Modern Malthusian Economics and Fossil Fuels

This is something I have speculated about since high school; I even wrote a paper on it in college.  How much of the future of our modern world and economy really depends on fossil fuels⸮

Thomas Malthus' famous essays predicted disaster as exponential human population growth overtook linear growth in agricultural production.  His work was very influential and was recognized by Darwin and others in terms of a role of natural selection.  It is ironic that today we say « social Darwinism » to refer to the application of natural selection ideas to economics, when it was really the economics that came first and we should call natural selection something like « biological Malthus-ism ».

Anyway, Malthus' predictions did not come to pass; probably because of the developing industrial revolution powered by the boon of energy made available from fossil fuels.  Economics is vastly interconnected and feeds back on itself in various ways.  More energy, leads to more food production, which leads to larger populations, more interconnectedness, more ideas being developed, communicated and tested, which leads to more inventions to further develop the economy.  The industrial revolution sparked a storm of positive feedback that has generated the modern world.  There have been some sidetracks, like industrial warfare, that were a horrible waste.  However, today the problem is this might also work in reverse.  As oil gets scarcer and more expensive to produce, energy becomes more expensive, food gets more expensive to produce and to transport, goods and raw materials also become more difficult to come by.  Travel gets inhibited.  Possibly less ideas are tested and developed as materials and energy are harder to obtain AND as eduction is less affordable in a global recession, ...   How far can the reverse process go?  It is clear that oil is only going up in price and at least in the short term there will be economic feedback.  When you stop to consider all the detailed parts from diverse sources with exacting production and manufacturing methods that go into making many objects, the feedback effect begins makes things like cell phones and personal computers questionable to support and affordably produce in the future (how can we get integrated circuits when it might be difficult to just buy insulated copper wire⸮) and makes us realize how surprisingly cheap personal technology really is. 

This doesn't have to be all negative.  For one thing it will force people to be less wasteful (personal transportation comes immediately to mind).  Having smaller fuel efficient cars and rail transportation could save a huge amount of energy.  Also getting rid of the ubiquitous air conditioners that are on all the time in public places (one of the first things we noticed when returning to the US), and hot water heaters that are continuously on will help a lot. 

Speaking of transportation costs, this brings up another classic economists, Johnn van Thuenen.  He came up with the idea of Thuenen rings, where various industries would organize themselves at different distances from city centers based on the cost of producing and transporting goods to the cities economic center.  Perhaps rising fuel costs will push the « residential ring » closer to workplaces, so we don't waste so much time and energy commuting. 

Can countries support big projects like space exploration without fossil fuels?  More importantly, can we effectively research future alternative energy sources to replace oil?  Perhaps a strong argument can be made that we should invest as much current resources as possible into alternative energy research to avoid a global economic catastrophe⸮ 

The opposite end of the scale when speculating about future energy/economics/technology is the idea of a technological singularity.  (Perhaps this is the modern technological equivalent to Marquis de Condorcet's "Idea of Progress." The optimism of which inspired Malthus to develop his opposing view "The Principle of Population.")  Carry the positive feedback effect above to its extreme.  Currently innovation is limited by slow human thinking.  Computer programs can compete with each other and evolve, modify themselves and write other programs.  If we could pass a point of complexity where software could write improved versions of itself, to direct and act upon further research directions there might be a tipping point beyond which an accelerated rate of innovation occurs that outruns humans ability to keep up with understanding it.

In a sense many elements of this are already happening.  No single person can ever know every detail of technology in a culture, but it can easily be argued that the percentage of total technology that is understood by the average individual today is a smaller and smaller proportion.  We achieve this by specializing on certain areas, but communicating between fields is getting harder to do as specializations diverge.  Also, the accelerated rate of invention over the past couple centuries is clear, what is the future outcome of this in the next couple decades?  There are also things like computer evolved antennas and evolved circuits that outperform traditional designs and can be very non-intuitive to understand.  How difficult would it really be to combine evolvable software, evolvable hardware and computer controlled electronics/robotics fabrication and natural resource extraction systems into a feedback loop? 

I've set this up as a scale from an economic dark age to a run away synthetic non-human technology in the future.  As always, instead of falling somewhere on a line in between, we will end up with a mix of elements from each scenario (they are not mutually exclusive), but it is hard to predict how and in what manner.  There are several robust counter forces at work ranging from a coming energy crisis to the accelerating pace of technological development...   So I suppose it is easy to pick and argue for where you predict things will end up depending on your own degree of cynicism/optimism.  However, does anyone really think we will somehow stop, equilibrate, and everything will remain essentially as it is now for the foreseeable future⸮  That would be the most surprising outcome.  It is easy to forget how quickly things can change.  Not that long ago most people were illiterate, speaking instantaneously with someone on the other side of the plant, much less human travel to space and the moon, were unthinkable.  Now we have the internet and the cold war is over, what is next, ...