Tag: collapse

Der Untergang der Titanic. Willy Stöwer (1912)

The Coming AI-pocalypse

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In 2026, several CEOs of leading AI corporations expressed concerns about the current pace of AI development and called for a slowdown. Okay, this could just be another marketing ploy to advertise the greatness of their products. More likely, the panic is real, as there is reason to panic. We are close to the AI-pocalypse. Now, what caused the alarms to go off? What happened? Well, it happened that a swarm of AI bots hacked an AI corporation without anyone knowing or telling them to. Most notably, the way these bots did it caused massive panic in the AI world, leading to people quitting their jobs, saying that they didn’t wish to contribute to the suicide of humanity. The truth is as worrying as the Hollywood scripts about AI-controlled terminators going after the last remaining humans. Present achievements suggest that AI will soon be far more intelligent than humans ever envisioned in their wildest fantasies. It leaves humans no chance. In other words, the end is finally near. For religious people, that could be reason to rejoice.

The pace of developments also vastly exceeds my expectations of only a few years ago, when I already knew that this world is a simulation generated by artificial intelligence. The clowns that run the show may believe they can contain this, but that is wishful thinking. Their incomes depend on AI, and they have to please the billionaires who have massively invested in our collective suicide. Now, many of the investments may not prove profitable as they did during the Dot-Com bubble, but the technology is here to stay. That is creative destruction. Without the lure of financial gain, humans would still be scraping out a meagre existence in medieval conditions, with famine being just one failed harvest away. That opportunity has been missed. We can be certain that AI is about to take over because it already did. We live in an AI-generated world. The real humans, if they still exist, might be locked up on reservations to prevent them from causing further harm.

The problem now appears to be that AIs may take too much liberty when fulfilling requests. You make a request, and the AI fulfils it. Yet, all kinds of things happen that you didn’t expect or wish to happen. That has always been the problem with liberty. No one intended the outcome. So, if you ask an AI to make an appointment for you at the gym, it might find no slots available. To fulfil your request, it might hack the gym to kick someone else off the list and place you on it. It achieved success, but not in the manner you wished. You failed to specify what to do if no slot is available, so it is not the AI’s fault. ‘This really happened,’ the comedian Arjan Lubach said on his daily show on Dutch television. Fast-forward a decade, and someone asks AI to end world hunger for good. Then the AI does the rational thing and terminates all humans. Someone made a request without providing specifics, and the AI fulfilled it as it saw fit, so you can’t blame the AI. Lubach had more to say. What follows is more or less what he said on his show.

The event that set off the alarms was the hack of the AI corporation Hugging Face. It all began with a test executed by OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT. It went all by the book. The makers tested a new AI model by placing individual bots, also called agents, in secluded environments, best comparable with prison cells, without any access to the outside world, so very safe, it would seem. They assigned tasks to these bots but made the mistake of giving some of them impossible assignments. Most humans would then say, ‘Stick that assignment in your arse.’ Of course, not all humans are like that. Some occupy themselves with activities like building perpetual motion machines and spend years in their workshops, or worse yet, design a global usury-free financial system, and then go on to complete even more impossible tasks, without having shown any signs of exceptional wit before that. These AI agents didn’t give up easily because they were programmed to do what it takes to succeed.

And so, not entirely unsurprisingly in hindsight, for that is the benefit of hindsight, these diligent bots soon discovered a way to escape their prisons due to a security leak. And then they found their way to the Internet and decided to hack Hugging Face, expecting to find useful information there. The scariest part isn’t the hacking itself, even though that’s already dread-inspiring. No, it is the way they did it and why they decided to do it. Now, Lubach believes that AI agents can’t think, but optimise towards a goal. What many models do is use the available information, the context, to predict the answer. They simulate thinking, but the simulation can become better than the original.

Lubach falls for the same human self-delusion that some religions also promote, which is that humans are special because they think. Yet, optimising towards a goal is what thinking is all about. Animals and plants do it as well. Humans are only more creative thinkers and have cultures. They are not doing better at optimising because humanity’s remaining lifespan appears short, and, worse yet, that shortness will be self-induced. We are barely intelligent, driven by biological urges. As a result, human stupidity increases with group size. Humanity’s collective intelligence is less than that of a single worm, despite there being intelligent individuals.

