Fooled by the Magic of Technology into mistaken extrapolation

[rufuspollock]

p.22 [@murphy-2021-energy-and-human-ambitions]

The historical progress can fool us into thinking that we can expect acontinued march to better substitutes. Having witnessed a half-dozenrabbits come out of the hat in the example of lighting technology (Box2.1), we are conditioned to believe more are forthcoming. It will be trueuntil it isn’t any more (e.g., see Figure 2.3) One way to put it is that 6rabbits does not imply an infinite number. We should welcome each newrabbit, but not hinge our future on a continual stream of new rabbits.

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This is an error of simple extrapolation of exponentials (which at some point must hit a limit). There is also the x-domain extrapolation in technosolutionism where we say "hey we can build mobile apps really well so ... why can't we fix X in democracy with a mobile app" (why isn't government more like software as a service etc).

[rufuspollock]

@lkavanagh30 i swear you wrote a bit post about technology as magic and technosolutionism - where was that? This seems really nice data point.