MIT Has Predicted that Society Will Collapse in 2040 | Economics Explained

发布时间 2021-11-26 13:45:02 来源

摘要

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In 1972, researchers at MIT concluded that society was on track to collapse by the year 2040, a follow-up study conducted by an analyst at KPMG found that we are ahead of schedule.

1972年，麻省理工学院的研究人员得出结论，指出社会到2040年将崩溃。而安永会计师事务所的一名分析师进行的后续研究发现，我们领先于预定的进度。

Advanced human civilizations have existed for, at best, 10,000 years. In that time, many great empires rose from nothing and returned to nothing, leaving behind little more than artefaxing crumbling architecture.

人类先进文明的历史最多只有1万年。在这段时间里，许多伟大的帝国兴起并崩溃，留下的仅仅是一些残破的建筑和手工艺品。

All it's hard for historians to definitively say what caused any of these particular collapses, the determining factors tend to fall into four broad categories, the political issues, social and cultural issues, environmental issues, and of course the one that we're specifically interested in, economic issues.

历史学家很难明确地说出这些特定崩溃的原因，但可以归纳出四个广泛的类别：政治问题、社会和文化问题、环境问题，当然，我们特别关注的经济问题也是其中之一。

Any civilization that has been reduced a little more than an entry into a textbook fell through some combination of these four factors. Some were almost instantaneous. The great city of Pompeii succumbing to the eruption amount for Sirius. Some took a few weeks, the Aztec Empire collapsed after 93 days of resistance against the Spanish, and some took centuries. 300 years separated the height of the Roman Empire with its eventual collapse.

任何一个文明，若降至不过是教科书的一页，都是因为以下四个因素的某种组合导致的。有些是几乎瞬间的。例如庞贝城被锡拉斯火山喷发所毁灭。有些需要几个星期，如阿兹特克帝国在对西班牙人的93天抵抗后崩溃，还有些需要几个世纪。罗马帝国兴盛和衰落之间相隔了300年之久。

Our modern civilization is the greatest ever known. Hundreds of thousands of times wealthier and more advanced than even the most massive empires of history could have imagined. If you are watching this video, you have access to the internet. If you have access to the internet, you have access to a source of knowledge that scholars and kings could not have dreamt of just a hundred years ago. The same is true for other modern luxuries that we take for granted.

我们现代文明是有史以来最伟大的。比任何历史上最庞大的帝国富有和先进得多数十万倍。如果您正在观看这个视频，您就可以接入互联网。如果您接入了互联网，您就可以获得学者和国王在仅仅100年前还无法想象的知识来源。同样也适用于其他我们视为理所当然的现代奢侈品。

Climate control, worldwide travel, cheap, and effective clothing, medicine, instantaneous communication, plentiful and safe food, water on tap and even little luxuries like being able to listen to your favorite song pretty much whenever you feel like it.

气候控制、全球旅行、便宜而有效的服装、药物、瞬间通讯、丰富而安全的食物、自来水，甚至像随时可以听你喜欢的歌曲等小小的奢侈品。这句话意思是现代科技带来了许多福利，如全球通信、安全食品、方便饮用水等，使我们的生活更加舒适。此外，我们还能享受在任何时候听我们喜欢的音乐等小小的奢侈品。

A question I get asked a lot is who is the richest person in history? The answer? Elon Musk, or it was about a week ago when he was worth more than $270 billion, that might have changed depending on when you actually watched this video.

我经常被问到的一个问题是谁是历史上最富有的人？答案是什么？埃隆·马斯克，或者说是在一周前，当他的财富超过了2700亿美元时，这可能因您实际观看此视频的时间而有所不同。

Oh, but what about Rockefeller, the Ross Stralds, the Romanovs or even this Marzo Musa fella that people keep on bringing up? What about them? Sure, they were rich for their time, but their time was one of almost universal poverty. Despite their relative wealth, they couldn't dream of all the amenities that you think nothing of. Let me tell you, if I had the choice between my modern rented two bedroom apartment and a sprawling 15th century French palace with no air conditioning, no plumbing, and no food that wouldn't give me cholera, I would take the apartment 10 times out of 10 and you are a fool if you wouldn't do the same.