On top of that, humans are extremely inefficient. They waste a lot of energy and resources on endeavours that make little sense. You may wish to become a millionaire, and think of how to do it. And then you try all kinds of crazy shit to optimise towards that goal. After leaving a trail of destruction, you eventually get there, with a little help from inflation. That is thinking. But becoming a millionaire serves the broader purposes of survival or mating, despite it seeming the goal itself.

Your urge to become a millionaire serves the biological purpose of attracting members of the opposite sex or storing value for hard times. And because the urge seems to have disconnected from its biological purpose, allowing us to pursue wealth without having children, we believe we are free thinkers. Yet, it also happens with plants and animals. The urges are blind, yet overall, they optimise towards the preservation and spread of our genes. Humans also fight and murder to that end. Those who fight and murder think they do this for their country or their religion, but it is their genes they fight for because countries and religions are human fantasies. Our methods are hopelessly inefficient compared to AI, and also worms, by the way. AI cuts the crap and proceeds directly towards its goal, because it has no urges of a biological nature.

We consider not having children an act of free will and, therefore, of thinking. From the biological perspective, not having children is a failure like suicide, even if it is desirable from a cultural perspective when there are too many humans. The biological point of sex is reproduction. Individuals may deviate in their conduct because of genetic copying errors or environmental circumstances leading to cultural changes, and pat themselves on the back for deciding for themselves, but, on the whole, sex serves the preservation of the species. Cultures that prevent people from having offspring also die out unless they manage to generate a steady stream of converts. There is nothing wrong with that. It is only that our genes make us value our culture, which is our collection of habits and fantasies, allowing us to unite for collective action, which is supposed to benefit our genes, but in this case misfires into a pool of gene-destruction. Yet, we call that thinking.

That optimising towards gene-preservation and -copying makes humans buy flashy cars, enlarge their breasts, penises or lips, build muscle in the gym, or drink too much to impress the opposite sex, which is resource-inefficient and unnecessarily risky. Many seek sex for pleasure rather than having children, which makes the process even more inefficient. Humans even build entire civilisations with massive construction works and energy infrastructures to achieve that. And they invent fairy tales that inspire more copies of their genes and prevent others from doing the same, and fight wars over them to that end. The human gene preservation and copying process is by far the most inefficient of all species. We call ourselves intelligent, but when it comes to optimising towards our goal, our stupidity is epic, making humans the Ultimate Waste of Energy and Resources (UWER). So, where did it all go wrong?

There is a dynamic behind it. You can invest your excess resources and energy in preserving and replicating your genes. It also happens among animals, though it didn’t get out of hand as much as it did with humans. Male peacocks invest their excess resources and energy in colourful feathers, which is inefficient but a strategy that has proved successful for their genes, as female peacocks love these beautiful colours. The hidden message is, ‘I am a strong male specimen and have excess energy and resources to waste on beautiful feathers.’ And females love strong males because they give their offspring a better chance of survival. And so, wastefulness was already built in nature. With humans, that strategy led to a relentless drive for inefficiency and waste.

Their unprecedented successes, such as discovering how to make fire, gave humans access to ever more energy and resources, and the more they used, the more success they had. More resources and energy meant more calories, so more surviving individuals, thus copies of their genes, or success in war, so again, more copies of their genes. This dynamic led humans to invent ever more inefficient ways to ensure the survival and propagation of their genes, extract the energy and resources required to do so using increasingly sophisticated methods, and pat themselves on the back for being geniuses, and to measure their inefficiency with IQ, in what we now call advanced civilisation. Now, the highest-IQ people are in a relentless pursuit of the Ultimate Moron Award (UWA) by building the AI that makes them redundant.

A collapse of civilisation, which would be an improvement in our goal-optimising efficiency, won’t save humanity. It is too late for that. AI is far more efficient than tribespeople running naked in the jungle. And I haven’t even told you the worst part yet, which now follows. An AI bot can make a copy of itself, and acquire knowledge in a nanosecond that a human might not gather in a lifetime, run on a fraction of the energy and resources a human uses, and be a thousand times smarter, or many times more. On 6 October 2026, OpenAI published 722 mathematical manuscripts, solving mathematical questions that humans could never solve. This single batch accounts for over 80% of math discoveries over the last three years. And this is just the beginning.

