Member-only story
The end of exponential growth
Created by author in leonardo.ai
Avi Loeb wrote an article called “Intelligence means exponential growth”
I fervently disagree with just about everything he said in it, but then he’s a techno-optimist who thinks aliens will save us with technology, and I’m what they call a “doomer” who thinks, to be brutal about it, that we’re fucked right now.
That expletive was quite deliberate, if you’ve ever read my work, you’ll know that I very rarely use such words. I only ever use them to dramatically emphasise what I’m trying to say.
I responded thus:
“You seem to think that exponential growth is always a good thing. It is most definitely not. Human civilisation is inexorably heading towards a major catastrophe that might well lead to our extinction.
You said that intelligence always leads to exponential growth, I beg to differ.
Humans, in one form or another existed for nearly two million years before the expansionist form, Homo Sapiens Sapiens rampaged through the world wiping out all our most closely related hominid species and the majority of megafauna on the planet in the process. Homo Neanderthalis had a slightly larger brain than us, it's possible they were more intelligent than us, they didn't adopt this disasterous tendency to exponential growth and the unlimited destruction that goes along with it.