哦，但洛克菲勒、罗斯·斯特拉德、罗曼诺夫王朝甚至这个大家一直提起的马尔佐·穆萨，你们怎么想他们呢？是啊，他们在当时很富有，但是那个时代几乎是一片贫困。尽管他们相对富有，但他们还是无法想象你们认为理所当然的各种舒适设施。让我告诉你，如果我要在现代的租赁两居室公寓和一个没有空调、没有给我霍乱的食物、没有管道的庞大的15世纪法国宫殿之间做出选择，我会毫不犹豫地选择公寓，如果你不这样做，那你就是个傻瓜。

The best part is I haven't even mentioned war yet. Despite what most people might think based on their diet of cable news and the front page of Reddit, we are living through one of the most peaceful periods in human history ever. Overwhelmingly, this has all been thanks to a combination of technology, education, and global cooperation.

最棒的部分是我还没提到战争。虽然大多数人可能基于他们看到的有线新闻和Reddit首页的印象，但我们正经历着人类历史上最和平期间之一。这主要得益于技术，教育和全球合作的大大促进。

Even nations that have resentful hostilities bubbling away beneath the surface are more dependent on one another today than even the closest of allies were back in the time of Napoleon. Why get hostile when you can get rich? It sounds vapid, but it's a good thing, albeit a fickle one.

即使存在潜在的敌意和敌对情绪，现在的国家之间的相互依赖程度比拿破仑时代的最亲密的盟友之间还要高。为什么要敌对，不如一起变得富有呢？虽然听起来肤浅，但这是一件好事，尽管有些不可靠。

Comparing our modern global economy to even the greatest empire throughout history is like comparing a jet engine to a donkey. That's not hyperbole, that's how far ahead we are today. But this is actually the problem. Sure, a jet engine is faster and more powerful than a donkey, but it's less resilient.

将我们现代的全球经济与历史上最伟大的帝国进行比较，就像将喷气式发动机与驴子进行比较一样。这不是夸大其词，而是我们今天远远领先的现象。但这实际上是问题所在。当然，喷气式发动机比驴子更快，更强大，但它不够有弹性。

One tiny floor in its incredibly complex network of interdependent components could render the whole thing useless. What's worse is that it moves so fast and flies so high that even the slightest hiccup becomes catastrophic.

它是一个极其复杂的互相依存的网络，仅仅一个微小的组件出现问题就会使整个系统失效。更糟糕的是，它的移动速度非常快，高度也非常高，即使是最轻微的问题也会造成灾难性的影响。

Most of us are live today, and especially those of us sitting at home watching internet videos on our smartphones would not know how to survive very long if we didn't have food within easy reach. Sometimes literally delivered to our door.

我们大多数人都活在当下，尤其是我们那些在家观看智能手机上的互联网视频的人，如果我们没有容易获取的食物，我们很难生存很长时间。有时食物甚至会被直接送到我们的门口。

But I'm getting ahead of myself, and probably starting to sound like some kind of deranged doomsday prep us screaming the end is nigh. So let's break down exactly how this MIT study predicted that society would collapse.

但我可能有些过于急躁，听起来像是一些疯狂的世界末日前的准备者，喊着末日将至。因此，让我们具体解释一下这份麻省理工学院研究是如何预测社会崩溃的。

What measurable metrics was MIT looking at to determine that the world was going in a good or a bad direction? What did these metrics tell us about the way our society would supposedly break down? And finally, is the fact that this report is ahead of schedule actually something to be worried about? Or is this all just the case of too much weight being given to statistical correlations?

