But for Those Pesky Humans

Stephan Heck and Matt Rogers explore how the world could change given some of the known technology that has been developed and argue for a bright future.  They write about this in their relatively new book, Resource Revolution.  I hope that they are right.  I think that they are right.  I'm an optimist, too.  I'll need to read their book.

In this New York Times review, the author of the review points out very possible unintended consequences of the efficiency improvements that will come if we allow electric / autonomous / carpool systems to develop and improve to the point that they are ubiquitous.  We could just opt for more.  Its a good point, but misses the larger point.

As prices decrease (and technology helps drive down prices), we tend to consume more.  More efficient cars have allowed people living in the exurbs to still commute to the office at a reasonable total cost.  What might be a more compelling line of argument might be whether the goods that we'd be consuming in the future are more or less subject to the same resource intensity as in the past.  As more and more of goods that we consume are low cost to "manufacture" or duplicate (video games, on-line entertainment more generally), our resource intensiveness per unit of GDP should be expected to decline.  To be fair, the author is focusing on physical goods where real resources are consumed.  But if we could cut the number of required cars in this country by half by increasing utilization to 10% from 5%, that would be a substantial reduction in the use of real resources.  If we could cut automotive deaths from 33k to 1k per year, that would result in a substantial reduction in the use of real resources.  Will these be sufficient to offset our increased consumption?  Good question to debate, maybe.

Personally, I think that we are saturated in our interest in spending time in cars (or at least I am).  I can't imagine increasing my time spend in cars just because I don't have to drive.  It will be quite a bit more valuable to me if I don't have to spend the time/energy to drive, yes.  Bigger house, nope.  Mine is too big already.  That may not be true for others, though.  Really, the big problem with housing will come when the cost of renovations is dramatically reduced.  3D mapping and engineering technologies could make this happen (maybe?).  Our existing housing stock is huge compared to new housing built each year.

Too much of a stream of consciousness post, apologies.