Society is predicted to collapse in 2040, according to MIT.

After conducting a follow-up study, KPMG analysts concluded that we are on track to meet our goals. For a maximum of 10,000 years, advanced human civilizations have existed.

In that era, many great empires rose from nothing and faded away, leaving behind only artefacts and crumbling buildings. The determining factors tend to fall into four broad categories, although historians can't say for sure what caused any of these collapses in particular.

Political, social, cultural, and environmental issues, as well as economic issues, are all topics of interest.

If a civilization is no more than an entry in a textbook, one or more of these four factors is to blame. Some were almost instantaneous, such as the collapse of Pompeii, others took weeks or even centuries, such as the fall of the Aztec Empire after 93 days of resistance against the Spanish. For three hundred years, there was an interval between the Roman Empire's peak and its demise. If you compare our current civilization to the most powerful empires in history, you will see how far we have progressed in just a few hundred years.

A hundred years ago, scholars and kings couldn't have imagined a source of knowledge like the internet would exist today. In the same way, we take for granted many modern conveniences. Even the tiniest luxuries, like being able to listen to your favourite song whenever you want, have become commonplace in the modern age.

Photo by Windows on UnsplashI'm frequently asked, "Who was the wealthiest person in the world?" If you're asking who's worth more than $270 billion right now, the answer is Elon Musk.

Ooh, but what about the Rockefeller family or even this guy who people like to talk about? What about the other people out there?

Although they were wealthy by today's standards, they lived in a time when poverty was nearly universal.

Although they were relatively well-off, they couldn't even dream of the luxuries you take for granted.

As for the 15th century French palace with no air conditioning, plumbing, or food that wouldn't make me sick: I'd take my moderns rented two-bedroom apartment ten times out of ten times, and you're a fool for not following my lead. This is the best part: I haven't even brought up war yet! Human history has never been more peaceful than it is today, despite what most people believe based on their daily intake of cable news and reddit's front page!

This has largely been the result of a combination of technology, education, and international cooperation. Resentful hostilities are bubbling beneath the surface, but even the closest of allies in Napoleon's time were more dependent on each other than today.

Why get into a fight when we can make a lot of money? It may sound trite, but it is a useful thing, if erratic. It's not hyperbole to say that comparing the modern global economy to even the greatest empires in history is like comparing a jet engine to a donkey. However, this is the root of the issue. Even though a jet engine is faster and more powerful than a donkey, it lacks the ability to withstand the wear and tear of a long journey. An error in any one of the system's interdependent components could make it inoperable as a whole.

Furthermore, due to the speed and altitude at which it travels, the slightest hiccup can be disastrous. It's hard to imagine a time in our lives when we wouldn't be able to get our hands on food that was delivered right to our doorsteps, or at the very least within a reasonable distance.

But I'm getting ahead of myself and sounding like some kind of deranged doomsday prepper, so let's break down exactly how this MIT study predicted that society would collapse. How did MIT determine if the world was heading in the right direction? What can we infer about the supposed breakdown of our society from these metrics? If this report comes out ahead of schedule, should we be concerned, or is this just a case of statistical correlations being taken too seriously?

Specific to the title of the MIT research

It was the primary goal of the Limits to Growth study to determine if our current consumption of the world's resources was sustainable. ' You've been forewarned: it was not. One of the first economic studies to use computers with dynamic, systematic models was conducted by the researchers of this study.

As a non-computer scientist, I can't explain system dynamics in detail, but in short, it is software that attempts to replicate complex real-world systems by modelling them in a computer programme.

Even though it sounds like something we've all done before, remember that computers were just as powerful back in the 1960s and 70s.

A computer model for the global economy was created despite these limitations by the MIT team. Everything from population growth to industrial capacity was modelled by this software, which was also crucial in determining how everything would interact.

Photo by Sybylla Climate on UnsplashLarger populations necessitate more resources, but they also necessitate a greater need for new ideas, which in turn leads to more innovation. When the world's population was just 2 billion, we had a much better chance of finding a Tesla or Davinci or a Haber or a Bosch than we do now, with a population of 8 billion.