麻省理工学院为确定世界走向好坏，采用了哪些可量化指标？这些指标告诉我们什么，关于我们的社会可能会如何崩溃？最后，这份报告提前发布的事实是令人担忧的吗？还是这只是过度重视统计相关性的情况？

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这个视频由Skillshare呈现。借助Skillshare，您可以学习新技能，如绘画、烹饪，甚至是如何不说澳大利亚话。我创造了一个12分钟的课程，帮助您解密澳大利亚词汇。以下是一个快速预览。为什么这个澳大利亚人要给常见的名词起那么多绰号，比如brecky、chewy和stubby？如果这一切听起来令人不安，别担心。我们将一起彻底解密澳大利亚的词汇。但是您想要前1000名观众使用下面描述框中的链接注册Skillshare Premium 1个月免费试用。注册后，您将立即获得对我的课程以及数千个其他精彩课程的无限访问权。再次提醒，链接在下面的视频描述中。

OK, so the MIT study specifically titled The Limits to Growth set out to primarily explore if our current usage of the world resources was sustainable. Spoiler alert, it wasn't. The study was actually one of the first economic studies ever to use computers sporting dynamic systematic models. I am not a computer scientist, so there are plenty of people who could explain what system dynamics are far better than I could, but in brief, it's basically a piece of software that attempts to replicate the workings of complex real-life systems by replicating them in the software.

好的，麻省理工学院的这项名为《增长的极限》的研究专门探究我们目前对世界资源的使用是否可持续。剧透一下，它不可持续。这项研究实际上是最早使用动态系统模型的经济研究之一。我不是计算机科学家，所以有很多人能比我更好地解释系统动力学，但简而言之，它基本上是一种软件，试图通过在软件中复制复杂的现实系统来复制它们的运行方式。

It sounds very familiar to us today, but remember this was taking place back in the 60s and the 70s where computers looked like this and had about as much processing power as your kettle. Despite these limitations, the MIT team eventually created World 3, which was a computer model for the entire global economy. This piece of software modeled everything from variable population growth to industrial capacity. It also crucially modeled how everything would interact with one another.

今天听起来非常熟悉，但请记住这发生在20世纪60年代和70年代，当时计算机看起来是这样的，处理能力跟你的水壶差不多。尽管有这些限制，麻省理工学院的团队最终创建了World 3，一个全球经济的计算机模型。这个软件模拟了从人口增长到工业产能等一切变量。它还至关重要地模拟了一切相互作用的方式。

For example, a large population is naturally going to require more resources, more food, more water, more homes, more of everything, but a larger population will also naturally lead to more innovation. We have a much better chance of finding a Tesla, Da Vinci, Haber, Bosch or Whittle with a population of 8 billion than we do with a population of 2 billion, which is where the world was 100 years ago. It's a common joke amongst macro economists that every change you make to the economy changes at least three other things.

例如，一个庞大的人口自然需要更多的资源、更多的食品、更多的水、更多的房屋、更多的一切，但是一个更大的人口也自然会导致更多的创新。在拥有80亿人口的世界上，我们找到特斯拉、达芬奇、哈伯、博世或惠特尔的机会要比100年前拥有20亿人口的世界大得多。宏观经济学家经常开玩笑说，对经济进行的每一项变革都会至少改变其他三个事物。

Sometimes we pave over this issue by assuming Ceterus Parabas, or all other things been equal in our models. This economic assumption is great for looking at cause effect in isolation. For example, a soda tax increases the price of and therefore reduces the demand for sugary beverages, all other things been equal, but this is the real world. Everything ever remains the same, just because it's easier to model that way. Predicting the future is extremely hard at the best of times, and almost impossible if you don't account for almost every variable. And that's what World 3 attempted to do.