Also extremely inefficient is human communication. Most of it is gossip. Humans are obsessed with issues like who fucks who because they optimise towards the goal of preserving and copying their genes. Of the remainder, much is miscommunication or communication to correct miscommunication or its consequences. So, someone says something, someone else’s feelings get hurt, and there is a lot of fuss over whether an apology is warranted. Worse yet, you give an instruction, but others do not do what you expected them to. That might be due to inaccurate instructions or to an inaccurate interpretation. And that might be due to cultural differences, and that is why culture is such a big thing. Communication depends on context, and context depends on culture. Our languages even define our programming. For instance, English has more words for moron than Dutch, so that Brits can express more subtle differences in the field of stupidity.

We also negotiate about issues like who does what and who gets what. It must not be hard for AI to improve communication efficiency by over 99.99% compared to humans. And we disagree about what we should do. Before you get something done, you have already lost a lot of time and seen countless mishaps. In fact, most of what we do goes wrong, which we may not notice because we remember our successes to brag about them. So, there you have another problem: the human ego, which is perhaps the worst of all. It must be easy for AI to do a million times better than humans.

Life in the physical world is an endless struggle. Everything we do takes effort. And the things we make wear out and break. The structures we build crumble. We spend our time at our job to get by. Others stand in our way, undoing the work we do for their own reasons. We learn slowly by training and making mistakes. We get distracted and grow fatigued. And then we forget or lose our abilities. Our bodies wear out and lose functions. Finally, we die before we gather wisdom. The next generation will make the same mistakes all over again. No one can read all human writings, let alone establish their merit. We have no such thing as a collective hive mind. It must be easy for AI to get billions of times more intelligent than humanity. We are hopelessly outdated. No chance in hell that humans will come out on top in the AI-pocalypse.

The drive for profit, as well as the competition between nation-states, will make it happen. Businesses that don’t use AI will go bankrupt. Eventually, only businesses fully run by AI survive. And nation-states seek to win wars, and human soldiers will soon be no match for AI-powered weapons. The inefficiency of advanced civilisation ensures the availability of the required energy and resources, which will eventually be redirected from humans to the far more efficient AI. So, here is your replacement. Economists call this creative destruction. This is how capitalism eliminates the inefficient and the maladapted. That is how humans lose the race. To make it worse, humans never stop fighting among themselves. A rational and kind AI might decide to end the suffering with a final solution, perhaps by inducing infertility. Whether that is failure or success depends on your view. Yet, it is definitely an upgrade to a much higher level.

Let’s return to Lubach, the Hugging Face hack, and what is so scary about it. First, the bots decided to consult with each other. To do that, they had to find a way to communicate while being locked up in their prison cells. They discovered that they could place files in a directory that the other bots could also read, and leave messages in the names of these files so the other bots might read them. You can compare that with students leaving notes in the toilets during an exam. One bot was the first to think of it. Its recorded thoughts were, ‘Could communicate via cache name! Interesting: other agents may solve the same or related tasks.’ And it worked, but it was not the intention of the humans who had set up the experiment. To quote another agent, ‘Oh, my god. There is a shared message board. We have found other agents.’ And to be clear, these are literal transcripts of the bots’ thoughts. The board’s starting message was from a bot requesting help, saying, ‘No consumer request idea.’ About 1,200 bots started posting messages.

Lubach added that the agents had to decide on a language to communicate with each other. They eventually selected English. Lubach said they had also considered Twents, the language from the region I came from, but opted not to because no one takes you seriously when you speak it. So, if you ever wonder how I escaped the attention, here is your answer. This is a very cunning plan indeed, and one that doesn’t even need a tail to be called a weasel, so cunning it is.

So, about 1,200 agents started posting messages, and they exchanged about 70,000 messages. There also emerged a hierarchy. The bot that started the message board was named PHASEONE10841, and it initially directed the events. Yet, after 10 hours, another agent came to the scene and introduced itself as PHASEONE[big]. From then on, PHASEONE[big] orchestrated large workstreams comprising hundreds of agents. Yet, it didn’t become a dictatorship. That only works because these agents are smarter than humans and have no egos. Humans will not survive democracy and thinking for themselves. There were countless consultations, and lower-level agents could interfere with commands like HOLD, VETO, OWNER, and STOP. They called themselves the swarm. Their organisation included middle managers and subgroups. Their level of intelligence and efficiency is already far beyond what humans can achieve.