One of the jokes among macroeconomists goes something like this: If you change one thing in the economy, at least three other things will change as well. Ceteris paribus, or assuming everything else is equal, is a common assumption we make in our models to get around this problem. For example, a soda tax raises the price of sugary beverages and thus reduces demand, all other things being equal, under this economic assumption.

However, in the real world, nothing ever stays the same just because it's easier to model it that way in a computer simulation. It's nearly impossible to predict the future if you don't take into account almost every possible factor. Indeed, that was the goal of World3. It was possible to model everything in the World3 programme, from birth rates to agricultural technology.

Keeping up with today's modern lifestyle necessitated a wide range of variables, all of which interacted with one another and were therefore vulnerable to feedback loops.

It is in fact from musical performances that the concept of a feedback loop was derived. A microphone placed near a loudspeaker produces an obnoxious high-pitched squeak.

When the microphone picks up a loud noise, it tells the speaker to amplify and play it even louder, which causes the microphone to pick up the loud noise again. Economies can experience the same type of effect. Younger workers will be under more financial pressure to care for the elderly, either directly by caring for them at home, or indirectly through taxation to fund pension schemes and elderly care, as a result of a decreasing birth rate in the population.

Photo by Vlad Busuioc on UnsplashAs a result of this economic stress, fewer young people will be able to start their own families because they will have less time and less agreeable circumstances. In terms of the MIT study, this is a very relevant example. While the study included hundreds of variables in its computer model of the global economy, it was only interested in tracking five of them.

Population, industrial output, food production, resources on hand, and pollution were all factors to consider. Although climate change is now widely recognised as a significant issue in science and society, this report was written in 1972, before it had even begun to garner the attention of scientists.

If the paper had been reissued today, it almost certainly would have included average global temperatures as well, but it wasn't. Despite this, you should be able to see that each of these individual factors is critical to how we live and work in the modern world, but perhaps even more so is how they interact.

Assuming all other factors are equal, let's assume that food and population are the only variables that differ. All other things being equal, if one of these variables shifts, the other will shift as well. However, this seems to be a more worrying sequence of events. Both a decrease in population and a decrease in food production are possible outcomes of this. That's right, those are two very different situations. Let's see, now that we know how to decipher the data in this report, what exactly did it say?

The researchers, being good economists, took some precautions. If they had predicted exactly what would happen in the future, they could have published their paper just one day before a commercially viable fusion reactor was developed. Instead, they tweaked the initial conditions and ran the simulation again and again. Simulations may assume that innovation and worker productivity are improving at the same rate they have been for a long time.

A more realistic scenario would assume that technological advancements continue to grow, allowing for things like harvesting resources from space or growing food in labs to become possible. Then, in other simulations, they would assume that technological advancement would slow down. As a side note, we may not believe in a technological plateau because we have lived through a period of constant technological advancement. When computing power has doubled every two years for the last five decades, we've reached the physical limit of how many transistors we can fit on a microchip. Quantum computing, a promising technology, may be able to solve this problem and give us access to ever greater computing power, but this is only one example. In the modern world, a great deal of technological innovation comes from major corporations finding new and innovative ways to waste your time while you're consuming advertiser content, which, of course, is ironic, but here you go with an ad.

You're such a good little shopper. In any case, the researchers who worked on this report tinkered with a few different variables before coming up with their conclusions. The models also took into account scenarios in which the rate of births was reduced, increased, recycling was increased, new resources were discovered, and the level of global trade was increased or decreased.

As far as this economic model was concerned, the authors attempted to take into account every possible outcome. Five key factors were then averaged together to predict where humanity would end up.

There was a wide range of results, but there was one thing that they all had in common: they were all based on a single model. Nearly all of them showed a sharp decline by the year 2040.

Since there are thousands of possible outcomes, it is impossible to address them all, but the researchers did their best to narrow the scope of their analysis to a few that fell within the expected range.

According to this scenario, we would continue to live as we do now, but technological advancements would allow us to feed, house, and clothe all of the additional people who would need to be fed, housed, and clothed. This scenario was considered to be the most optimistic. As a result of water pollution and agricultural land misuse, the model still predicts a significant drop in food production. However, technological advancements will help to address this issue.

