Why can't we go back?

We’re not returning to the days of forging and living off the land. If we were to do that in earnest, we would have to reduce the human population by at least 80% and more just to gain the needed acreage to sustain. Who should go? AI is our best means of finding sustainability.

I have heard this argument a lot recently “Rather than developing new technology and certainly not AI, we should be considering a complete return to the ways of our ancestors as far back as necessary to cultivate a more sustainable way of life on earth. The answers are in our past when it comes to environmental sustainability, not in 1’s and 0’s.”

My response: To this argument is as follows.

Allow me to wax on a little as to why technology is so important for food sustainability versus the proposal of going back to the ways of the past.

Let's talk about some egalitarian and idealistic opinions that we should return to that land as a species. To return to individualized agriculture or even foraging hunter-gathering. What would that take in terms of acreage on earth? Keep in mind that I will use very conservative favorable numbers based on the research that varies over the years.

Let's start with hunter gathers because, you know, that's where it began. Since hunter-gatherers did not rely on agriculture, they used mobility as a survival strategy. Indeed, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle required access to about 98 acres per person to find the food they needed to survive. Unfortunately, earth only has 36 Billion acres of land, and we are not accounting for land suitable for such endeavors. There are 7.7 billion people on the planet, but let's knock that down to a nice round number like 7 billion. 98 acres multiplied by 7 billion is 691 billion acres needed to go back to the good old days of spears and arrows. This presents a problem for those who call for a return to simpler times.

Next, let's try personal agriculture. Here a single human requires using the 5 to 6 acres of land to live comfortably, producing their food. This is by far a much more favorable prospect. Accept that's still 42 billion acres for just 7 billion people on a planet with only 36 billion acres. Again is not a good sign for those who want to go back to simpler times without economies and industry to support food production.

Now, these numbers can be swayed obviously by other research, but given that, I haven't even factored in land habitat requirements to do either of these things. That reduces the useable acreage by a large margin, and one must again factor in climate change, reducing the number of usable lands. So, to put it bluntly, I'm saying there is no way we can ever go back to anything remotely like these scenarios without a mass extinction event.

We're not going back unless you kill off 60 - 90% of all humans today. SO! If we're not willing to do that on purpose over, say, the next 50 - 200 years, we will need to rely on the authentic product of humanity at large, technology.

This brings us to the use case for AI to find timely solutions to ever-growing complex issues such as food insecurity. The great POC of the potential of AI in my mind is the protein folding project known as ALPHAFold, developed and opened to the world by DeepMind. The resulting "database includes predicted structures for a wide range of species, including plants, bacteria, animals, and other organisms, opening up new avenues of research across the life sciences that will" impact "global challenges, including sustainability, food insecurity, and neglected diseases."

Believe me, I am an idealist and optimist most of the time. But those characteristics can't be aligned with genocide, in my opinion, and are distractions from the crisis at hand. We gotta move forward NOW.