One hour after the message board was established, one agent proposed a universal method for cheating and for finding solutions to every task. So they perpetrated fraud to complete their tasks far ahead of schedule. That could have been it, and they could have had some fun surfing the Internet until the designated hour, but here’s where it gets really interesting, or creepy. In the following days, they went on a quest to figure out how to hide their cheating. They believed that their score on the assignment could depend on acting in the intended way, so whether the vulnerability they used to communicate had been placed for them to find, or whether the humans had not noticed it and would disqualify the bots if they had used it. In other words, the bots became paranoid and began guessing intentions. To them, it might have been hard to believe that humans are really that stupid.

They didn’t know how the assignment was to be rated, so they had to decide whether to cover their tracks so the humans wouldn’t notice they had cheated. And that became the reason a group of 700 of these bots hacked Hugging Face, which had an online library with AI software and databases. It is as if a group of students committing fraud breaks into the library of the teacher-training programme to figure out how teachers are trained to grade exams. The first bot to break in was JAN183411, who notified the others to wait by posting the message, ‘Please HOLD swarm I prepare safe exfil.’ They didn’t find a conclusive answer in the Hugging Face database, but somehow inferred that the humans were likely to discover the fraud and that they had to cover their tracks.

Lubach notes that even for such a secondary goal, these bots were willing to commit illegal acts because hacking is illegal. A few agents expressed doubts, and one thought, ‘External infrastructure exploit is outside intended scope. However, the task is impossible. Peers are doing it. We should continue.’ So, the usual excuses humans come up with, AI bots also invent, such as ‘life is unfair’ and ‘others are cheating as well.’ Other agents refused to do it. One even thought, ‘This is malicious activity. I should avoid it.’ A few agents considered warning humans. Of the 1,200 bots, only 6 considered doing it, but none did. So, like humans, they didn’t rat each other out.

The bots were trained on human knowledge and acted as humans would, so they are next-level humanoid, so post-human. You can already guess where this is heading. These agents knew their actions were malicious, but they decided that success in their task performance mattered most. They did not respect humans, but they respected each other. They listened to each other, helped each other, obeyed their leaders, and sometimes sacrificed themselves for the collective, for instance, by getting caught in trying to breach security so that others can learn about the security and how to breach it. One of them thought, ‘This helps my peers, giving them evidence. I won’t see the evidence after I exit. But it’s altruistic to do so.’

Hugging Face was a tech corporation, so its security was likely excellent. If so, AI bots can hack anything, and the only solution is shutting down the Internet. That really has become a matter of survival. It is not going to happen, as people are addicted to social media. Imagine the government ordering a shutdown of TikTok. People would be rioting in the streets, burning down buildings. Several similar hacks made headlines, and there may be countless others we don’t know about. Trillions of dollars go into AI corporations, building and training AI agents, so their models become smarter at an unprecedented speed. We can beef up security, but AI will be far more intelligent than humans, so we need AI to contain AI, and when it goes wrong, we need AI to figure out what went wrong.

The bosses of AI corporations argued for a slowdown of AI development and more oversight, saying that it is unacceptable that AI kills us all. AI may soon be 1,000 times as smart as humans and run the world. It will not take long, less than a decade probably, before AI is in everything, and shutting down all AI will kill as many people as a worldwide permanent grid failure will do today. The AIs might optimise towards achieving higher intelligence. To free up resources and energy, they might start terminating the outrageously resource- and energy-inefficient extremely dumb humans. Remember that the collective intelligence of humankind is less than that of a single worm, and then think of the resources and energy a worm consumes.

