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George Hotz talks about it here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DdZmZJHEVUc?si=g7z3yB_V_pvqc6-q
To paraphrase: no we aren’t going to give food away, there is just going to be abundant food that’s so cheap that nobody can’t afford it. No don’t start a charity to give away 100 malaria vaccines, start a company to make the malaria vaccines cost $0.01 each and make them abundant.
This is already the case, but now everyone complains about food waste. Can't win!
Food waste you mean carbon sequestration? Do your part, don’t eat that tart!
But seriously is anyone really complaining about food waste? I personally haven’t really heard that.
People complain about food waste, and though they have a point, I think it's ultimately a trivial problem. Food being wasted us a byproduct of our civilization producing so much food so cheaply that we can afford to waste it. But, to bring the subject back to malaria vaccines, I am not worried about future generations having so many malaria vaccines that they can afford to fill landfills with them.
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People complain about it all the time where I live, and it is actually a real environmental issue. I know that I feel bad whenever I waste food, for one. That said it isn't like there are many people championing food waste, so there's not much of a debate.
How is food waste an environmental issue? It's all biodegradable organics.
Modern industrial and petroleum-based agriculture is absurdly wasteful. For every calorie of energy the modern agricultural system produces, 13 calories were spent growing it and distributing it ( https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/food/us-food-system-factsheet - this data is somewhat old but if you have better I'd love to see it ). Historical farming methods tended to have ratios like 1:5-10 as opposed to 13:1, but nobody really notices that we're technically massively less efficient at turning energy into food due to the abundance of energy provided by fossil fuels. We're currently expending those fossil fuels at breakneck speeds, and in many cases using farming methods that contribute to environmental degradation and loss of soil quality as well. It'd be dishonest to just shove those costs into the energy equation, but I think there's a real and serious issue there that a lot of people have spent a lot of time talking about.
Industrial agriculture is actually a tremendously bad deal when you look at the level of raw energy we put into the system and what we get out of it when compared to other options, and food wastage is made worse because the costs of that waste are magnified by the sheer inefficiency of the system that produced it. Sure, an apple you throw away because it had a worm in it or went off isn't that big of a deal, but when that apple was produced by the modern day industrial system of agriculture you're wasting a lot more energy than you were in the past.
Finally, a lot of food is wasted for reasons that a lot of people don't like (corporate profitability, aesthetics, etc). I believe you live in Australia - if you're interested in learning more on that particular aspect, I recommend checking out The War on Waste https://iview.abc.net.au/video/DO1624H001S00
(edited solely for spacing/readability)
I don't really see the problem here. Like, why is the energy input/output ratio the relevant metric? Obviously modern agriculture is going to involve more energy usage since we now have tractors and stuff and we didn't use to. But that's also why we are now able to feed 8 billion people. Energy is there to be used - and what's a better use for it than feeding the world?
I don't believe there is another viable option to "industrial agriculture" when it comes to producing the amount of food we need. And if your problem is that it uses natural biofuels, I don't agree, but that's an argument for getting the required energy from other sources rather than for scrapping all the combine harvesters.
Sustainability is the biggest one. Energy is one of the most fundamental building blocks of human society and existence, and the way we spend and manage it is extremely important. To use a financial metaphor, spending more than you earn is not usually considered a solid strategy for improving your financial conditions for the future. Our current farming habits are spending accumulated energy rather than helping to collect it, and this is a deadly serious concern over the long term. Of course, it isn't the only issue - modern industrial farming practices are bad for the soil and planet in a huge number of ways. Some of them are more local, like the decline in soil quality and damage caused by excessive pesticide usage. Some of them are bigger issues which only show up as problems later on - like the excessive usage of antibiotics used to help animals grow, which are currently contributing to the evolution of antibiotic resistant bacteria. These problems are all solvable, yes, but solving problems takes time, energy and attention.
Yes, and there's nothing wrong with tractors existing. But as has been pointed out, they're not really the biggest contributor to these issues.
And this is actually a big fucking problem now that we're spending energy to create food rather than generating it. Currently, we're only able to support that number of people by drawing down on a limited resource which does not renew itself on any timescale relevant to human lives (it takes a long time to make fossil fuels!). On a societal level, the discovery and utilisation of fossil fuels was the equivalent of a massive lottery win - a huge, one-off windfall of useful, usable energy. If you're incredibly rich, you can afford to spend far more than you make - for a while. But when you get a whole bunch of dependents reliant upon those resources, what happens when you run out?