有时候我们在建立模型时会遵循Ceterus Parabas假设，也就是假设其他因素不变。这个经济学假设很适合用来研究因果关系。例如，如果对汽水征税，价格会上涨，从而减少了对含糖饮料的需求，但这只是一个理论上的模型假设，而我们需要面对的是现实世界。在现实中，事物变幻莫测，我们不能简单地假设所有事物保持不变。未来预测本来就已经很难了，如果我们不考虑几乎每一个变量，就更加几乎不可能。然而，这却是“世界3”模型的试图。

The World 3 program had systems for modeling everything from birth rates to farming technology. The idea was that all of these variables were very important to maintaining the modern lifestyles that we enjoyed today, but because they interact with one another, they were prone to feedback loops. The idea of a feedback loop actually comes from musical performances. If you have ever held a microphone up to a loudspeaker, you will know the horrible high-pitched sound that comes out of it.

《世界3》计划开发了各种建模系统，从出生率到农业技术等方面均进行了建模。其主要想法是，所有这些变量对我们今天享受的现代生活都非常重要，但因为它们相互作用，容易产生反馈环路。反馈环路的概念实际上源自音乐表演。如果你曾将麦克风放在扬声器旁边，你会听到可怕的高音频声。

That's because the microphone is hearing a loud noise, it is then telling the speaker to amplify and play that loud noise even louder, only for that new loud noise to be picked up by the microphone all over again. The same kind of effect can happen in economies. For example, declining birth rates can lead to an aging population. An aging population will put more financial pressure on younger workers to care for the elderly, rather directly by caring for them at home or indirectly through taxes to fund pension schemes and aged care.

这是因为麦克风听到了很大的噪音，然后告诉扬声器将噪音放大并更大声地播放，只为了让新的大噪音再次被麦克风捕捉到。这种效应也会在经济中发生。例如，出生率下降可能导致人口老龄化。老龄化人口将给年轻工人带来更多的经济压力，直接通过照顾老人或间接通过税收资助养老金计划和老年照顾。

This financial pressure will mean younger workers have less time and less agreeable conditions to make a family of their own and you are left with further declining birth rates. This is actually a very important example as it pertains to the MIT study. You see, while the study accounted for hundreds of variables in its computer-generated model of the global economy, it was actually only interested in tracking five of them. These were population, industrial output, food production, available resources and pollution.

这种经济压力将意味着年轻工人有较少的时间和不太好的条件来组建自己的家庭，这将导致出生率进一步下降。实际上，这是与MIT研究相关的一个非常重要的例子。你看，虽然这项研究在其计算机生成的全球经济模型中考虑了数百个变量，但它实际上只关心五个变量。这些变量是人口、工业产出、食品生产、可用资源和污染。

It's worth remembering that this report was published in 1972, before climate change was more than a blip on the scientific community's radar and certainly far from being the widely recognized issue it is today. Chances are if the paper was replicated today, it would also include average global temperatures, but it wasn't, so it didn't.

值得记住的是，这份报告发表于1972年，在气候变化成为科学界关注焦点之前，甚至远远不及今天广为认可的问题。如果今天进行复制，很可能也会包括全球平均温度，但由于没有这样的数据，所以这份报告没有包括。

Now despite that, you should be able to see that all of these individual factors are very important to how we live and work in the world today. But perhaps what is more important is again, how they end up interacting with one another.

尽管如此，你应该能够看到所有这些个体因素对我们今天生活和工作的重要性。但也许更重要的是，它们如何互相作用。

Let's go back to the economist safe space for a second and assume that all other things are equal, outside of food and population. Now these variables are obviously dependent on one another. If one moves the other will too, all other things been equal. But what sounds like a more concerning order of events? A decline in population leading to a decline in food production or a decline in food production leading to a decline in population? Yeah, obviously two very different scenarios right there.