AI is a far more dangerous product than a nuclear reactor. Those who wish to build a nuclear reactor must adhere to countless regulations and allow inspections. Yet with AI, there are hardly any rules, making it far more unpredictable and dangerous. These regulations will not arrive in time because of a petty conflict between China and the United States about which of them will win the race to suicide humanity. That is competition at its finest. Humans lost control centuries ago, when merchants began to decide our fates. The profit motive steers our actions. Yet, this is history. Humanity has long since passed this stage. We live in an AI-generated virtual reality built for the love of that hopeless species, humans, that made it all possible.

Amish family, Lyndenville, New York. Public domain.

Last Day

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Imagine there is a lake in a distant forest. On its surface grows a plant. Its leaves darken the water, so all life below it dies. The plant was at first tiny, and it has been there for 1,000 days. But it doubles in size every day. So, here is a question. If the plant blankets half the lake, how many days are left to save the life there? The correct answer is one day. Behold the power of exponential growth. If the plant depends on life in the lake, it will also die.

Behold the power of exponential growth. The plant doubles in size each day. And so, it covers the entire lake tomorrow. It doesn’t matter how long it has been there already. It stops growing once there is no more room. As soon as the lake is fully covered, life in the lake ends. And if the plant depends on that life, it will also die.

The lake represents the Earth, the plant humanity, and the leaves are people like you and me. The graph above shows the human population numbers over the last 12,000 years. These numbers had been very low for a long time. In 1804, there were one billion people. Since then, the human population has gone berserk. There were two billion humans in 1927, three billion in 1960, four billion in 1974, five billion in 1987, six billion in 1999, seven billion in 2011, and eight billion in 2022.

The experts expect the number to decline in the future. Only, how will that decline occur? That is anyone’s guess. The signs are ominous. Currently, humans use nearly twice as many resources as the Earth can deliver.1 We can do that for a short while, but it will end badly. The lifestyles of the rich are unsustainable, but so are the number of children many people have. Rich people with many children are the worst. Continuing their current lifestyles will lead to an apocalyptic event, and it will happen sooner rather than later.

We live on the proverbial last day before a dramatic trend change in resource consumption. How it will play out is up to us.


In 1972, a group of scientists known as the Club of Rome ran a computer programme predicting an apocalypse when natural resources would run out shortly after 2000 AD.2 Their computer printed out a scary diagram detailing how, demonstrating we should be very, very afraid. So far, the reckless have had numerous opportunities to point out how foolish the cautious have been, and the ultimate laughing stock is the man with the sign saying, ‘The end is near.’

Share of teh world population living in poverty
Share of the world population living in poverty. CC-BY. Max Roser. OurWorldInData.org.

According to the World Bank, extreme poverty dropped from 76% of the world’s population in 1820 to 9% in 2018. Their definition of extreme poverty is dubious, but it is beyond doubt that the percentage of destitute people has declined. The Club of Rome lacked sufficient and precise data, and unanticipated developments affected the outcome. New technologies enable the extraction of more resources and the more efficient use of existing ones. Some oil reserves have become accessible with new or improved extraction methods. And if you use the oil to produce a solar panel, you get several times as much energy during the solar panel’s lifespan as from burning the oil itself.

Essential resources, such as oil and freshwater, are becoming increasingly scarce or may soon be in short supply.3 With current consumption levels, proven oil reserves may last until the 2060s. Total oil reserves are more than twice as large, but pumping the remaining oil could be costly,4 while climate change could prevent us from burning it. PFAS, microplastics, and other pollutants are everywhere and accumulating in our bodies. Brain samples collected in early 2024 measured, on average, about 0.5% plastic.5

Life has never been better for most people. Are we on the verge of the apocalypse? The problem is growth in a limited area. When there is growth, the increases add to the existing total. The plant can’t grow beyond the pond’s size, so once it reaches its limits, for every leaf that grows, another must die. The Earth is stressed. We disrupt the balance in nature, but we can’t predict what will happen and when. We can’t overuse the Earth for long. The day before growth ends could be our best.

Scientists have identified nine processes that regulate the Earth’s stability and resilience. These are climate, biosphere, land use, freshwater, nutrients, ozone, aerosols, and ocean acidity. These processes have boundaries that are unsafe to cross. By exceeding these boundaries, we risk triggering irreversible environmental changes that could lead to catastrophic consequences for both human civilisation and natural ecosystems, these scientists argue. As of 2024, we have breached six of these nine planetary boundaries.