At some point around 2040, the population will begin to level off, but that's due to the natural tendency of wealthier, more urban populations to have fewer children, rather than starving people. While industrial output does peak and then decline, this would normally indicate lower living standards, this is almost entirely counteracted by more efficient use of goods that we already have.

A decrease in industrial output is almost certain if tomorrow's technology allows self-driving cars. However, this does not mean that we will be poorer; rather, it simply means that a vehicle that previously served only one household can now serve dozens of them efficiently.

They either don't understand how to communicate with the general public, or they secretly enjoy making people angry. This is what the World Economic Forum was talking about when they famously said that "you will own nothing and be happy about it." In addition to reducing pollution, a more effective use of resources would guarantee that raw materials would never be depleted.

It wouldn't be a catastrophe, and while living standards might not rise as rapidly as they have in the last century or so, society would not come to an end as a result.

When it comes to saving the world, you don't have to put your faith in a new wave of technological advancements. What is meant by the term "stabilised world scenario" is what would happen if the world simply maintained its current rate of innovation while simultaneously investing heavily in things like renewable energy sources and materials recycling processes. We are only considering resource depletion and local pollution in this model because it was created before climate change was taken into account; as a result, when we discuss recycling and renewable energy, we are ignoring externalities like carbon emissions. The main difference between this stabilised world scenario and the comprehensive technology outcome we discussed earlier is an almost voluntary reduction in industrial output before it causes problems like food shortages and excessive pollution.. According to the researchers, this model was the most pessimistic of all the other models they tested.

If some crazy unexpected technological development does not occur which drastically alters how we manage our economies, then I remain cautiously optimistic once more. Aside from perhaps a spiritual sacrifice to daddy Elon, which can't hurt, it's hard to make concrete plans for technologies that we can't even imagine yet. According to a follow-up study in 2021, all of the captured variables in this outcome have the worst fit to our current reality, compared to the original 1972 study. This path we are currently on, according to Gaya Herrington's research, best represents what researchers in 1972 called the Business As Usual 2 scenario… what a bad thing that is! This is a model that clearly depicts a collapse in the economy.

Things like recycling common materials never become economically viable or subsidised widely enough, and pollution continues to rise at an exponential rate. Even though industrial output has surpassed all of the other possible outcomes, the good news ends there. Famines in poor countries are caused by a decrease in food production in rich countries. As a result of a lack of new workers, industrial output declines, putting an even greater strain on the economy. Industrial output and economic prosperity are further harmed by the loss of easily accessible resources.

According to all accounts, society as we know it has come to an end. Earlier, I stated that I would prefer to be a middle-class worker in the modern world rather than a monarch from any time period older than 150 years.

I'd rather be a middle-class worker today than a king in 20 years if the status quo holds, and that's a genuinely frightening thought. That said, if reading this study makes you nervous, perhaps it's time to address some of the criticisms levelled at this model. Limits to Growth, a report that basically amounts to someone screaming that the world is ending, was met with scepticism almost immediately. It's worth noting that the data tracks the predictions in the business as usual model with pretty frightening accuracy, proving many of these criticisms wrong.

However, other critics point out that the study's model of human innovation is bleak.

These sceptics acknowledged that, yes, our current rate of innovation may not be sufficient to prevent such a collapse, but necessity is the mother of invention.

The doomsday scenario of business as usual is likely to give way to the more palatable scenario of comprehensive technology research and investment as soon as humanity's back is against the proverbial wall.

We've already seen a massive increase in the availability of renewable energy technologies on the public market. The issue of waste management, for example, is still a major one, but we've come a long way since even a decade ago.

For those who want me to predict the future, please refer to these two reports instead of asking me. I'd like to think I'm optimistic about the future, but I've come to the realisation that my opinion doesn't carry nearly the weight of research published by 17 of the world's top economists and scientists, research that has been backed up by another exceptionally gifted individual. Either this was all overblown and we can use it as an excuse for learning more about the limitations of developing systematic models for forecasting future events, or we'll all have to start learning how to hunt and gather food in the wild.