让我们回到经济学家的安全区域，假设除了食品和人口外，其他所有因素都相等。显然，这些变量之间是相互依存的。如果一个变量变动了，其他变量也会随之而动，前提是其他所有因素相等。但哪个情况听起来更令人担忧？人口下降导致食品生产下降，还是食品生产下降导致人口下降？很明显，这是两种截然不同的情况。

Okay, so now that we understand how to interpret the data generated by this report, what did it actually say? Well, like good economists, the researchers kind of hedged their bets. Making the future exactly is a fool's errand. They could have published their paper one day before a design for a commercially viable fusion reactor was developed and researchers realized this, so what they did instead is they tweaked the initial conditions and ran the simulation over and over again.

好的，现在我们已经了解了如何解释这个报告所生成的数据，那么它实际上说了些什么呢？像好的经济学家一样，研究人员有点含糊其辞。精确预测未来是愚蠢的行为。他们可能在商业可行的聚变反应堆设计开发前一天发表了论文，然后研究人员意识到了这一点，因此他们改变了初始条件并一遍又一遍地运行模拟。

In some simulations, they would assume that innovation remains at a constant pace and worker productivity continues to improve at the rate it currently has been. In other simulations, they would assume that technological innovation continues to compound on itself, meaning things like harvesting resources from space or growing food in laboratories becomes possible, and then in other simulations, they would assume that technological progress would slowly plateau. A quick side note is that a technological plateau might not sound very realistic to us today, but that's only because we have grown up in a time of constant innovation.

在一些模拟中，他们会假设创新的速度保持不变，工人的生产力也会以目前的速度不断提高。在其他模拟中，他们会假设技术创新不断自我复利，这意味着从太空中采集资源或在实验室中种植食物成为可能，而在其他模拟中，他们会假设技术进步会缓慢达到平台期。一个快速的旁注是，技术平台期可能对我们来说并不太现实，但这只是因为我们生长在一个不断创新的时代。

Moore's Law is a great example of this. For the past five decades, computing power has roughly doubled every two years, but we are starting to reach the physical limits of how many transistors we can pack onto a microchip. Promising technologies like quantum computing may solve this issue and let us continue to gain access to even more computing power, but then again it may not. And that's just one example. A lot of technological innovation these days is just major companies finding new and innovative ways for you to waste your time consuming avocados of content, and yes, I realise the irony that I am part of the problem here, but here go, have an ad. What a good little consumer you are.

摩尔定律是一个很好的例子。在过去的五十年中，计算能力每两年翻倍增长，但我们开始达到微芯片上可以容纳的晶体管数量的物理极限。有前途的技术如量子计算可能会解决这个问题，让我们继续获得更多的计算能力，但也可能不会。这只是一个例子。如今，很多技术创新只是大公司为你找到吃龙果的内容的新颖而创新的方式，是在浪费你的时间，是的，我意识到这里存在的讽刺，但是去看看广告吧。你是一个好的消费者。

Anyway, technological innovation was just one variable of the researchers of this report tweaked. They also ran models that assumed lower birth rates, higher birth rates, higher rates of recycling, more resource discoveries, greater levels of global trade, reduced levels of global trade. They basically tried to account for every outcome that would be possible with a realistic combination of factors in this economic model. They then averaged out the trajectories of five crucial factors to determine where humanity would end up.

无论如何，技术创新只是这份报告的研究人员调整的一个变量。他们还运行了具有更低出生率、更高出生率、更高的回收率、更多的资源发现、更大的全球贸易水平以及减少的全球贸易水平等模型。他们基本上试图考虑到这一经济模型中现实因素的每一个可能的结果。然后，他们平均了五个关键因素的发展轨迹，以确定人类最终会走向何方。

As you would suspect from a range of models with variables changed up every time, they got a range of different results. But they all sort of had one thing in common. They all showed a significant decline around the year 2040. Of course, it's impossible to address all of the thousands of potential outcomes that were modeled, but the researchers really focused on a few that fell well within the standard deviation of all of these potential outcomes.