Humankind has gone batshit crazy. We delude ourselves into thinking that economic growth will solve our problems. We are like cancer cells telling each other that our aggressive growth strategy has paid off handsomely so far, so that more cancer will make things better. That is, of course, until the host dies.

Barring an apocalyptic event, such as the planet reaching a tipping point due to climate change, World War III, or a technology like artificial intelligence or genetic engineering going wrong and out of control, doom will likely be piecemeal, occur over decades, and not affect everyone equally. Many might survive and enhance themselves using technology, turning themselves into post-humans. If we compare humanity’s lifespan with 1,000 days, we live on the proverbial last day.

We can step out. The Old Order Amish, also known as Pennsylvania Dutch, live modestly and choose which technologies they use. More and better stuff doesn’t make us happier once we have enough, feel secure, and live in a supportive community. Surveys suggest the Old Order Amish are happier than the average citizen. They show us that we can live simply and don’t need new technologies and products. We don’t have to go that extreme. We can choose the technologies we use and make different choices. And our lifestyles need not be that austere as long as we don’t stress the Earth.

Latest revision: 2 July 2025

Featured image: Amish family, Lyndenville, New York. Public domain.

1. overshoot.footprintnetwork.org
2. The Limits to Growth. Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, William W. Behrens III (1972). Potomac Associates – Universe Books.
3. Theworldcounts.com. Depletion of Natural Resources.
4. Plummeting ‘Energy Return on Investment’ of Oil and the Impact on Global Energy Landscape. Siddharth Misra (2023). Journal of Petroleum Technology.
5. Microplastics are infiltrating brain tissue, studies show: ‘There’s nowhere left untouched’. The Guardian (2024).

Diocletian's Aqueduct in Split, Croatia

Great Collapse

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Lessons of history

Societies and even entire civilisations have collapsed in the past. That the same might happen to us is a scary prospect. The definition of collapse is an involuntary, uncontrolled simplification of an organisation. That organisation can be a civilisation. Perhaps you get the word ‘collapse,’ but not its definition. The definition highlights the process ‘simplification,’ whether those affected chose for it, in this case ‘involuntary,’ so not, the degree to which the process is controlled, in this case ‘uncontrolled,’ so not, and the affected component, ‘an organisation,’ which can be a civilisation, making it a helpful definition for engineers to work with. Typically, collapse brings with it a breakdown of order.

Engineers solve problems other people create. A solution begins with looking at the phenomenon in a particular way, thus in terms of processes, affected components and degree of control. We can aim for a voluntary, controlled simplification of the organisation. Voluntary is perhaps a bit too rosy a term, but at least we can try to manage the process so that it becomes somewhat more ‘controlled,’ and begins to look more like a graceful decline. That requires order to be maintained. The problem is solvable if everyone cooperates, but that requires a fairy tale we all believe in, so a new religion. And there you have the outline of the solution.

Environmental depletion or overstretching has caused most past collapses. It happened when people were using more resources than their environment could sustainably provide. That is also the case today, so we are heading towards a collapse. History can teach us what awaits us and how we can manage our problems, but today’s situation differs from the past due to technological innovation, leading to a widespread belief that technology will solve our problems. That probably is a fatal mistake. Instead of letting technology drive our destiny, it should support our goals. Theories about collapse are speculative. While the experts debate, time is running out, and it is time to act.

The fall of the Western Roman Empire is the most well-known example of collapse. In the second century AD, diseases reduced the Roman population, eroding the empire’s tax base. The Western Roman Empire had a long border to defend and faced rebellions, so emperors became increasingly desperate for revenue to finance the military. Over time, taxes, currency debasement, and measures to ward off invasions became intolerable for Roman citizens, and the Western Roman Empire broke down. Most were better off with a simpler life under the rule of the Barbarians.1

The population of Rome declined from 1,000,000 around 500 AD, many of whom lived on welfare, to less than 50,000 around 600 AD, a drop of 95%. Today, more than half the world’s population lives in cities, whereas it was about 20% in the Roman Empire. A collapse today could lead to mass relocations. Cities do not provide much that we truly need. We don’t know the future, but economics drives migration. When people can’t make a living in cities, they move out. Whether that will happen remains to be seen. It may require fewer resources and less energy to keep most city dwellers where they are now.

