Ephemeralization
Concept related to Abundance and Post-Scarcity economics, from Buckminster-Fuller:
Definition
1. CESJ:
"A term invented by R. Buckminster Fuller to describe the process of "doing more with less" as a continuing process of redesigning technology and structures of the physical world through more effective uses of existing natural resources, recycled materials and energy sources. In terms of binary economics, ephemeralization refers to the process of increasing the productiveness of capital relative to that of labor."
(http://www.cesj.org/definitions/glossary.html)
2. Francis Heylighen:
"Ephemeralization is a little known—but very illuminating—concept that helps us to understand technological evolution. It was proposed by the visionary architect-engineer Buckminster Fuller, who is best known as the inventor of the geodesic dome. He defined ephemeralization as (Fuller, 2019; Heylighen, 2008):
- doing ever more with ever less through technological innovation.
...
More generally, ephemeralization is the tendency for technological systems to become ever more efficient. For a given useful output, newer technologies typically require:
- less material or resources (as components of the system, or to be consumed during its operation)
- less energy (to produce or to function)
- less time (to build or to achieve their aims)
- less human effort (to build or to use)"
(https://francisheylighen.substack.com/p/ephemeralization-doing-more-with)
Description
Buckminster-Fuller (in: Critical Path):
"As a long-time student of foreign investment I saw a pattern developing. Between 1938 and 1940 I was on the editorial staff of Fortune magazine as its science and technology consultant, and my researchers harvested all the statistics for Fortune's tenth-anniversary issue, "USA and the World." In that issue I uncovered and was able to prove several new socioeconomic facts -- for the first time in the history of industrial economics:
1. the economic health of the American -- or any industrial -- economy was no longer disclosed (as in the past) by the total tonnage of its product output, but by the amount of electrical energy generated by that activity; tonnage had ceased to be the criterion because
2. we were doing so much more given work with so much less pounds of materials, ergs of energy, and seconds of time per given function as to occasion ever newer, lighter, and stronger metallic alloys, chemicals, and electronics.
Though at that time universally used as the number-one guide to the state of economic health of any world nation, tonnage no longer represented prosperity. The amount of energy being electrically generated and consumed became the most sensitive telltale of economic health....
There is not a chapter in any book in economics anywhere about doing more with less. Economists traditionally try to maximize what you have, but the idea that you could go from wire to wireless or from visible structuring to invisible alloy structuring did not occur to them at all. It was outside their point of view -- beyond their range of vision. Economists are specialists trained to look only at one particular thing.
In my Shelter magazine of 1930-33 and in my 1938 book Nine Chains to the Moon, I identified this progressive doing-more-with-less as ephemeralization. Though Fortune magazine also published my 1922 concept of ephemeralization in its tenth-anniversary issue of 1940 in a prominent manner, and despite ephemeralization having subsequently wrought epochal advancements in the standard of living for two billion previously deprived humans, ephemeralization is a phenomenon that in 1980 is as yet largely unknown to or overlooked by the world's professional economists. Nonetheless, the combination of accelerating acceleration and ephemeralization has now elevated 60 percent of all humanity from its year-1900 99-percent poverty level into realization of an everyday standard of living superior to that enjoyed by any kings, tycoons, or other power-commanding humans prior to the twentieth century."
(http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/leisure/bucky.html)
Example
==
Francis Heilighen:
"Perhaps the most visible effect of ephemeralization is the miniaturization of equipment, which requires an ever-smaller volume, weight, and amount of material for the same functionality. This trend is more recently known as dematerialization (McAfee, 2019): the most important functions of a system can now be achieved with a fraction of the material resources that used to be necessary. As a result, in spite of continuously increasing wealth, in the technologically most advanced countries the consumption of material resources has actually started to decrease over the past years (Bailey & Tupy, 2020; McAfee, 2019).
The most spectacular illustration are the smartphones we carry in our pockets. These have replaced dozens of bulky and expensive consumer goods, including TVs, radios, tape recorders, newspapers, photographic and video cameras, CD players, maps, video cassettes and players, alarm clocks, encyclopedias, game consoles, etc. (see picture).
Miniaturization of a system also reduces the time needed for signals to physically travel across the system, speeding up its operation. The progress has been most spectacular for electronics, and their use for the processing, storage, and transmission of information. This growth in efficiency tends to be exponential. That means that efficiency doubles after some fixed period of N years, known as the doubling time. This implies that efficiency is multiplied by four after 2N years, by eight after 3N years, by about a thousand after 10N years, and by about a million after 20N years!
The famous Law of Moore is the observation (originally by Intel engineer Gordon Moore) that, through ongoing miniaturization, the number of transistors on a computer chip tends to double every two years (N = 2). This trend has held for at least the past half century. As a result, computing power—measured in calculations per second—has grown even faster, by a factor of roughly a million over thirty years (N = 1.5) (Kurzweil, 2005). Meanwhile, the cost of such computation has plummeted, as each new generation of chips delivers more power for less money. For example, the computing capacity of a $1,000 smartphone in 2025 is comparable to the world’s fastest supercomputers of 2002—machines such as Japan’s Earth Simulator, which then cost about $500 million and filled an entire building.
The memory storage capacity of chips and disks has increased even more quickly than transistor counts—doubling roughly every year (N = 1) for several decades (Kryder’s Law). Information transmission has likewise increased at exponential rates. Early modems around 1980 could receive just 300 bits per second, whereas today’s broadband and fiber connections reach hundreds of megabits or even gigabits per second—more than a million times faster. Here the doubling time N has been around 1.5–2 years (Nielsen’s Law, see Figure). Note that such growth is much faster than the one in farming productivity, where the doubling time is about 40 years."
(https://francisheylighen.substack.com/p/ephemeralization-doing-more-with)