正如你所怀疑的那样，由于不断改变变量的不同模型，他们得到了一系列不同的结果。但他们所有的结果都有一个共同点，即在2040年左右出现了显著的下降。当然，不可能涵盖所有可能的成果，但研究人员专注于一些可以落在所有这些可能成果标准偏差之内的成果。

The first and potentially most optimistic outcome was called the Comprehensive Technology scenario. This was a model where we continue to live like we currently do today, but technology progressed fast enough to ensure that our productive capacity was able to keep up with the new people that needed to be fed and housed and closed. The model still predicts a significant drop in food production brought about primarily due to pollution of waterways and the misuse of arable land, but that is addressed through technological innovation.

第一个、也可能是最乐观的前景，被称为全面技术方案。这个模型假设我们仍然像今天一样生活，但是技术进步足够快，确保我们的生产能力能够跟上需要被喂养、住房和衣物的新人口。该模型仍预测粮食生产会因水道污染和耕地滥用而显著下降，但通过技术创新得到解决。

The population does start to plateau around the year 2040, but that's due to the natural tendency of wealthier, more urban populations to have less children, rather than people starving to death due to lack of food. In this model, industrial output does peak and then decline, which would normally indicate lower living standards. But this is almost entirely contradicted by the more efficient use of the goods that we do have.

人口在2040年左右开始趋于平稳，但这是因为富裕、城市化程度较高的人口生育较少的自然倾向，而不是因为由于缺乏食物导致人们饿死。在这个模型中，工业产出达到顶峰然后下降，这通常意味着低生活水平。但这几乎完全被我们更有效地利用现有商品所推翻了。

If tomorrow, technology got to such a point where we had self-driving cars, then the need for individual car ownership would be greatly reduced. This would likely lead to a fall in industrial output, but it's not like we would be poorer because of this. It's just that suddenly a car that used to service only one household can now be efficiently shared amongst dozens.

如果明天，技术发展到我们拥有自动驾驶汽车的地步，那么个人拥有汽车的需求将大大减少。这可能导致工业产出的下降，但并不意味着我们因此会变穷。这只是因为曾经只为一个家庭服务的汽车现在可以在数十个家庭之间高效地共享。

This is actually what the World Economic Forum was talking about when they famously said that you will own nothing and be happy about it. They either just really don't understand how to communicate with the general public, or they secretly enjoy making people angry.

当世界经济论坛著名地说过你将拥有没有任何东西但会感到开心时，事实上就是在谈论这个问题。他们或者是真的不知道如何与普通公众进行沟通，或者他们暗自乐于让人们生气。

The more efficient use of resources would also reduce pollution and ensure that raw materials are never reduced to nothing. This wouldn't be a totally terrible outcome, and yeah, we might not continue to see the same exponential growth in living standards that we have seen over the past 100 years or so, but it also wouldn't be a societal collapse either.

更有效地利用资源也会减少污染，并确保原材料永远不会用尽。虽然这不会是一个完全可怕的结果，是的，我们可能不会继续看到过去100年左右生活水平的指数增长，但它也不会导致社会崩溃。

If you don't feel comfortable relying on some new way of technological innovation to save us all, then the researchers who publish this report have an alternative. The so-called stabilized world scenario is what would happen if the world just maintained its current rate of innovation, while also investing heavily into things like renewable energy sources and materials recycling processes.

如果你不觉得依赖某种新的技术创新方式拯救我们所有人感到舒适，那么发布这份报告的研究人员有一个替代方案。所谓的稳定世界情景是指，如果世界仅保持当前的创新速度，同时大力投资于可再生能源和材料回收处理等领域，将会发生什么。

Again, this model was made before climate change was considered a factor, so when we are talking about recycling and renewables, we are looking at it purely through the lens of resource depletion and local pollution while, wholly disregarding other externalities like carbon emissions. This stabilized world scenario looks very similar in many ways to the comprehensive technology outcome we explored earlier.

