The past wasn't sunbeams and frolicking in meadows, but your take on it is totally off base. The fact is that in every period of (Western) history, the wealthy have always lived incredibly comfortable and enjoyable lives. Modern technology isn't the determinant variable. They did it by harnessing their respective civilizations--it was absolutely not equitable. They rested atop a pyramid of other people. And so do you and I! We do not live in equitable times globally. To the extent that we've made any strides morally, it's only that we've substituted technology and industrialization for slavery and oppression. But under no configuration is modern life sustainable for 8 billion people, energy, living space, and raw materials wise, so this situation is going to keep drawing down the reservoir until there is a brutal correction.

I also think your characterization of all of history being "mostly starving, struggling for survival, dying of infections, dying during childbirth, being illiterate, and having little shelter or comfort" is frankly tripe. As if native peoples lives (over hundreds of thousands of years, indeed) are such utter trash that they need to be rescued from it by technology. "Oh, the poor brown people living such primitive lives, how sad. Let's do a mission to convert them to consumerism and fill their lives with junk, get them some jobs and atomize their tribes." I invite you to visit basically any place on Earth that is not Europe or North America. It's frankly a white/western superiority complex and technology is just a fig leaf over it, a fundamental belief that today's way of life is the only one worth living and is so obviously superior that it cannot be questioned. I mean, those stupid native Americans and their huts. Good thing we fixed that, right?

We can fit far more than 8 billion people on the planet. Look how much of it is uninhabited by humans right now. The limit isn't living space, it's our ability to generate and distribute clean energy. Raw materials are a concern, but I don't think we're anywhere close to running out at the moment, and if we get our shit together technologically there are plenty of raw materials in the solar system.

>As if native peoples lives (over hundreds of thousands of years, indeed) are such utter trash that they need to be rescued from it by technology. "Oh, the poor brown people living such primitive lives, how sad. Let's do a mission to convert them to consumerism and fill their lives with junk, get them some jobs and atomize their tribes."

> I mean, those stupid native Americans and their huts. Good thing we fixed that, right?

I'm not sure why you needed to bring race/skin color into the discussion, or to attribute this view to me in that tone. How about we ask people what they want, rather than prescribing how they should live from our idealized/nostalgic view of native people? Let's see whether they want to live with an electric grid, medical care, and access to modern goods and services. If we judge by the number of industrializing societies across the world, it seems like people do want these things.

>I invite you to visit basically any place on Earth that is not Europe or North America.

I invite you to look at statistics like life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, healthcare outcomes, and access to food and housing. I think you'll find that most places in the world don't do as well on these metrics as Europe and North America. You're basically arguing that these people should stay in poverty. Again, I think you should ask the people you're talking about whether they want that.

This is reproducible across time, geography and culture. It is the basic condition of humanity.

> I invite you to visit basically any place on Earth that is not Europe or North America. It's frankly a white/western superiority complex and technology is just a fig leaf over it, a fundamental belief that today's way of life is the only one worth living

I invite you to do the same, and ask the people you'd meet if they'd prefer if half their children died in their arms or if they'd prefer to live without electricity, or antibiotics, or fertilizer, or telecommunications, or vaccines, or, or, or....

> But under no configuration is modern life sustainable for 8 billion people, energy, living space, and raw materials wise, so this situation is going to keep drawing down the reservoir until there is a brutal correction.

If billions are going to die either way then instead of just giving up we should be trying everything in our power to improve our technology to increase the carrying capacity of the earth and escape another malthusian trap as we've done so many times in the past.

Unless of course you want billions to die.

As an aside, I'm very disturbed to realize this screed is coming from someone of your stature in the tech community.

Oh geesh. As if the lines of code I have written are what I put forth to vouch for this. We should divorce the tech fantasies from the meatspace realities. My opinions are based on the many, many, non-tech days that I've spent roaming the Earth[1] and have seen what humans as a whole are really up to. I've spent a whole lot of time picking up garbage off beaches and roadsides and over the course of my short life have already seen the forests and fields of my youth get gobbled up by Lowes's and Burger Kings and endless, endless sprawl and greed. When I see a hundred acres of corn get sold off for 6 million bucks and the only thing that is built on it is a gas station, it dawns me that it's just another transaction in a long, long line of trading what was here before for the now--forests, trees, raccoons, foxes, wolves, beatles, ants, birds, bees, all...woosh. I guess tomorrow it'll be a solar/wind-powered datacenter and we'll all pat ourselves on the back. But we're fruits or flowers on the tree of life, and we're sawing its branches off.

