Good reply from coldarchon. Unfortunately they've been hellbanned, so most people won't get to see it.

1) I think overall, the suffering is most likely to outweigh the benefits.

2) Starvation. Our soil is dying. What Acari used to do for free, we now do with chemicals, poorly. Peons have to buy their seed instead of re-using their own (mostly due to the usage of hybrid seeds, which are designed to reproduce very poorly). Plus, the seed is not adapted to the soil which then has to be irrigated, pesticized etc. Not to mention transgenic plants, which are not used to feed the world, but starve it (terminal seeds and patents come to mind).

We are already seeing some of the effects now, and it sucks (health, peasant suicide…). But for now it merely sucks. The real danger lies elsewhere.

See, we hardly need fertilizers or pesticides. Except when the soil is dead, with no fungus nor acari to provide what the plants need to grow. Or when the soil is compressed by excessive ploughing, and the roots can't set in. Or when the soil is burned by the sun at the end of the summer, and is not protected by weeds (which in this case wouldn't actually be weeds). Most our soil is suffering all three. Therefore, we badly need a heavy industry, mostly based on oil.

When there is no oil, we starve.

It won't be quick. Oil will get more expensive, and so will food. Add in some random financial crisis, and the industry could halt for a time. This wouldn't be a big deal if our soil was alive. But when it's dead, you can't grow squat on it without a relatively heavy industry. Fortunately, we can revive soils. With hedge wood, actually (systematically cutting hedges was a really bad idea). It takes 3 years however, so we'd better start before we actually need live soils.

> You don't get 10 productivity growth points ever year

I wasn't clear. I just meant that producing more and more goods in less and less man-hour would be a wonderful thing, and we should basically push for it. I also meant that we do have bit of that kind of growth (if I recall correctly, productivity doubled since the 70s, mostly due to computers and robots).

> Economically an politically speaking things get better slowly.

Agree. It does get better. My fear is that we are too slow. We need something good enough before we start starving. Because if we do, things will get ugly. Will something good come out of that? Maybe. The French Revolution itself started as an ugly uproar of starving people. But I'd rather avoid it, if at all possible.

> Well we clearly see is that what works is to grow the food where it grows the best and bring it to where people want to eat is.

It works in the short term, for the West. I think the cost of transportation is vastly underestimated, because the price of fossil fuels is vastly underestimated. The market hardly measures environmental costs, nor does it plan for several decades ahead —classic tragedy of the commons. I have some hopes for a cleaner (and actually cheaper) transportation however. (Airships and self driving cars come to mind.)

If food gets to expensive more people will trie to make money with food. People will have a bigger insentive to produce, store and consume food in other ways then befor. You advocate one solution. I just trues in markets insentives, People spend moeny on food and the would spend more if needbe. People will sell me food. It may come with reduced life quality in other stuff but thats ok.

If your sure about your solution do a startup.

There are to many variables to accuratly predict ahead so much.

> If food gets too expensive more people will try to make money with food. People will have a bigger incentive to produce, store and consume food in other ways then before.

That'll work as long as it's only a price problem. But If the lack of resources is sufficiently dire, we will lack food, period. And our current lack of foresight tells me that the probability of such an outcome is far from negligible.

> If you're sure about your solution do a startup.

Doesn't work. There are already plenty of ethical peasants which try their best to grow good food with few enough resources. They succeed, though they are often hindered by silly regulations and the sheer weight of their more "conventional" colleagues. The problem is, unlike software, food doesn't scale. Everyone must adopt better ways, and that takes advocacy. In programming, the equivalent would be trying to significantly reduce the usage of, say, mutable state (self plug: http://loup-vaillant.fr/articles/assignment).

> There are to many variables to accuratly predict ahead so much.

Fair enough. A more reasonable prediction would run like this: "we may one day have depleted so much resources that a good deal of us will die of starvation, or of secondary effects like war".