Nate, thank you for yet another mind boggling interview! I have spent hours taking notes, reading the transcript, reading Dr. West's 2007 PNAS paper, and formulating questions.
I hope you hold a roundable with Geoffrey West and Mario Giampietro, who also was looking at metabolism at varying scale. Other past guests to consider adding to the roundtable include Josh Farley, Paul Erlich, Joseph Tainter, and Jared Diamond.
Humans have exceeded their activity metabolism since they began cooking with fire 1.8 million years ago, not just 10,000 years ago with the agricultural revolution. We are truly fire apes, and 1.8 x10^-6 years sounds like an evolutionary time scale. There are so few foods that humans can digest raw, our metabolism must be genetically adapted to cooking, no doubt to feed our oversized brains. Cooking is a form of predigestion. We are the only animals that require predigested food past infancy.
Have you read his PNAS paper? Although it has since been edited, it was published in 2007, before the internet took off, and way before AI crossed a capability threshold. By what factor has the internet expanded social interaction, for urbanites and rural people? If it turns out to be possible to continue to power the internet, the cloud, AI, and personal devices, could humanity relocalize, deconstruct megacities, and resume a new cycle of "growth" based on the distributed social organization? In that scenario, human connection to the agricultural land that sustains us, if not to "nature", could be restored, thus increasing the carrying capacity of the smaller towns (food and waste transport by horse or oxcart), while satisfying the dopamine need for growing social interconnections. Growth of social connections is limited by the length of a human lifespan, so the connectivity of the overall system would level out at some K carrying capacity. Of course, this scenario would require good governance of the internet: elimination of streaming video advertisements and commercial extraction of personal data, and brakes on potential virality of falsehoods and AI hallucinations.
In the PNAS paper, and at about 40 minutes into the interview, Dr. West talks about innovation to cause a discontinuity from the previous growth cycle, temporarily slowing it way down, but starting a new growth cycle from the elevated point of the discontinuity. How do these cycles relate to the adaptive cycle in complex systems? It looks to me like iteration between the rapid growth (r) phase and the reorganization (alpha) phase, yet urban infrastructure, bureaucracy, and (usually ineffective) approaches to undesirable attractors (eg. crime, poverty, drugs) resemble late conservation (K) phase behavior. The latter is consistent with Dr. West's forecast of collapse, i.e. the release (omega) phase. So I'm confused. Maybe the social system is on a different adaptive cycle from the distribution (infrastructure) system? Are there differences in scale? Maybe you could have Dr. Brian Walker (ecologist at CSIRO) come in to explain?
Nate, thank you for yet another mind boggling interview! I have spent hours taking notes, reading the transcript, reading Dr. West's 2007 PNAS paper, and formulating questions.
I hope you hold a roundable with Geoffrey West and Mario Giampietro, who also was looking at metabolism at varying scale. Other past guests to consider adding to the roundtable include Josh Farley, Paul Erlich, Joseph Tainter, and Jared Diamond.
Humans have exceeded their activity metabolism since they began cooking with fire 1.8 million years ago, not just 10,000 years ago with the agricultural revolution. We are truly fire apes, and 1.8 x10^-6 years sounds like an evolutionary time scale. There are so few foods that humans can digest raw, our metabolism must be genetically adapted to cooking, no doubt to feed our oversized brains. Cooking is a form of predigestion. We are the only animals that require predigested food past infancy.
Have you read his PNAS paper? Although it has since been edited, it was published in 2007, before the internet took off, and way before AI crossed a capability threshold. By what factor has the internet expanded social interaction, for urbanites and rural people? If it turns out to be possible to continue to power the internet, the cloud, AI, and personal devices, could humanity relocalize, deconstruct megacities, and resume a new cycle of "growth" based on the distributed social organization? In that scenario, human connection to the agricultural land that sustains us, if not to "nature", could be restored, thus increasing the carrying capacity of the smaller towns (food and waste transport by horse or oxcart), while satisfying the dopamine need for growing social interconnections. Growth of social connections is limited by the length of a human lifespan, so the connectivity of the overall system would level out at some K carrying capacity. Of course, this scenario would require good governance of the internet: elimination of streaming video advertisements and commercial extraction of personal data, and brakes on potential virality of falsehoods and AI hallucinations.
In the PNAS paper, and at about 40 minutes into the interview, Dr. West talks about innovation to cause a discontinuity from the previous growth cycle, temporarily slowing it way down, but starting a new growth cycle from the elevated point of the discontinuity. How do these cycles relate to the adaptive cycle in complex systems? It looks to me like iteration between the rapid growth (r) phase and the reorganization (alpha) phase, yet urban infrastructure, bureaucracy, and (usually ineffective) approaches to undesirable attractors (eg. crime, poverty, drugs) resemble late conservation (K) phase behavior. The latter is consistent with Dr. West's forecast of collapse, i.e. the release (omega) phase. So I'm confused. Maybe the social system is on a different adaptive cycle from the distribution (infrastructure) system? Are there differences in scale? Maybe you could have Dr. Brian Walker (ecologist at CSIRO) come in to explain?