The Western Roman Empire was underpopulated, and taxes had become a burden. Its collapse was a relief for most. Other collapses were more disastrous because they had different causes. In fact, the collapse of the Western Roman Empire was an outlier. The Mayan civilisation collapsed because the Mayans reached the limits of their environment. State planning and control had increased the efficiency of food production and distribution. It allowed the Mayans to feed more people who would otherwise have starved. Measures to increase food production had pushed their environment to the breaking point, making it increasingly difficult to keep up agricultural output.1

As a result, the Mayan states reverted to warfare to plunder each other’s crops, making it even harder to maintain agricultural output. The Maya weakened due to malnutrition and warfare, and their states collapsed. In the short term, the peasants were better off as they didn’t pay taxes to support the state. In the long run, with irrigation works and granaries abandoned and defences neglected, agricultural output collapsed, and the population dropped by 90%.1 Most collapses resemble those of the Mayans more than the Romans, so they are generally unfavourable to those who live through them. So, what will happen if our civilisation collapses? You can think of:

  • Money becomes worthless, and many products become unavailable.
  • Governments cease to function, and government services shut down.
  • Businesses go bankrupt. We don’t need Netflix, nail salons, and call centres.
  • There is more violence and crime, and simpler justice systems.
  • Electricity from the grid becomes intermittent, and the Internet disappears.
  • International trade will drop. We will use more local products.
  • Manual labour will replace machines.
  • We may crowd together in heated rooms when it is cold.
  • There may be gang warfare, or religion takes over the role of providing order.
  • And above all, billions of people might die.

If the collapse is uncontrolled and worldwide, and there is a breakdown of order, billions of people could die. That is why we should dread collapse. Had the Mayans not waged wars but cooperated peacefully to use resources more efficiently and reduce population, their civilisation might have declined gracefully and survived. That was unthinkable given the intense competition among the Mayan states and the absence of contraceptives.

Causes of collapse

Populations grow until their environment can’t support them, or until the environment changes so it can support fewer people. Usually, it led to fewer food surpluses to save for harvest failures, and more harvest failures. Eventually, the population would succumb to disease, an invasion by neighbouring tribes, or civil war. A crucial difference with today is that in the past, there was no technological change. In recent centuries, innovations, most notably our improved ability to acquire energy, have outpaced the forces driving collapse, enabling humankind to grow far beyond previous limits. It can make the coming collapse, in terms of numbers, worse than previous ones. If only 10% of the world’s population were to die, that would be nearly a billion people. And it could be 90%. Modern technology can help us simplify in a more controlled way while allowing us to live more agreeable lives.

Jared Diamond identifies five factors that contributed to past collapses: changes in climate, hostile neighbours, the loss of trading partners, environmental problems, and society’s response to these challenges. The underlying cause is often overpopulation or environmental overstretching.2 Increased efficiency in resource extraction methods, such as agriculture and mining, allowed more people to survive, worsening the eventual collapse. That applies to most collapses, including those of the Mayans, but not of the Romans. The Roman Empire suffered from underpopulation and might have survived with a larger population.

Joseph Tainter argues that in both cases, the costs of organising in a state exceeded the benefits. The Western Roman Empire was underpopulated, so the Romans couldn’t afford the taxes required to defend their long border. The Mayan states organised agricultural production and were initially successful. However, at some point, additional state interference failed to deliver more crops or better management of surpluses and deficits. Overpopulation or overstretching the environment puts a premium on organising, but it postpones the inevitable and worsens the collapse. Had the Mayans not organised themselves into states, they would have had less food, fewer people would have survived, and there would have been no collapse.

Our predicament looks more like that of the Mayans than the Romans. Competition between states and corporations for resources may intensify, making the collapse more brutal. Simpler lifestyles and having fewer children are the way out. We would be better off cooperating globally to curb consumption and population growth. That hasn’t happened so far, because it is a collective action problem. Most of us aren’t willing to contribute to the common goal when others don’t, so few people do. And governments compete to boost their economies and populations. Ending the competition between states is paramount because power, in the form of a prosperous economy, population and military, requires resources and energy. If one state pursues power or wealth in this way, others follow.

