MIT Has Predicted that Society Will Collapse in 2040

This is very interesting, thank you for making that video. One thing I’ll point to is, in my opininion, a misconception in “jet engine vs. donkey” analogy. Specifically, the idea that our society being more complex makes it more fragile (akin to a jet engine) than ancient societies. Historical study tends to show that the exact opposite is true, ancient societies were incredibly fragile, the loss of a single food source, epidemics, or depleting the local environment, could lead to quick and incredibly deadly collapses, yet those collapses seem almost insignificant in the course of History simply because there just wasn’t that much to lose. By contrast, the more complex a society is the more adept it is at weathering blows, the Roman Empire withstood catastrophies that would have brought a less complex society to its knees, and part of what made its fall so memorable and studied is the sheer magnitude of the systemic forces that eventually took it down.

To offer another analogy rather than “the jet engine”, I would go to biology. Simple organisms versus complex organisms. Ancient, primitive societies might be thought of as unicellular organisms, extremely vulnerable to any single event, but whose “collapse” is hardly even noticeable because there is so little to lose. By contrast, our society might be thought of as something like the most complex organism we know of, a human and its brain. We are gifted with an incredible adaptativeness, a strong immune system, we are able to effortlessly weather catastrophies that would have brought less developped societies to their knees…But the magnitude of the challenges we are facing because of our complexity is also unlike anything any other society had to face in History.

Quick and dirty analogy: As a “brain” society, we’re having a stroke. Our very complexity is starting to wear down on us, and while we’re still finding ways to work around the problem, “rewiring” to keep functionning around rotten tissue, we’re now in a race to do this fast enough before the bleeding cripples us for good. It’s not a more optimistic analogy I’m afraid.

I read “Limits to Growth” back in the 1970’s. It had a couple of assumptions that didn’t play out. The primary one was that it assumed that the world would come to the level of prosperity that the US enjoyed in 1970, and that the resources to achieve that level remained constant. The amount of resources required to achieve 1970’s prosperity has dropped dramatically. We use less of everything to achieve higher living standards. On the third hand, that only pushes the dates into to future a few years.

Would love to see a comparison of the various economic doomsday theories of the 50s-80s and see how they’ve fared. I remember hearing my parents and their friends talking about them in the early 90s, and yet here we are.