Technology-Driven Disruptions

Discussion

Nafeez Ahmed:

" our research at RethinkX shows that the incumbent industries that define our civilization are being upended by a series of overlapping and interconnected technology disruptions happening in every one of the five foundational sectors of civilization. Neither the degrowth nor the ecomodernist narratives grasp this reality.

In information, the dawn of the internet and the smartphone are not only disrupting traditional centralized models of the mass media, but are also cascading across into other sectors. The creation of new information business models has disrupted catering and restaurants and led to the rise of ride-hailing, disrupting taxis; while the ubiquitous spread of lithium-ion batteries has driven down battery costs for EVs, further disrupting transport, and in turn further disrupting demand for conventional energy.

The information disruption thus helped trigger and accelerate the disruption in the transport sector. As costs of EVs plummet, they are on track to make ride-hailing even cheaper than private ownership of internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. Improvements in information are simultaneously creating massive opportunities for autonomous technology, which will soon make self-driving cars a reality. The combination will disrupt private ownership of ICE cars altogether, as Transport-as-a-Service becomes 10 times cheaper.

As battery costs are dropping, this is having a huge impact on the energy sector, which is experiencing disruption from the combination of solar, wind and batteries. These technologies are not just becoming better and better at converting sunlight and wind into electricity, and then storing it, they are doing so at declining costs. This makes them the cheapest forms of electricity in most regions of the world: they are also on track to become 10 times cheaper within the next decade.

The impact of the information disruption on materials has driven the rise in 3D printing, nanotechnology and precision biology. That in turn is now impacting the food sector, where information advancements are now enabling us to manipulate matter at ever-smaller scales, and in particular to brew and program proteins any way we want to. The costs of these technologies, namely precision fermentation (PF) and cellular agriculture (CA)–which will allow us to create real animal meat products without killing animals–are dropping dramatically, to the point where PF is on track to become 10 times cheaper than the livestock industry within about 10-15 years.

The history of technology disruptions reveals that when they become 10 times cheaper than incumbents, the incumbents simply cannot compete and are wiped out. Adoption of the new technologies, which at first starts slowly, accelerates exponentially along an S-curve, slowing down as it reaches mass adoption. This doesn’t happen in a prolonged, linear incremental fashion–but rapidly, often in as little as 10-15 years.

Here’s what we therefore learn from studying the dynamics of disruption, and the nature of current disruptions: they do not entail a continuation of business as usual within the current industrial paradigm. In fact, they entail the opposite: they are disrupting that paradigm, and impacting every defining foundational sector of industrial civilization.

As a result of these technology disruptions, we can already see how conventional industrial carbon-intensive energy, food and transport industries – which happen to be responsible for 90% of carbon emissions–will be outcompeted within the next two decades, driven by economic factors.

Together, as these disruptions encompass every foundational production sector of civilization, they entail that the entire production system of civilization is on the cusp of transformation.

Trying to intensify incumbent industrial activities to solve our problems, as the ecomodernists call for, cannot work–as these doomed industries are already locked into vicious cycles of diminishing returns. Doubling down on them will only lock society further into their collapsing trajectories.

Yet trying to degrow our material footprint within the framework of industrial technologies and associated production systems also cannot work as it’s those systems that create the path to unsustainable perpetual material growth. We have to transform those extractive production systems, and the most efficient path to do so is by accelerating the existing technology disruptions unfolding right now with the most transformative implications."

(https://www.rethinkx.com/blog/next-economy-growth-degrowth)