What are the Limits to Growth?

From Wizards vs Prophets to Progress Studies vs Transhumanism

Housekeeping: I spoke with Sam Lessin about the next phase of VC and Noah Smith about China.

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In Where Did The Future Go, we explored whether progress is happening or not.

In Let’s Talk about Luddites and On Economic Growth, we explored the arguments for whether progress is good.

One of the main questions being asked right now is whether indefinite progress is even sustainable.

Charles C. Mann’s “Wizards and Prophets” explores this question in depth through the lives of Willian Vogt and Norman Borlaug, a prophet (anti-growth) and wizard (pro-growth) respectively. Vogt was in the New Malthusians school of thought, which included Paul Erhlich who wrote The Population Bomb, warning that our population was growing faster than we could handle, and that we would be screwed if we didn’t cut back. In other words, he was a prophet who believed that we had limits, and that we should live within our means. Norman Borlag, on the other hand, was the “father of the green revolution” who’s research and application enabled us to feed many a billion more people than were previously possible. In other words, he was a wizard who believed we could master our nature, and could innovate our way out of any bind. After all, it’s the only thing that’s worked in the past.

Indeed, Wizards have historically been accurate; no Malthusian fears of overpopulation have ever come to pass. And if anything, we’re suffering from too few people, not too much. Andrew McAfee’s book “More from Less” talks about how we’ve further decoupled resource usage from economic growth, making prophets seem more and more wrong over time. But like the famous example of the Thanksgiving turkey for whom before Thanksgiving everything is great, but then gets slaughtered on Thanksgiving, just because we haven’t hit our limits doesn’t mean we couldn’t hit them in the future. I mean come on, the prophets plead, are there literally no limits on growth? How can you have exponential growth indefinitely?

Different thinkers respond to the question of sustainability in different ways. Tyler Cowen says, sure, but I’ll take at least another 700 years! Peter Thiel says we don’t have enough progress. Others say pack it up, it’s all over. We’re screwed no matter what we do.

Wizards say, no matter what you think we should do, there’s no way to put the genie back in the model. Modern economic growth is what feeds billions of people, and it’s the only thing that’s going to feed billions more. Prophets are saying that, look, we have a finite planet, so there must be limits, and if growth is exponential, then logically that growth cannot continue forever. As a famous quote goes “The only person who thinks exponential growth is sustainable is either an idiot, or an economist.”

In other words, prophets say current growth rates are unsustainable and that we should care about future people who would not be born as a result of a dead planet. Wizards say that maximizing growth rates is in the best interest of future people and that sacrificing economic growth for theoretical concerns about resource usage is akin to murdering future people who could not live without sufficient resources. This shows that the debate is less about values and more about logistics. Wizards and prophets are both trying to save future people, they just disagree about how to do it.

Ultimately, the Wizards and Prophets distinction is about the fundamental nature of reality — what are the limits to growth? Can we master the universe?  Paul Kingsnorth thinks we can’t. David Deutsch thinks we can. Tyler Cowen says we might as well enjoy while we can.

Just like we’re all liberals now, the truth is we’re all wizards now, just in different ways and for different ends. To recap, how are we all liberals now? Democrats support abolishing limits on customs, behaviors, and relationships (e.g. social progress), and Republicans support abolishing limits on market regulations (e.g. economic progress). OK, so that’s how we’re all liberals, but how are we all wizards now? Democrats are pro-tech to the extent it leads us to a more egalitarian future and frees us of biological constraints and republicans are pro-tech to the extent it makes us wealthier. To be sure, there are also leftists who are anti-growth because growth increases inequality and there are also rightists who are anti-growth because it will further atomize us from our nature. But both these leftist and rightist anti-growther movements are fringe movements who have no power. (Except in AI with the whole EA vs E/acc, which I’ll address in a future piece).

Bio-libertarians vs Bio-realists

Mary Harrington encapsulates these differences when she says that the divide here is not between liberals and anti-liberals as much as it is between what she calls Bio-libertarians and Bio-realists. Bio-libertarians think, broadly speaking, that there should be no limits whatsoever on our right to manipulate the natural world, whether it’s related to our environments or our bodies. Bio-realists assert rather that there are indeed natural limits, that we as organisms exist in dialogue with those limits, and that we should build our culture with half an eye on the limits both at micro and macro scales.

Emerging technological innovations force us to answer new and fundamental questions: How do we feel about AI replacing core human activity? How do we feel about genetic editing? How do we feel about artificial wombs? What happens when we become post-human? Even Wizards are not equipped to answer these questions.  

Of course these questions beg follow up questions: what is human? After all, humans have been using technology since the fire. Perhaps it’s the difference between technology making us more in tune with nature vs changing the state of nature entirely.

Also: what is nature? Of course, we don’t live in nature as we understood it centuries ago. Nature, in its “natural” form, would have the average life-span at 30 and a high percentage of kids dying at childbirth.

Indeed: Nature is trying to kill you. You’d never be able to live in, say, New York City, for example — the NYC we all know and love is just not natural. I'm not even talking about the buildings; I'm talking about the fact that they have brutal winters. Without technology, living in places like NYC would be absolutely miserable.

People love an idealized version of nature. They like nature without lions roaming, or nature that’s somehow replete with western medicine, a fast internet connection, and a warm bed at night to sleep in.

