The general point is accurate, don’t take it so literally.
There were more than enough trees until we developed the technology to clear cut in expeditious manner. There were more than enough fish until we developed the technology to pull massive indiscriminate amounts out of the ocean (and/or started polluting our rivers with industry). There was more than enough topsoil until we developed mechanized plows and artificial fertilizer. Etc.
A few hundred years ago or less, a squirrel could get from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River without ever touching the ground. Not possible today. That’s not a push and pull played out over thousands of years, that’s a one-way trend.
The general point is not. Iceland and Easter Island were fully deforested way before the industrial age. Countless species went extinct in Britain and more examples abound.
Britain was a little bit industrialised even before the steam engine. There were windmills and water mills. Steam massively accelerated it, but industry did exist before.
Commons in England were being enclosed in the Tudor age. It caused a great deal of social unrest, even rebellion. It had little to do with technology, and was mostly caused by population growth.
Interestingly, clearcutting is part of it but another part is just grazing. If you let sheep graze in a forest they will eat all the saplings, so after a century of this, the old trees die out without new ones to replace them. I agree with your point but thought that could be of interest - Whittled Away, by Padraic Fogarty, is a good book discussing this (and why Ireland, which really should be all forest, is an ecological wasteland more generally)
This is where STEM people are weak- a lack of knowledge on history. In another forum, someone would have chipped in that England's virgin forests were fully deforested by 1150. And someone else would have pointed out that this deforestation produced the economic demand for coal that drove the Industrial Revolution in the first place.
Still, that kind of underscores OP's point. Yes, natural resources were not completely unlimited prior to the Industrial Revolution; Jonathan Swift predated Watt's steam engine, after all. Still... Neither were information resources 10 years ago. Intellectual property laws did exist prior to AI, of course. The legal systems in place are not completely ignorant of the reality.
However, there's an immense difference in scale between post-industrial strip mining of resources, and preindustrial resource extraction powered solely by human muscle (and not coal or nitrogylcerin etc). Similarly, there's a massive difference in information extraction enabled by AI, vs a person in 1980 poring over the microfilm in their local library.
The legal system and social systems in place prior to the Industrial Revolution proved unsuitable for an industrial world. It stands to reason that the legal system and social systems in today's society would be forced to evolve when exposed to the technological shift caused by AI.
Both animals and water power go way back. The early steam engine was measured in horsepower because that’s what it was replacing in mines. It couldn’t compete with nearby water power which was already being moved relatively long distances through mechanical means at the time.
Hand waving this as unimportant really misunderstands just how limited the Industrial Revolution was.
Irrelevant. Here's Bret Devereaux (an actual historian) explaining this distinction and precisely why those are irrelevant in the context of the Industrial Revolution:
> Diet indicators and midden remains indicate that there’s more meat being eaten, indicates a greater availability of animals which may include draft animals (for pulling plows) and must necessarily include manure, both products of animal ‘capital’ which can improve farming outputs. Of course many of the innovations above feed into this: stability makes it more sensible to invest in things like new mills or presses which need to be used for a while for the small efficiency gains to outweigh the cost of putting them up, but once up the labor savings result in more overall production.
> But the key here is that none of these processes inches this system closer to the key sets of conditions that formed the foundation of the industrial revolution. Instead, they are all about wringing efficiencies out the same set of organic energy sources with small admixtures of hydro- (watermills) or wind-power (sailing ships); mostly wringing more production out of the same set of energy inputs rather than adding new energy inputs. It is a more efficient organic economy, but still an organic economy, no closer to being an industrial economy for its efficiency, much like how realizing design efficiencies in an (unmotorized) bicycle does not bring it any closer to being a motorcycle; you are still stuck with the limits of the energy that can be applied by two legs.
So yeah, actual historians would be dismissive at your exact response, basically saying "I know, I know, but I don't care". You're still just talking about a society mostly 'wringing efficiencies out the same set of organic energy sources'. It IS unimportant, and you completely misunderstand how the Industrial Revolution reshaped production if you think it is important.
I think I prefer the 'STEM people' approach of trying to say true things, rather than this superior approach of just saying things and then, when they turn out to be false, dismissing them as irrelevant. If the truth of the claim is irrelevant, why did you make it in the first place!
The statement IS true anyways, the problem is that you failed to distinguish between an example and a universal claim. You want to argue on logic? I'm an engineer, I can argue on precision too:
The (true!) statement is "However, there's an immense difference in scale between post-industrial strip mining of resources, and preindustrial resource extraction powered solely by human muscle (and not coal or nitrogylcerin etc). Similarly, there's a massive difference in information extraction enabled by AI, vs a person in 1980 poring over the microfilm in their local library."
