The Civilizational Cost
Busting the elitist techno-fantasy that society and the current growth-based economy can — or should — function with a massively reduced global population.
In 2020, Felix Moreno wrote Chip Wars, a book about the future of technology, analyzing China, the USA, and other countries. It also predicted the future of the entire chip production chain, and introduced the concept of Civilzational Cost.
Very often economists, philosophers, visionary entrepreneurs or barroom thinkers claim that, thanks to technology and automation, only a limited number of people would be needed to generate almost all the world’s wealth and run the entire economy.
They propose that if a large part of current global wealth were concentrated in technology companies, for example in the NASDAQ, and its stock market price is X million, it is really only necessary for these companies to grow more in order to automate virtually everything and have total control from a computer, with little need for people, to generate almost all the current wealth.
Thanks to the amount of humans on the planet — each one being a cog in the current system, exploiting every piece of the biosphere and also using a lot of fossil energy — we have been able to build a human and energetic castle that has helped elites believe that they can live without people or biophysical limits.
This is pure fantasy. It simply doesn’t add up.
For argument’s sake, let’s develop the idea and look at a key piece of current technology, the microchip. Taiwan (along with South Korea) is the only country that can manufacture the latest generation processors. To be able to do this they ‘only’ need 40,000 engineers. In other words, in theory ‘only’ 40,000 people are needed to make the Taiwanese miracle possible.
Some people would argue that with 40,000 people you can make the microchips, and then with another 50,000 you can make robots in China. With 100 times those amounts we can have all the engineers to make an army of mega robots, or a bunch of servers that control our lives with AI and do almost all the jobs.
But then a question arises: if almost all Taiwan’s GDP is generated by these 40,000 engineers, why are there 23 million inhabitants? If almost all the wealth is generated by 40,000 people, why don’t we make robots to keep these 40,000 people alive and forget about the rest?
This is where the concept of civilizational cost comes in.
Those 40,000 people, without schools, without universities, without a house, without supermarkets, without cleaning, without clothes, without heating, without garbage collection, without systems to have light, water, sewage, without the rest of the operators of the chip factories, without trucks, ports — and all this accompanied by huge amounts of energy — surely would not be engineers.
But wait, there’s more. Taiwan is next to China, and there is always the possibility that China will invade. Who prevents that? A Taiwanese army of 215,000 soldiers against a country with an army of over two million. Obviously not.
In order for Taiwan not to be invaded, it has the support of the entire US military, and even Europe. The reason? It is a strategic country for the rest of the world, so there are many more people to defend Taiwan apart from its 23 million inhabitants: one million US soldiers, plus Germans and other Taiwanese allies. In fact, Taiwan has a considerable army in relation to the size of its population.
Plus, Taiwan has no mines or coltan, so we need more armies to control the resources of the Congo, Bolivia or Chile, and ships, planes, clothes for all the people we have mentioned, food, bars, hotels, construction companies, cement, shipping companies, foundries, etc.
In other words, you simply cannot dissociate a company that manufactures a microchip, from 8 billion people — since between them they build the different civilizations that exploit the resources of the entire planet, not only to manufacture the microchip, but to maintain the civilizational infrastructure that uses it.
So, to what extent can engineers and machines alone make people redundant, if fossil energy flows are shrinking and renewables fail to fill the gap?
And to what extent can wealth be produced without anyone consuming the products produced in huge quantities? Can cell phones be manufactured in small quantities (e.g. 150 million per year) and be profitable if, today, manufacturing 1.4 billion cell phones per year, there are only two places in the world that manufacture mobile chips and only five mobile companies are viable to stay afloat with energy costs and ever decreasing sales?
It is becoming increasingly difficult to be technologically competitive due to falling demand. Despite the fact that almost every citizen on the planet is already consuming technology, only one or two companies can stay on the technological cusp. Because, to have robots and AIs and the latest technology, the energy and money investments are so large that it only makes sense with the entire world population contributing to their effort and consumption to make it so — and with the huge amounts of energy that oil has given us.
The reality is that without a whole planet of 8 billion people consuming the resources plundered from the earth with fossil fuels and buying 1.4 billion cell phones a year, we could not have such advanced cell phones, because the demand cannot grow as there are no more potential consumers, nor enough energy to maintain growth.
For all this, to imagine a society of only a few hundred million inhabitants, full of technology and robots doing all the work necessary to keep those people alive, is completely nonsensical — because it does not take into account the civilizational and energetic costs. And within the civilizational costs, it does not take into account the different civilizations, their armies, and their interests, which in no way are going to remain in a universe of a few hundred million people all happy with their robotic technology and their GDP.
Instead of dreaming about massively reducing the global population and living in a techno-fantasy run by robots and AI, we should be thinking about how to reduce our dependence on high technology and develop appropriate technologies for the different types of production and basic services, allowing everyone to live well within planetary boundaries.
As energy flows are reduced, it will not be possible to maintain the current high technology and the enormous flows of information. I’m not proposing a return to the cave world (as many will sarcastically say), just that we need to be aware of the fragility of current technology and come up with more resilient alternatives.
Inspired? Here are some ideas of what to do next:
- Tales of Dystopia by Felix Moreno is a selection of collapsist stories that are not essays but works of science fiction that predict the future. Unfortunately, the thread is so fine that some dystopian science fiction stories written in recent years are no longer science fiction but simple fact.
- In Chip Wars, Moreno also introduced the term Peak Memory, which refers to the point when humanity no longer produces more data storage than the previous year, marking the beginning of the decline of the information society. In 2022, this predicted event happened for the first time in human history. All these ideas and more are included in his book, Peak Memory, which is currently being translated into English.
- Read Moreno’s other books (Spanish only), which explore whether civilizations will be able to maintain the pace of production or if they’ll decrease technologically in a world where we have less and less energy available.