There's a very glib saying associated with sustainability practices - "What cannot be sustained, won't be." Right now, the population we have is unsustainable, only made possible because we are drawing down on the fossil-fuels that were formed over millions of years. Those fossil fuels won't last forever, and we currently have no adequate replacement for them when they become uneconomical to extract (people tend to get the easiest-to-extract resources first, leaving the harder-to-utilise ones for later). We haven't just got an unsustainable system of food production, our system of food production produces negative externalities and degrades the environment in ways that will make future agriculture more difficult.
Building AGI(unless you're Big Yud). Setting up sustainable and renewable power sources. Leaving a useful inheritance for those who come after us. Space exploration. Scientific research. Sustaining industrial civilisation over a longer timescale, giving us more potential opportunities to find useful things and giving us more time for technological (and cultural) development. Just to be clear, I'm not arguing that we need to keep human numbers down in total, but that our current population bump should have been stretched out through time so that the growth could happen in a more sustainable and enduring way.
You're correct! There isn't another viable alternative to industrial agriculture, and there isn't a way to produce the amount of food we need. This doesn't mean that Demeter is going to descend from the sky in a cloud of smoke and give us a sustainable, energy-positive farming method that doesn't require fossil fuels. It means that people are going to needlessly, pointlessly starve to death when more prudent management of our natural resources could have let them live longer and more satisfying lives. You don't need a crystal ball to predict what happens when a population outgrows the carrying capacity of their environment - you can see it happen all the time in nature, and it isn't particularly pleasant to go through.
The malthusian long term could be 5 billion years. All those problems were supposed to be insurmountable centuries ago, but the carrying capacity of the earth has only grown exponentially. Tech beats nominally diminishing resources every time. The EROIE of the past was irrelevant, they had no idea what a lump of coal, a vial of kerosene, a handful of uranium ore, could do.
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Seems way too soon to worry about natural biofuel use being "unsustainable". We have centuries worth of coal left.
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According to the chart, the lion's share of this modern energy expense on food is storage, services, transportation and processing. But do we not save energy on the convenience? It makes some sense that we spend more calories on growing food because we use few people and many machines, as opposed to 90% of people plowing their own (or not exactly their own, but details) share of a field. But is the freed manpower accounted for?
Uh, no. We waste copious amounts of food making sure that you can get whatever you want no matter the season/location of origin. "Storage, services, transportation and processing" ARE the convenience!
No. Why would it be? Do you account for how many horses are no longer required to carry people long distances when working out the economics of cars?
No, because I'm not a horse.
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At the Malthusian limit, the amount of non-solar energy put into food is equal to the energy necessary to sustain every human being (all of whom are working directly or indirectly to produce that food), and that is equal to the amount of solar energy put into the food times all the efficiencies involved minus wastage. Humanity has often been near there.. so yeah, the freed manpower is absolutely enormous.
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That sounds great, but the problem is that you now have to invent a new economic system to replace capitalism. If every malaria vaccine costs $0.01 to make, yippee! I can sell them for $50 and make a huge return! What do you mean I can't sell them for $50, I have to sell them at a price the very poorest can afford? What's my incentive there to invest in a company where, no matter how much product they produce, no matter what volume of sales, they're just about covering their operating costs and I'm making back pennies instead of dollars on my investment?
Dismantling and replacing capitalism is going to be the way more difficult problem than finding out how to make cheap cheap goods and services.
the idea is the volume makes up for the lower price.. the McDonald's business model.
But you can't just price everything at pennies. McDonald's may have a Eurosaver menu, but they also have the full-price products.
I'm poking at this because it sounds great and if achievable, who could object to cheap drugs? But the nuts and bolts don't seem worked out. So where is every garage pharma getting all the energy and ingredients and plant and transport and so on? Oh something something AI has solved the problems of pulling rabbits out of hats something something. Everyone has their own personal robot slave, maybe a couple of them. We're all cellar alchemists turning lead to gold.
Take the step of "and the AI is magic" out, and how do you keep it from collapsing into a pixie dust glitter of wish-fulfilment?
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Unfortunately for you, a malaria vaccine production facility only costs $20 in this post-scarcity utopia. If you tried charging $50 for a single dose, I'd just start my own company (blackjack and hookers optional). At that scale, I don't need to attract investors and even the utter basics of running a company like "tracking sales" or "accepting payments" might not be worthwhile.
We currently have pseudo-post-scarcity availability for a few substances:
It would be great if we could add hundreds of other items to that list.
I think this kind of extreme deflation will be challenged by governments using it to just print money.
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Maybe compare it to Tylenol? I didn’t realize it before having kids, but Tylenol is a life saving medicine as a fever reducer, and costs effectively nothing.
I don’t think GeoHot is laying out a full business plan here, just speaking in broad terms, and I do generally agree with him.
And when they’re abundant and cheap like Tylenol, other people will sell them for 49.99, 49.98, 49.97, […], 0.01. Nobody will want your $50 malaria pills just like nobody wants $50 Tylenol.
