Economy featured

Goldilocks Technology – A Preliminary Checklist

By Nate Hagens, originally published by The Great Simplification

August 12, 2024

Goldilocks from The Three Bears

(Recorded August 5 2024)


Description

As a problem-solving species, technology is an embedded part of the human experience – we assess, innovate, invent and adapt. But as we move out of the anomalous era we have just lived through and into less stable economic, social, geopolitical and ecological circumstances, humanity will require different kinds of innovation for a livable future.

In this Frankly, Nate offers preliminary guidelines for what might be termed ‘Goldilocks Technology’ – not too hot (dopaminergic gadgets) and not too cold (stone age tech) inventions for the future. Can governance upstream of designers and engineers use prices and policy to incentivize more appropriate and reliable technology? Can values and behavioral choices change demand, shifting the products available toward more sustainable options? What would the materials, supply chains, and disposal of technology that is ‘just right’ look like – and how would it change our wider boundary relationship with the biosphere?

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Show Notes

PDF Transcript

00:46 – The Carbon Pulse

00:51 – TGS Episode on Goldilocks Technology

02:46 – Planetary boundaries, Overshoot

03:28 – The Five Horsemen

05:35 – Elon Musk’s companies being supported by government subsidies

06:03 – Prices of inputs are wrong

06:11 – Shale oil is the source rock and finite, Art Berman on TGS

06:23 – The true cost of externalities 

07:15 – Overton window

08:08 – Energy Primacy

09:00 – The move to a multipolar world 

09:18 – Fragility of complex supply chains, reliance on cheap oil

10:07 – Auroville

10:25 – Bricks made from dirt

10:40 – Sodium batteries

11:16 – We recycle 8.5% of global supply chain

11:20 – Roman Krznaric

11:40 – Circular economy in Edo Japan

12:01 – Regenerative innovations, Regenerative economies

12:21 – Primary productivity

12:52 – Industrial Dairy Farms and Ecological Impacts

13:14 – Pricing to include ecological impacts

13:25 – Daniel Schmachtenberger, TGS Episode, link to Naive Progress Paper here as well 

16:50 – Wide boundary thinking, Wide Boundary Frankly

18:07 – Optimal foraging theory

18:34 – Economic superorganism

18:44 – Contact movie

Teaser image credit: From A Child’s Book of Stories by Penrhyn W. Coussens, illustrated by Jessie Willcox Smith. New York: Duffield and Company, 1911. By Jessie Willcox Smith – https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101063603847, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=84502042
Nate Hagens

Nate Hagens

Nate Hagens is the Executive Director of The Institute for the Study of Energy & Our Future (ISEOF). Allied with leading ecologists, energy experts, politicians, and systems thinkers, ISEOF assembles roadmaps for understanding how human societies might adapt to lower-throughput lifestyles.

Nate hosts the podcast The Great Simplification, where he has conversations with experts in energy, ecology, government, technology, and the economy to provide a systemic view of the world around us.

After ten years in finance, Nate left Wall Street to study the interrelationships between energy, ecology, and economics—and the implications for human futures. He was the Managing Editor of The Oil Drum, one of the most respected websites for analysis and discussion of global energy supplies and implications of the upcoming energy transition.

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mwildfire
mwildfire
2 years ago

I an think of one more item for the Goldilocks checklist. A good tech innovation would not benefit some at the expense of others. A great deal of what's put forth today fails this criterion .

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