In the same we should be worried that people don't know how to grow their own food, procure their own heat, or build and thrive in a community. Not being snarky, I am genuinely worried about that
When i'll leave for family home later, i'll take my laptop with me. My family is big, so the chances are high that i'll need to run some ADB or photorec on a SD card. I hate it[1]. There is some knowledge/reliability deficit with computers that houses/heatings/food aquisition dont have.
There is something to be said about the dead simple ways of things for sure, and all depending on object/item but a "sweet spot" where something is pretty darn efficient yet not overly complex.
Our endless forwards towards "the most efficient" everything always carries consequences. People / society included.
What’s going to kill billions is the lack of industrialized farming productivity, but you don’t expect every individual to know how to resolve that
It will certainly switch diets and most probably cause hunger and malnutrition for some time. But we can support billions of people, given the right diets. We cannot support billions of people's mcnuggets, beef burgers or cornflakes with milk. About a third of my food comes from stuff I make, grow and harvest myself. I can up that, if I need, but preparing, growing and harvesting are a hobby, not a full-time endeavor. I'm certain I can't up it to 100%. Maybe not even 50%. But some neighbor, friends and family can help out (and I them) and I'm certain with some ~100 people we could be self-sufficient. Sober, sure. But not dead.
(I would die from lack of insulin within months, though. TII. So I am aware of how dependent on industry and high tech I am)
If that link in our global industrial chain breaks, a lot of people will die. We can, of course, still grow food, but not anywhere near as much and it will take a lot more care and attention to not deplete all available soil in a generation or two.
In a hypothetical apocalyptic scenario, we might lose a lot of institutional knowledge about agriculture. It's not hard to imagine some average joes trying to farm the wrong way and accidentally starting another Dust Bowl. After all, that's how it happened the first time.
Feeding 8 billion people is so, so much more complicated than just putting some plants in the ground. That we can do it at all is an absolute miracle of technology. We simply could not do it with only naturally available resources. Not by a long shot.
If everyone stops eating meat, and starts eating the proteins themselves, we win some 1000% to 25000% (sources range from 10 to 25x the proteins in/output when producing meat). Meat is just a terribly inefficient way to produce proteins. (Edit: to be clear, "meat" differs a lot: chicken apparently being rather efficient, more even than cheese, beef being amongst the worst).
And if then the resulting food sources are grown efficient, and all, or a lot of waste can be eliminated by shortening supply chains, sourcing JIT (no avocado's in winter in Europe, no tomatoes in snow), I'm pretty sure we'll get a long way.
But, sure. If some rich countries keep demanding giant portions of global protein in e.g. soybeans and corn to feed cattle to make burgers for 7 meals a week, then certainly: people in countries who cannot afford to compete with the soy-prices will starve.
We’ve settled on a system of markets to deal with scarcity. I believe the 1,000% to 25,000% win might have some losers you’re not telling me about.
And, no surprise, this isn't a free market at all. At least in Europe, meat, dairy (and on lesser extent crops) are heavily subsidised.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/feed-required-to-produce-... has a quick overview. My numbers aren't wrong, but, as always, they do need context (i.e. not all input is currently human consumable. Oos, many input is grass, which is rather ineffective land-use, i.e. the same km² could produce a multitude of human edible foods)
1/3rd of value or flavour is relatively easy. 1/3rd of protein or calories is a lot harder.
Need those mechanized 2000ac farms growing corn, canola or wheat to supplement the homegrown tomatoes/potatoes/peppers/herbs/apples. But it’s impressive what can be done with a somewhat small backyard in terms of value/flavour and not a lot of effort.
My tiny lot brought me all the potatoes, corn, beans and pumpkin I need and some more. Our five walnut trees, shared with 12+ households, produce some more protein.
I obviously still buy rice and a lot of wheat and rye meal to bake my bread and pizza and to make pasta.
My point was that I don't need the large industrialized food industry to feed myself. My point was not that I can do without a society with specialized and efficient food production.
Depends on the local deer population.
Only slightly kidding. They reproduce quickly and are currently plentiful. Overabundant, even, in the central US.
Get something else to do the work can accomplish a lot. As could fishing depending on where you are.
At our current rate of consolidation and specialization we're going to get to the point where so few people know how to do particular high tech things we may be at risk of someone taking those people out and leaving a massive capability hole across multiple industries.
Or just burnout, changing jobs or them leaving tech alltogether. I'd argue that many companies are already incapable of keeping their tech stack running as intended due to knowledge deficits.
i keep thinking about how we don't actually need 95% of the code running at my job to actually accomplish my company's goals. it's insane how we just kept going with the flow while features and maintenance effort exploded.
that said, anyone know how well the BSD's work as a desktop operating system? mostly worried about hardware i guess, since it's already an issue on linux from time to time. but man the linux ecosystem, while wonderful, suffers from massive complexity too, or at least it looks more and more like it the longer i use it.
Plant seeds
Water
Sunlight
Pick weeds
Wait
Growing food is much harder than that.
Growing a few tomatoes or something is easy. But growing enough food to sustain yourself and your family is much more involved and requires a lot of training and experience.
Most people could likely do it. But it would take them 3-5 years of failures before they could reliably grow enough food for themselves. Probably more on the scale of a whole family.
Besides plants, you could have animals, and get milk and meat from them. Chickens for eggs and meat too.
It doesn't take too much land for it in my opinion. And if you live in a community that does that sort of thing, you could trade meat for tomatoes, and vice versa, or whatever, without relying on megacorps to give you your calories
Localism is the way
[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/183648/average-size-of-h...
Check out the famous book, “Five Acres And Independence”. That was the basic size of a family farm in the USA a hundred years ago.
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+much+land+is+needed+to+f...
None of them I found credibly suggested less than an acre per person.