I would add that a world with advanced AI, with or without much more advanced robotics, is a world with much more automation than we have today. So we can build and manufacturing and mine more than we do today.
I mention this because controlled environment agriculture (indoor farming) has many times higher yield per unit area than conventional farming, and many times lower water and fertilizer use and waste generation. Yields are also more stable, not subject to weather and less subject to pests. Construction and energy costs are the limiters, and those should be solvable with normal economic development + better automation.
Thanks for the addition. Vertical and indoor farming should improve on the current fragility (thus add to robustness) of the agricultural industry. Feeding 8 billion people will still cost a lot of resources.
Mining however is different in that mining cost will ever increase due to decreasing quality of ore and ores being mined in places that are harder to reach. This effect could be offset by technological progress for a limited time (unless we go to the stars). Vast improvements in recycling could be a solution, but that requires a lot of energy.
Solving the energy problem via fusion energy would really help a lot for the more utopian scenario’s.
Fusion would be a big help for sure, but not strictly necessary. Consider that total sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface is ~120PW, or 15MW for each of 8 billion people. That’s about 1000x current primary energy use. Commercially cost-effective solar cells are currently ~20% efficient. If you could get install and balance of system costs down enough, with universal adoption rooftops alone could theoretically get you within spitting distance of an all-solar grid (yes in practice it won’t happen this way, it will take massive amounts of complementary infrastructure and other energy sources and other technologies, etc., I’m just talking about land usage requirements.)
And yes mining gets more difficult in absolute terms, but I think you’re (on a timescale of decades) underestimating the value of improving mining and metallurgical technology while overestimating the difficulty of recycling. On a timescale of longer than decades, “improving technology” expands to include things like automated asteroid mining (and manufacturing?) using space-based solar power.
I would add that a world with advanced AI, with or without much more advanced robotics, is a world with much more automation than we have today. So we can build and manufacturing and mine more than we do today.
I mention this because controlled environment agriculture (indoor farming) has many times higher yield per unit area than conventional farming, and many times lower water and fertilizer use and waste generation. Yields are also more stable, not subject to weather and less subject to pests. Construction and energy costs are the limiters, and those should be solvable with normal economic development + better automation.
Thanks for the addition. Vertical and indoor farming should improve on the current fragility (thus add to robustness) of the agricultural industry. Feeding 8 billion people will still cost a lot of resources.
Mining however is different in that mining cost will ever increase due to decreasing quality of ore and ores being mined in places that are harder to reach. This effect could be offset by technological progress for a limited time (unless we go to the stars). Vast improvements in recycling could be a solution, but that requires a lot of energy.
Solving the energy problem via fusion energy would really help a lot for the more utopian scenario’s.
Fusion would be a big help for sure, but not strictly necessary. Consider that total sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface is ~120PW, or 15MW for each of 8 billion people. That’s about 1000x current primary energy use. Commercially cost-effective solar cells are currently ~20% efficient. If you could get install and balance of system costs down enough, with universal adoption rooftops alone could theoretically get you within spitting distance of an all-solar grid (yes in practice it won’t happen this way, it will take massive amounts of complementary infrastructure and other energy sources and other technologies, etc., I’m just talking about land usage requirements.)
And yes mining gets more difficult in absolute terms, but I think you’re (on a timescale of decades) underestimating the value of improving mining and metallurgical technology while overestimating the difficulty of recycling. On a timescale of longer than decades, “improving technology” expands to include things like automated asteroid mining (and manufacturing?) using space-based solar power.