I haven’t come across any reasonably complete and in-depth analysis of this (just a bunch of scattered and more or less tangential fragments to which I didn’t keep a list of references) - if anyone else has links to such, I’d be interested in taking a look.
One big problem with regarding technological progress as one-way is that a great deal of technology relies on nonrenewable resources. To take your example of farming, today’s agricultural techniques rely very heavily on fossil fuels and perhaps on less obvious resources: consider phosphate deposits, soil erosion and pesticide resistance—all problems which might be solved easily with sufficiently advanced technology, but not necessarily otherwise.
The conclusion is that it’s hard to know how much time we have, but one thing is clear: stagnation is not stasis. It is, in the end, death.
I haven’t come across any reasonably complete and in-depth analysis of this (just a bunch of scattered and more or less tangential fragments to which I didn’t keep a list of references) - if anyone else has links to such, I’d be interested in taking a look.
One big problem with regarding technological progress as one-way is that a great deal of technology relies on nonrenewable resources. To take your example of farming, today’s agricultural techniques rely very heavily on fossil fuels and perhaps on less obvious resources: consider phosphate deposits, soil erosion and pesticide resistance—all problems which might be solved easily with sufficiently advanced technology, but not necessarily otherwise.
The conclusion is that it’s hard to know how much time we have, but one thing is clear: stagnation is not stasis. It is, in the end, death.