Brown, John Seely, and Paul Duguid. “A Response to Bill Joy and the Doom-and-Gloom Technofuturists.” 2000. Emerging Technologies: Ethics, Law and Governance, by Gary E. Marchant and Wendell Wallach, edited by Gary E. Marchant and Wendell Wallach, 1st ed., Routledge, 2020, pp. 65–71.

via: https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188_W16/Reprints/Response_to_BillJoy.pdf

annotation URL: urn:x-pdf:1e8f84f1b5e3fb65dfe49ef6f173c79e

A reprint of: <br /> - “Re-Engineering the Future: A Response to Bill Joy and the doom-and-gloom technofuturists,” The Industry Standard, John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid. 24 April 2000, p.196. - “A Response to Bill Joy and the Doom-and-Gloom Technofuturists,” AAAS Science and Technology Policy Yearbook 2001, edited by Albert H. Teich, Stephen D. Nelson, Celia McEnaney and Stephen J. Lita, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2001.

Cross reference: Bill Joy's paper and notes at urn:x-pdf:753822a812c861180bef23232a806ec0

• for: Malthus - energy extraction, overshoot,
• paraphrase
  • increasing energy extraction via cultural evolution of new energy saving and extraction technologies allows a population to continue growing exponentially instead of crashing due to limits of energy extraction growth.

I'd have laughed too, but for the present moment this seems to in fact be the case.

Victor's frightening imagination of a "race of devils" that would be "propagated upon the earth" may owe something to fears of vast population increase in the wake of debates over Thomas Malthus's predictions in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), which were being fiercely debated (by Godwin and William Hazlitt among others) around the time of the novel's composition. See Clara Tuite, "Frankenstein's Monster and Malthus's 'Jaundiced Eye': Population, Body Politics, and the Monstrous Sublime," Eighteenth-Century Life 22.1 (1998).

Malthusian narrative is a population + resource theory proposed by the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus. In sum, when unchecked or uncontrolled, population will grow exponentially, while our resources, like food, will not grow as fast. Thus, unchecked population growth will be met with famine and other sufferings. You might have guessed, this idea later developed into the whole idea of advocating for population control. Overall, not a happy thought.

Whether it is empirically supported or not, it holds a great power over how people think about sustainability.