Hacker News Reader

Comment by pif | Hacker News Reader

> Do you think it's possible we'll get to the point where technology makes labour so cheap...

Just a pet peeve of mine: making labour (and life in general) cheaper, is not only a matter of technology progress (in the sense of human knowledge getting richer and richer) but also of what energy sources nature provides.

As an example, the steam engine was a huge breakthrough and James Watt did change the fate of humanity, but it would not have been possible without coal veins. Our economy is based on oil, but how long will it last?

We can invent more and more kinds of machines, but we'll need new sources of exploitable energy. We may learn to recognize currently-unknown kinds of sources, but we'll never be able to create them.

View on HN

But a lot of what that technology does is reduce the energy cost of doing any particular thing - so naturally, we do more of it because it's cheaper, but for the same energy input we're getting much more.

When calculations had to be done inside human brains, plus paper and abacuses, the cost - in energy - per calculation was huge. Now it's not, the cost is tiny. Even if energy becomes more expensive, you don't lose that advance.

The same technologies we use today would work well with a whole range of energy inputs. Some would be easier than others, but most technological advances are, and have been, genuinely more efficient ways of doing things.

That's a great point, of course. More technology typically requires more energy, which doesn't just appear out of nowhere. Although newer technology tends to require less energy per unit of work/computation, in aggregate the amount of technology in use increases rapidly enough that net energy requrements increase as well.

I'm hopeful that solar power will play an increasing role. Our sun won't last forever, but barring catastrophe it'll be there on any timescale those of us living now care about. Of course, solar's effectiveness depends on how much the energy captured by solar panels exceeds the amount of energy requred to manufacture them. I get that sense that solar power's efficiency and cost effectiveness continue to improve rapidly, but most of my information on the topic comes from mass media. It's an area I'd like to know more about, but I don't currently have enough time to do the research needed to properly understand it in depth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com