More From Less

The third premise is that the tradeoff that pits human well-being against environmental damage can be renegotiated by technology. How to enjoy more calories, lumens, BTUs, bits, and miles with less pollution and land is itself a technological problem, and one that the world is increasingly solving.

When the Industrial Revolution released a gusher of usable energy from coal, oil, and falling water, it launched a Great Escape from poverty, disease, hunger, illiteracy, and premature death, first in the West and increasingly in the rest of the world (as we shall see in chapters 5–8). And the next leap in human welfare—the end of extreme poverty a

we are now promised even more astonishing “disruptive” innovations and AI-driven “solutions.” The reality is that any sufficiently effective steps will be decidedly non-magical, gradual, and costly. We have been transforming the environment on increasing scales and with rising intensity for millennia, and we have derived many benefits from these ch

(i) For the first time in history, the frontier of technology is reaching the majority of the world’s population. (ii) Technology at a human scale is democratizing personal productivity as never before.