I said there is a major difference in scale between "modern strip mining" and "a preindustrial extraction method powered only by human muscle", and I made an analogous point about AI-enabled information extraction versus 1980s manual archival research. That statement is purely true. Nothing in that statement says the muscle-powered-extraction example was the only preindustrial mode of production, just as "someone using microfilm in 1980" does not imply microfilm was the only way information was accessed in 1980. The fact that other information formats existed in 1980 is irrelevant to the truth of the example.
So no, nothing I said "turned out to be false". You are attacking a claim I never made because you failed to parse the logic in the one I did. Most importantly, this direction missed the big picture dialectical synthesis that I was introducing as well, and just kept decomposing the argument into locally falsifiable atoms which lost the thread of what was actually being discussed.
Is your counter argument that you’re not wrong just attacking a straw man? Because it really sounds to me like you are just clueless.
Strip mining goes back thousands of years, it’s a simpler technology than making tunnels. And no it wasn’t limited to human power to crack rock several more powerful methods existed.
Roman mining literally destroyed a mountain, operating within an order of magnitude of the largest mines today. That’s what makes what you say false. It’s not some minor quibble over details you are simply speaking from ignorance.
It’s almost like you’re intentionally trying to be wrong.
You don't seem to understand how analogies work. I’m not talking about strip mining vs tunnel mining, I was comparing scale of human powered mining to mining with nitroglycerin.
I’ll let you figure out how the scale of mining “going back thousands of years” is very different from modern explosive mining on your own. Go google “iron production by year” or something. Hint: it took generations for the Romans to strip a small hill, that a modern midsize mining company can do in a few days.
How so, being precise and correct is IMO worth preserving in a world of handwaving slop.
The industrial revolution was from ~1760–1840, it was a major shift it doesn’t cover everything that happens between 1760 and now more did it overwhelm many existing trends.
Yeah - really struggling to understand why people are not grasping this point.
Yes, Easter Island was deforested far earlier - but you wouldn't compare the steam engine's capability in resource extraction compared to what people on Easter Island were doing.
It feels like people are almost straining to not understand the point - I think it's quite clear how ML + AI serve to extract resources of data at a unheard of scale.
It's the autism. And I say that endearingly. I'm an engineer who probably likes trains way too much.
I intentionally pointed out the STEM-esque responses of pedantic correction as a symptom of a disciplinary blind spot: technically correct nitpicking that misses the forest for the trees, a tendency to atomize arguments and lose the structural point, and that tendency is a weakness, not a strength.
There's also a lack of historical training to contextualize their own objection. That's also why I brought up Devereaux as an authority hammer: the actual domain experts consider those objections and dismiss it.
It is hard to convince a man of that which his income is dependent on him not understanding. -Upton Sinclair
You aren't wrong. There's definitely going to be a need to drag people kicking and screaming to enlightenment unfortunately. Too much money to be made at stake otherwise.
the conclusion doesnt follow from the premise is the issue.
the laws and enclosure happened basically orthogonal to the respurce constraints, so there's no actual comparison to draw.
if you insist on a causation, id go with the opposite - the laws making ownership and forcing people off of land enabled the exploitation and innovation, not that it was cleanup for exploitation that was already happening. existing exploitation across all kinds of degrees was already being managed without the enclosure.
if you just want to make stuff up, you can reference anything you want, like that some elaborate thing happened in star wars, and thus the same thing must be happening with AI
I also saw a theory (not sure how credible) that the reason humans started doing agriculture was in fact because we killed all the megafauna we used to eat.
This was over 10,000 years ago. Well before the Industrial Revolution, indeed, before even the original Agricultural Revolution.
> There were more than enough trees until we developed the technology to clear cut in expeditious manner.
Unless you mean 'an axe', way before that there were deforested areas where the need for trees was larger than the supply and there were enough humans to fell them.
> A few hundred years ago or less, a squirrel could get from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River without ever touching the ground.
Yes, but that wasn't possible in other parts of the world much sooner.
> The general point is accurate, don’t take it so literally.
It's not, because the Malthusian trap was all too real going into modernity, as in recurring famines were a thing, they were quite real, nothing "literal" about them.
First of all, the study is written by an economist, might as well have sent me an Oracle of Delphi pronouncement. And second, he mentions the Malthusian trap being a real thing in his very first sentence, so not sure what I should have gotten out of this.
There were more than enough trees until we developed the technology to clear cut in expeditious manner. There were more than enough fish until we developed the technology to pull massive indiscriminate amounts out of the ocean (and/or started polluting our rivers with industry). There was more than enough topsoil until we developed mechanized plows and artificial fertilizer. Etc.
A few hundred years ago or less, a squirrel could get from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi River without ever touching the ground. Not possible today. That’s not a push and pull played out over thousands of years, that’s a one-way trend.