The Collapse of Complex Societies

Summary

The collapse of complex societies14 June 2025Those who crit­i­cize so-called “AI doomers” often over­look that there is a broader, intel­lec­tu­ally serious tradi­tion of tech­no­log­ical doomerism that goes back decades. To revisit these works is to wonder whether AI really presents new risks, or if it is simply the mani­fes­ta­tion of a risk previ­ously fore­told.Of course, predic­tions of global apoc­a­lypse are as ancient as humanity. Given the histor­ical track record—no global apoc­a­lypse yet!—those predicting apoc­a­lypse have tradi­tion­ally had a rough time being taken seri­ously. Still, there is a big differ­ence between predicting the arrival of apoc­a­lypse ex nihilo vs. a reasoned argu­ment that it neces­sarily emerges from specific human deci­sions and habits.This book, published in 1972, was an early effort to quan­ti­ta­tively model the effects of tech­no­log­ical change. I read it some years ago. As the title implies, The Limits of Growth consid­ered how five key global factors would affect human devel­op­ment:If the present growth trends in world popu­la­tion, indus­tri­al­iza­tion, pollu­tion, food produc­tion, and resource deple­tion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached some­time within the next one hundred years. The most prob­able result will be a rather sudden and uncon­trol­lable decline in both popu­la­tion and indus­trial capacity.In support of their theo­ries, and unusu­ally for the era, the authors of TLoG relied exten­sively on soft­ware simu­la­tions. This allowed the authors to, say, model the course of human progress under real­istic current assump­tions. In this model, popu­la­tion decreases rapidly after around 2050:But using a soft­ware model also allowed the authors to run simu­la­tions with different starting assump­tions, such as this one with natural resources doubled. Perhaps coun­ter­in­tu­itively, the model predicts that increasing resources causes the big drop in popu­la­tion to happen so...