What I find disturbing, but not really surprising, given how virtualized and fake our worlds and imaginations have become, just how blinkered the tech sector is, as if exponential growth is going to continue forever and matter and energy are just going to suddenly take up our growthism mindset and help us boost our fever dreams of...what...a hundred billion people on Earth? Or of 8 billion Elon Musks whisking around the planet on private jets? I honestly don't know what people expect. The exponential curve would naturally become an S curve at some point, but unfortunately we aren't aiming for that. We've already overshot, and the reservoir we are drawing down will eventually run dry, and that's a brutal, brutal crash.

And if you take my opinion for advocating any fascist-sounding, eugenics-sounding, kill-the-baddies-sounding recommendation, then you're reading something in I didn't write. Like if pointing out we're headed for a cliff turns into an argument about the two options: magically sprout wings or all of us cut our legs off the knees. It's a total non-sequitur and binary thinking.

[1] And yeah, it's true that I've been able to roam said Earth because of tech that's been invented in the last 50-100 years. And yes, I am lucky. And yes we are having this conversation because of tech, and yes, I don't feel great about the unsustainability of the lifestyle that all of us, including me, live.

1. The human growth explosion already happened. We're dealing with the end stage of it over the next 50-100 years. There will never be a world of "a hundred billion people on Earth" since it turns out people don't want to reproduce that much. We'll hit peak human this century which means that we actually do have a shot at giving all people a decent lifestyle if we develop our technology and have abundant energy. Exponential growth is just not required. The Ehrlichian doomsday was never going to happen.

2. The past was actually really bad, even for the wealthiest. Disease, starvation, and violence were actually rampant. Rewinding the development clock in rich areas, or pausing it in developing areas, would be equivalent to the largest crimes against humanity ever perpetrated.

I find your rejection of this basic fact of history by writing things like: "if native peoples lives (over hundreds of thousands of years, indeed) are such utter trash that they need to be rescued from it by technology" or "Incredibly tone deaf, frankly, when most past humans had none of those things and yet dealt with it, living actual full lives. We've basically forgotten what we are, what we came from, and believe we deserve Saturday morning cartoons." to be wildly ignorant. These people suffered, for millions of years, and still they suffer today. Alleviating this suffering is not optional. Frankly only someone who grew up in the utterly privilege western culture could ever think or write something like this.

3. Humans are not separate from nature. This one is counter-intuitive and hard to swallow but the truth is all human activity is natural, Lowes and Burger Kings are just a natural as forests. Nature is utterly impersonal. It has no morality or opinion. Sometimes one species gets a lot of adaptions that let it dominate and reshape the rest of nature into the way it sees fit. Then other species evolve to fill the new niches that are created. We make a lot of plastic now, but bacteria are starting to evolve to eat it, is plastic bad for nature? It's a nonsensical question. Plastic is nature.

It's fine to not like this and prefer some parts of nature over others, I certainly do, but no part of it is "better" or "worse" it just IS. Any morality you assign to it is purely your own opinion. You're right that keeping 8 billion humans fed and happy has a big impact on the rest of nature. But the only moral dimension that impact has is: will it cause more or less human suffering?

Sometimes the answer is yes, and we should stop. Sometimes is no and we have a moral duty to reconfigure nature to our liking. Most of the time the answer is: "it's not clear" and then people argue about it and sometimes pass laws.

But crucially it's all about humanity.

> And if you take my opinion for advocating any fascist-sounding, eugenics-sounding, kill-the-baddies-sounding recommendation, then you're reading something in I didn't write

But surely you must realize that the malthusian collapse that you anticipate will be characterized by authoritarian violence. Times of resource scarcity always are. So by embracing a defeatist philosophy you implicitly endorse it.