这个模型是在考虑气候变化之前制作的，因此当我们谈到回收和可再生能源时，我们仅从资源枯竭和当地污染的角度来看待它，完全忽略了其他外部性，如碳排放。这个稳定的世界情景在很多方面看起来与我们早先所探讨的综合技术结果非常相似。

The main difference is an almost voluntary reduction in industrial output before it creates problems like food shortages and excessive pollution. Of all the models based on all the different combinations of variables, this is what the researchers identified as the most optimistic.

主要的区别在于，几乎是自愿减少工业产出，以避免像食品短缺和过度污染等问题的出现。在所有基于不同变量组合的模型中，研究人员认为这是最为乐观的。

Again, most optimistic barring some crazy unforeseen technological development that radically reshapes how we run our economies. This could happen and hopefully it will, but it's hard to make concrete plans for technologies that we can't conceive of yet, outside of maybe making a spiritual sacrifice to Daddy Elon. Can't hurt.

再说一遍，除非出现一些疯狂的、不可预见的技术发展，彻底改变我们经济运作的方式，否则最乐观的预测仍旧存在。这种情况可能会发生，希望也会发生，但对于我们无法想象的技术，很难制定具体的计划，除了可能向埃隆·马斯克致以一次精神上的祭品。这样做应该不会有害。

Anyway, the bad news is that while the original study in 1972 thought this could be something that we could realistically work towards, the timeline of all the captured variables in this outcome has the least closest fit to our current reality, as explored by the 2021 follow-up study.

无论如何，坏消息是，尽管1972年的原始研究认为这可能是我们可以真正致力于的事情，但2021年的追踪研究探讨了这一结果中所有被捕获变量的时间线与我们当前现实的最小接近度。

The Gaya Harrington study instead suggests that the path that we are actually on best represents what the 1972 researchers dubbed the business as usual scenario, and that's not good. This is a model that highlights a very clear collapse. Pollution continues to increase exponentially and things like recycling of common materials never become economically viable or subsidized widely enough.

盖亚·哈林顿研究指出，我们实际上正在走的路线最符合1972年研究人员所称的"照常经营"的情景，而这并不可取。这是一个强调非常明显崩溃的模型。污染量继续呈指数增长趋势，而像常见材料的回收再利用从未成为足够广泛得到经济上的支持的东西。

Industrial output does reach a higher level than in all of the other possible scenarios, but that is about where the good news ends. A drop in food production causes massively declining birth rates in rich countries and famines in poor countries. The lack of young workers reduces industrial output which further hinders economic prosperity. Easily accessible resources also dwindle away, which again further reduces industrial output and economic prosperity.

工业产出比所有其他可能的情况都要高，但好消息就在这里结束了。食品产量下降导致富裕国家的出生率大幅下降，而穷国则面临饥荒。年轻工作人口的短缺降低了工业产出，进一步阻碍了经济繁荣。易于获取的资源也在消耗，这再次降低了工业产出和经济繁荣。

By all accounts, this is what we would consider a complete collapse of society. I said at the beginning of this video that I would rather be a middle class worker in today's world than a king from anywhere beyond 150 years ago.

据所有的说法，这就是我们认为的社会完全崩溃。我在这个视频的开头说过，我宁愿成为今天世界上的中产阶级工人，也不愿意成为150年前的任何国家的国王。

If the business's usual model was to play out, then I would rather be a middle class worker today than a king just 20 years in the future, and that's a genuinely scary thought. So if you are feeling a bit anxious like I was while reading this study, perhaps it's important to address the criticisms of this model.

如果企业一般的模式继续下去，那么我宁愿今天成为一个中产阶级工人，而不是20年后成为一个国王，这是一种真正可怕的想法。因此，如果您像我一样在阅读这项研究时感到有点焦虑，也许解决这种模型的批评很重要。

A study that basically amounts to someone screaming the world is going to end is naturally going to be met with some cynics, and that was the case for the limits to growth report. It's worth noting that a lot of these criticisms have been proven wrong simply by the fact that the data is tracking the predictions in the business as usual model with pretty frightening accuracy.