What luddites fail to realize is that humans are, in their very nature, a technological species. We build tools to make our lives easier and better.

We can trace back the roots of transhumanism to the invention of writing, the original mental prosthetic. Suffice it to say, we’ve been enhancing ourselves for a very long time.

Progress Studies vs Transhumanists

And it’s here where the fight switches from wizards vs prophets — after all, we’re all wizards now — to wizards vs transhumanists.

Transhumanism is less a technology than an orientation: You’re a transhumanist if you think every new technology is just a step towards a future where we transcend traditional human limitations, including limitations on our bodies, our brains, and our mortality. That every new technology brings us closer to a proto-cyborg where we will upload our consciousness to the cloud and live forever happily ever after.

This is in contrast to the wizard mindset in tech best represented by the Progress studies faction led by Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison who celebrate economic growth and aim to promote its spread.

While transhumanism is the Wizard/progress mindset to the extreme, it’s also the logical conclusion of the Wizard/progress philosophy. Technology, after all, is all about doing more with less, or as Balaji puts it in his essay, “The Purpose of Technology”, reducing scarcity. And yet, mortality is the ultimate form of scarcity. “If you made lifespans much longer, you'd reduce the effective cost of everything.”

Between the Progress studies and Transhumanism poles there’s a broader question of why we can’t just find common ground somewhere in the middle? Why can't we have washer dryers, cars, and lights, but not these crazy ideas like limb regeneration, bionic eyes, and the brain machine interface type stuff the transhumanists want? In other words, why can’t we be wizards/into progress studies without being transhumanists?

The answer here is that once you get technology growth going, it's pretty hard to stop it from eating the world. It’s hard to tell billions of people who want access to food and clean water and warm beds that there's no more room. The simple fact is that how we used to live may have fit a world of 10 million people but won’t fit a world of 8 billion. Transhumanism happens gradually, then suddenly. It starts with being a dude in a really nice car with private security to being a guy with chips in his head and a laser gun on his arm.

New Fault Lines

It’s worth sitting on this wizard/progress studies and transhumanist distinction more deeply:.

Zooming out, in the same way that fighting against wokeness brought awkward bedfellows, like former socialist Glen Greenwald and right wing journalists like Ben Shapiro, transhumanism reorients alignments in the opposite way by creating new fault lines among people who normally agreed on much. For example, I have friends who agree on wokeness, economic growth, and foreign policy, but when it comes to, say, artificial wombs, some are pro-and some are anti-. The former are transhumanists and the latter are merely wizards.

Which is why the new fault line is between the Wizards and the Transhumanists. Wizards are pro-tech, just not THAT extreme. But just like liberals and wokes eventually end up in the same place, so do the wizards and transhumanists. There is no way of saying “we want equality or, in this case, technology, but not THAT much” without any consistent constraints. Indeed, unless there are hard constraints, the movement will just go to its logical conclusion. The pure version always beats the compromised version. After all, software eats the world, and it doesn’t stop at logistics.

Transhumanism is a movement that aims to bring us affordable nuclear power, brain machine interfaces, genetic modification, limb regeneration, space travel, life extension. All those sound great. It’s the same benefits as the wizard/progress movement, only more turbo-charged. Instead of curing cancer or diabetes, address the root: aging. 

It’s easy to see the appeal of transhumanism. Aging cured. Death conquered. The human brain reverse-engineered by AI. 

It’s also scary. While some may ask, why is it scarier than the changes wrought by the industrial revolution, which we’d see as enormously positive today? Or, put differently, “Why is this time different”? Some might say because back then we needed cheap labor and a military, so lower class jobs were safe. But now, thanks to technology, we need less people for the economy and the military, which means that governments have less of a reason to invest in people. And so there's a class of people that's not just unemployed, but also unemployable. Also, the concerns go, different kinds of inequalities will emerge. Rich people are going to get life extension sooner than other people will. Not to mention gene editing. We’ve had economic inequalities, but soon we’ll also have biological inequalities. Almost like a species divide.

The economic concerns crumble upon realizing that if this growth happens we will all be so rich that we’ll be able to afford new make work jobs. Indeed much the bigger fear is A malthusian zero sum world with not enough economic growth, half the world living in poverty, billions of people starving to death. The speciation concern is an interesting one we’ll cover in a future post, as well as the AI people who are asking not just what happens to working class humans, but what happens to humans, period.

Fear of the apocalypse has many wizards acting like the decel prophets of old. Nuclear has stalled out, even though it’s obviously the answer. Gene editing has been regulated to death. AGI labs have gone from working to spread AI to working to contain AI. 

Marc Andreessen wrote about how we should be more afraid of the reactions to the fear of technologies than the technologies themselves. Peter Thiel echoes the same sentiment when he says that we’re scared of apocalypse, but we should be scared of what people are creating in order to “prevent” the apocalypse: a homogenized one world totalitarian state surveilling their citizens using social credit scores and wearables where everything you do is tracked and monitored by a government in the name of peace and safety. As we’ve said throughout this piece, there’s no putting the technology genie back in the bottle, so it’s either letting companies compete or it’s ceding power to unaccountable bureaucracies and hoping they serve our best interests. If we could quantify the counter-factual of lives saved with a more favorable FDA regime, or with a different strategy towards nuclear, I know which future I’d prefer.