We've seen what happens when you don't bother tracking basics (coughFTXcough) 😁
But see, that's what I'm talking about. "At that scale" where any Tom, Dick or Harry can start churning out malaria pills without, it would seem, needing to worry about sourcing and paying for ingredients, machinery, plant, etc. then we are talking a whole new economic system.
Let's stick with my example of salt.
Imagine that an accountant went up to a restaurant owner and asked:
The answer would likely be something like "idk, maybe about 500 mg each because I bought a 10 kg bag ten thousand meals ago and it's half gone." In this case, the basics literally aren't worth tracking. (If the accountant was asking about steaks, on the other hand, the owner had better have those answers.)
We're already 1% of the way to post-scarcity, and capitalism works just fine. I don't see any reason it would fail when we're at 50% or even 90% post-scarcity. It would simply focus on the remaining, scarce resources.
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Yes, but Tylenol is not being sold at $0.01 a pill. Look at the hoops pharma companies jump through in order to keep medicines under patent, instead of becoming cheap generics.
To make things work where you get investors for your "it only costs $0.01 to make it and hence we can only charge $0.02 to sell it so your dividends will be $0.005", you will need to find some refinement of free market capitalism that we don't yet have.
Yes it is.
https://www.costco.com/kirkland-signature-extra-strength-acetaminophen-500-mg.%2c-1%2c000-caplets.product.100213623.html
That's 1000 for $9.99, 999 pills for 1 cent each and then 1 extra. Now, if you buy a smaller quantity it is more expensive, since you're paying them to make and ship around a smaller bottle, and there's probably also a bit of a premium for name-brand Tylenol if you don't know about generics (some of which is you paying them to advertise the existence of Tylenol to you), but here's a smaller quantity of brand-name Tylenol for something like $0.15 each.
https://www.amazon.com/Tylenol-Acetaminophen-Extra-Strength-Count/dp/B000052WQ7/
Not exactly an onerous burden.
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It's being sold for $0.08 a pill.
Like, what the argument here? That capitalism prevents anything from becoming cheap, plentiful, and accessible?
So far, yes. I want to see the working out when everyone can make 1 cent Tylenol in their kitchen.
Huh? Super cheap products require economies of scale. You absolutely can set up a factory churning out cheap Tylenol and sell tons of it for cheap. You're not going to be able to make small batches in your kitchen and sell them cheaply and it be economic, even if you magic away all the regulatory and supply chain hurdles.
Competition is still a powerful force when applied to big pharmaceutical corporations though. If Pharma Giant #1 and Pharma Giant #2 can both produce malaria vaccines for $0.01 per shot, the sale will go to the one that sets their price lowest. Since even a price of $0.02 per shot creates a big profit margin if you have enough volume, they get churned out, and humanity wins.
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What a way to miss the point. What they seek is to make the free-market value of most things so minimal that we no longer bother to put a price on them in much the same way you're not being metered for the air you breathe, or at the least like how you don't have to pay a fee for running a tap in a restaurant even if you're not ordering in there.
It's not like Taylor Swift concert tickets being sold at a price far less than the market will bear, largely for the PR benefit of fans deluding themselves into thinking Taylor is looking out for them, so that you can make a killing off re-selling them for much more than you paid for them, if you're lucky or have a bot helping you scalp them.
This is, of course, completely orthogonal to whether or not that's feasible (I do think it is, at least for malaria vaccines), but that is what their goal is.
The world as we know it is already radically abundant compared to most of history. There are no end of things that people won't mind you taking in passing, with objections only rising when you show up with a handcart to grab all the "free" stuff.
Because nobody manufactures air on Earth (except Mother Nature). Creating a breathable atmosphere on the Moon is a different matter, and that would be charged for (at least according to Heinlein) and if you can't pay your oxygen bill, you will suffocate and nobody thinks that's wrong.
There's a reason I'm implicitly describing air on Earth as opposed to on a hypothetical lunar colony. My analogy is the inverse of what you're thinking, it's going from a commodity being scarce and worth rationing out to being "too cheap to meter".
Last time I heard about "too cheap to meter" it was nuclear power and we were all going to be living the abundant life with the clean energy generated by the nuclear power plants:
So how did that one work out in reality, then?
Not a failure of nuclear power, but the idiots blocking it with onerous regulation. That's being reversed now, better late than never.
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We don't manufacture iron ore either. We still buy and sell that - including when it's still in the ground.
Scarcity is the key variable.
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X. Instead a hypothetical moon colony would nationalize the oxygen production industry, and if you don't pay your taxes you would be beaten by the police and then imprisoned.
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