Nobody brought that up at the Summit, but I hosted a meeting on alternative energy and peak oil a few months ago for our Santa Cruz Future Salon.
The speaker we invited for that gave a pretty strong case for why oil has either already peeked, or if it hasn't that it will very soon. This is why people should be getting off their asses and switching over to better renewable energy sources today, rather than sitting around and waiting. Either way, I don't think it will affect the timescale for the singularity, but perhaps it's worth debating.
There are several issues I'd mention here... first, oil is a pretty inefficient energy source, as well as being dirty and bad for the environment. So I hope we'll switch to better ones (nuclear, solar, wind, fusion, hydrogen, etc.) sooner rather than later. Even if we just used solar, the sun will burn for billions more years which is many millions of times longer than it needs to in order for us to reach the singularity. Another issue that's important here is to seperate technological progress from consumption and population growth. Information technology has always grown exponentially, whereas things like population and GDP do not. So while there may be some relation between the two, they're quite different things.
Let's assume that people are stupid and stubborn, and don't switch away from using oil during the rest of this decade. This means that oil prices will rise and it will put much higher selection pressure for them to switch during the next decade. Because of the scarcity, the profits to be made from developing renewable energy will be even greater so we will get even more money put into developing new technology. Which could have spillover benefits to information technology that will drive the exponential even faster. So any temporary lull due to a slowdown will be compensated soon by increased funding in the long run.
So getting back to the distinction between the growth of knowledge/technology and the growth of population and consumption. Let's say that for some bizarre reason, something goes wrong and even after the oil prices skyrocket, people still refuse to switch to cleaner renewable energy sources. In this case, much of the population will start dying off. However, there will still be a core segment of the rich population which can afford the incredibly high oil prices. While some of the resources may go to aiding the people who are dying off, surely a lot of them will still go into developing new technology. So here the situation is a little debatable, but I think the technological progress would still continue exponentially. Although the exponent could be slowed down in this case, it's a pretty artificial case to begin with since it's highly unlikely people would want to stick with oil to the point of killing themselves off.
One thing I'd mention also, just as a side comment, is how far ahead of the US the country of France is. While the US gets most of its energy from coal and oil, the majority of homes in France are powered by nuclear. In the US, because of one indicent on 3-mile-island, there is a lot of irrational fear regarding nuclear technology. I think the situation is exactly analogous to September 11th. Americans, for some reason, react out of fear to isolated random incidents and are willing to give up huge amounts of comfort (whether it be human rights or efficient energy) in order to feel like they're safe against another catastrophe. Even if such a thing is extremely unlikely.
Re: The Singularity and Peak Oil
The speaker we invited for that gave a pretty strong case for why oil has either already peeked, or if it hasn't that it will very soon. This is why people should be getting off their asses and switching over to better renewable energy sources today, rather than sitting around and waiting. Either way, I don't think it will affect the timescale for the singularity, but perhaps it's worth debating.
There are several issues I'd mention here... first, oil is a pretty inefficient energy source, as well as being dirty and bad for the environment. So I hope we'll switch to better ones (nuclear, solar, wind, fusion, hydrogen, etc.) sooner rather than later. Even if we just used solar, the sun will burn for billions more years which is many millions of times longer than it needs to in order for us to reach the singularity. Another issue that's important here is to seperate technological progress from consumption and population growth. Information technology has always grown exponentially, whereas things like population and GDP do not. So while there may be some relation between the two, they're quite different things.
Let's assume that people are stupid and stubborn, and don't switch away from using oil during the rest of this decade. This means that oil prices will rise and it will put much higher selection pressure for them to switch during the next decade. Because of the scarcity, the profits to be made from developing renewable energy will be even greater so we will get even more money put into developing new technology. Which could have spillover benefits to information technology that will drive the exponential even faster. So any temporary lull due to a slowdown will be compensated soon by increased funding in the long run.
So getting back to the distinction between the growth of knowledge/technology and the growth of population and consumption. Let's say that for some bizarre reason, something goes wrong and even after the oil prices skyrocket, people still refuse to switch to cleaner renewable energy sources. In this case, much of the population will start dying off. However, there will still be a core segment of the rich population which can afford the incredibly high oil prices. While some of the resources may go to aiding the people who are dying off, surely a lot of them will still go into developing new technology. So here the situation is a little debatable, but I think the technological progress would still continue exponentially. Although the exponent could be slowed down in this case, it's a pretty artificial case to begin with since it's highly unlikely people would want to stick with oil to the point of killing themselves off.
One thing I'd mention also, just as a side comment, is how far ahead of the US the country of France is. While the US gets most of its energy from coal and oil, the majority of homes in France are powered by nuclear. In the US, because of one indicent on 3-mile-island, there is a lot of irrational fear regarding nuclear technology. I think the situation is exactly analogous to September 11th. Americans, for some reason, react out of fear to isolated random incidents and are willing to give up huge amounts of comfort (whether it be human rights or efficient energy) in order to feel like they're safe against another catastrophe. Even if such a thing is extremely unlikely.