors were made of gallium, but we use silicon these days. That's a substitution.
> Well, we have highly-redundant compute-per-person. I personally have nine pretty capable computer chips to my person, just in the building I'm in. That's a lot, and that represents an excess in resource consumption.
Less than you'd think. These days, the main expense is for the power to run your chips, less so than the energy to make the chips. And having redundant chips around that aren't turned on doesn't cost any of the former.
> If we make the same games we're making today but we go back a decade or two in graphics, then we can have fewer consoles and gaming PCs, too.
Btw, that's one of the answers about what people would do in case of resource shortage for making chips.
> I'm not saying "one chip for many devices" is a panacea.
And I'm saying it would only save you a few chips, but wouldn't save you on batteries nor screens etc.
(And even a 'dumb' screen needs quite a few chips these days.) Hey, even Apple's chargers have more powerful chips in them these days than their first stand alone computers a few decades ago had.
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Btw, you can economise on powerful chips even more, if you do most of the heavy computing in the cloud: even your combined phone/laptop/desktop chip would still be idle most of the time. The cloud can eg use one million chips for three million people. That's even better than one chip for one person (which you touted as better than nine computers for one person.)
Having 'target display mode' on laptops and whatnot is one way that would save the chips that go into screens, which is why I mentioned it above. I agree that computing in the cloud can also reduce the number of chips used (although that does rely on chips to keep the internet going, etc.)
A 'climate collapse' is extremely unlikely. Look at studies on the (prospected) economic impacts of climate change. Wikipedia has an article on it, for example.
In any case, the forecasts expect something like perhaps 20% total reduction in GDP over say the next 100 years compared to the scenario without global warning. (But that's on top of our regularly scheduled single-digit percent per year regular economic growth.)
20% is a huge impact! It's bigger than Brexit. But it's also only about as big as the per capita gap between the US and the UK. And the UK is far from a collapsed nation.
And: in case you want to mention that the economy ain't everything. Yes, I totally agree. That's why my argument works in reverse: the economy can only function when the environment hasn't totally collapsed. Thus if leading experts project around a 20%-ish reduction in GDP, that means that the don't project a collapse in the environment.
As a sanity check: financial markets also don't seem to expect a collapse of the global economy anytime soon.