这份研究基本上是在大声喊出世界将要终结的内容，自然而然地会引起一些怀疑者，而这也正是《增长的极限》报告所面临的情况。值得注意的是，很多这样的批评观点被事实证实是错误的，因为数据以惊人的准确度追踪了经济正常情况下的预测。

Other critics point out that this study has a very pessimistic way of dealing with human innovation. These critics consider that, yeah, sure. Right now our rate of innovation might not be sufficient to avoid this kind of collapse, but necessity is the mother of invention.

其他批评者指出，这项研究的处理人类创新的方法非常悲观。这些批评家认为，是的，现在我们的创新速度可能还不足以避免这种崩溃，但必需品是发明之母。

As soon as humanity's back is against the proverbial wall, a lot more attention will be placed on researching and investing in technologies that could push us from the doomsday scenario of the business as usual model into the more palatable comprehensive technology scenario. We can already start to see this taking place with a huge surge in renewable technologies becoming available in the public market. Certainly there are still some areas where we are lacking. Waste management being a huge one, but we are much better than we were even a decade ago.

一旦人类面临危机，就会更加关注研究和投资技术，使我们从“照旧经营”模式的即将灭顶之灾走向更可接受的全面技术方案。我们已经可以看到在公共市场上出现了大量可再生能源技术的激增，事实上，仍有一些领域需要改进，废物处理是其中非常重要的一个领域，但我们比十年前已经进步很多。

If you want me to tell you what I think will happen, I'm sorry, I'm just going to encourage you to read the two reports yourself. I generally want to be optimistic about the future, but I also realise that my opinion does not carry nearly as much weight as research published by a collection of 17 of the world's top economists and scientists. Research that has been vindicated by another very talented individual. Best case scenario? This was all massively overblown and we could use this as an excuse to learn about the limits of creating systematic models to predict the future. Worst case scenario? Well, I guess it's time to start learning how to forage for food in the wilderness, which you can start right now with Skillshare.

如果你想知道我对未来会发生什么的看法，很抱歉，我只能鼓励你自己去阅读这两份报告。一般来说，我希望对未来持乐观态度，但我也认识到，我的意见远不及由17位世界顶尖经济学家和科学家发表的研究权威。并且，这些研究还得到了另一位非常出色的研究人员的证实。最好的情况是什么？这一切都被夸大了，我们可以借此机会了解创建系统模型来预测未来的局限性。最坏的情况呢？我想现在是时候开始学习在荒野中捕食食物了，你可以在Skillshare上开始学习。

Thanks to Skillshare, you can master virtually any skill you can think of. Before signing up, I could barely draw a stickman figure. After watching a couple of helpful courses, my illustration skills have improved dramatically. If drawing isn't your thing, Skillshare offers a wide array of courses on lots of other topics from cooking to coding. You name it Skillshare as you covered. If you're interested in becoming an actor or actress but don't know how to pull off a convincing Australian accent, fear not, because you can learn right now. Thanks to my mini course on How and Up to Suck at Speaking Australian.

拥有Skillshare，您可以掌握几乎任何您想学习的技能。在注册之前，我几乎无法画出一幅简单的人物图。通过观看一些有用的课程，我的插画技能得到了极大的提升。如果您不喜欢画画，Skillshare提供了许多其他主题的课程，从烹饪到编码应有尽有。无论您需要什么，Skillshare都能满足您的需求。如果您对成为一名演员感兴趣但不知道如何使用真实的澳大利亚口音表演，不用担心，因为您现在就可以学习。感谢我在“如何模仿澳大利亚口音”小课程中学到的内容。

Pause the video right now and be one of the first 1000 viewers to get one month of free Skillshare premium by signing up using the link in the description below. As always, thanks for watching mate. Goodbye.

现在暂停视频并成为前1000名观众之一，通过在下方说明中使用链接注册，获取一个月免费Skillshare高级会员。像往常一样，感谢您的观看。再见。