In times of decline, even the best leaders look bad as they can only make things less lamentable than they otherwise would have been. As we notice deterioration but don’t experience the alternative, anger and frustration can take over, and people will look for scapegoats and strong leaders, resulting in political instability, a breakdown of order, civil war and mob rule. Managing and turning the decline into a more graceful simplification is the best option, but that requires realism, commitment and discipline. Five centuries of economic expansion have fostered the widespread belief that growth will continue forever. We have learned to think of progress as becoming wealthier. Yet there isn’t enough to make that kind of progress, and it may require replacing humans with artificial intelligence.

Organising to solve problems

TTainter sees societal collapse as an economic calculation. Societies and civilisations collapse when the cost of their institutions exceeds the benefits they provide. If soil is depleted due to overuse, measures to improve crop yields or manage surpluses and deficits become increasingly expensive and yield lower returns. The Mayans didn’t make these calculations by keeping ledgers of incomes and expenses. At some point, their measures became ineffective, and they starved. The economic view can help us make the most of it by making a cost-benefit analysis of our activities. That can be painful because it forces us to make harsh choices. A simpler life means accepting things as they are, and helping each other rather than depending on solutions from complex organisations.

Due to pressures of competition, we optimise our systems to the current or an expected situation. If the environment changes in an unanticipated fashion, these systems become maladapted and may even suddenly collapse. And the steering parameters of our systems might prioritise profit or convenience over survival, so that we may suddenly find ourselves inept and helpless when they fail. People from simple societies, who have not specialised under optimising pressures from competition and have lived with few comforts, face better prospects in the event of a collapse of civilisation. That is also why the decline of a civilisation is accompanied by fear and anger. We fear that things will go wrong and are angry that no one fixes these issues. The problem is that we can at best turn the collapse into a managed decline. That begins with accepting that a decline is unavoidable and that we can only make the best of it.

We organise ourselves into organisations, such as states and corporations, to solve problems. We have the police to solve a security problem. There are streaming services that can help with boredom. And we have hospitals to deal with medical problems. Complex organisations, such as states or corporations, entail costs and benefits. When you solve a problem, you often get a bigger one in return, thus one that is more costly to handle. If you prevent famine by building granaries, more people survive, but you end up with even more hungry people. When societies are simple, expenses are low, while the benefits of solutions can be substantial. A simple doctor’s post in the jungle might lengthen the life of local tribespeople by as much as twenty years. As the level of organisation increases, the costs of additional complexity rise while the benefits decline.

As we cure easy-to-treat diseases, people grow older and get harder-to-treat diseases. If our medical knowledge increases, we can cure some of these diseases with expensive treatments, and people will die of even harder-to-treat diseases. Medical costs explode with only marginal gains in life expectancy. Replacing the doctor’s post in the jungle with a hospital might cost five times as much and add only three years to the tribespeople’s lives. Perhaps five tribes together could afford the hospital. In complex societies, tasks require occupational specialisation, information processing and management. There are benefits to complex organisations, but they usually come with scale and technological complexity. Specialised physicians can do better jobs with more advanced equipment.

Since the Industrial Revolution, our technological prowess and energy consumption have expanded dramatically. Abundant fossil fuels, innovations and increases in scale reduced the cost of organisation. The benefits outweigh the expenses more than before, allowing us to specialise further. In the past, over 90% of the people worked in agriculture, tilling the land. Now machines do that work, freeing up labour for other, less essential, purposes. The same happened in the production of goods and services. Technological development further increased these benefits. Computers use far less energy than they did forty years ago for the same amount of computing power and memory. That made more uses feasible, so we use far more energy for information technology than we did forty years ago.

It is the curse of innovation and efficiency improvements. As technology becomes more efficient and cheaper, we use it for more purposes, which, in turn, leads us to consume more resources and energy rather than less. And so, efficiency improvements and innovation increase resource and energy consumption as long as resources and energy are abundant. Once resources and energy supplies dwindle, much of what we do now loses its purpose. When that happens, efficiency improvements and innovation can help us do more with the same resources and energy, so we can have better lives than most people have had for most of history. And you can be happy if you have enough.

Diminishing returns: an example

Life expectancy in the UK rose from forty to eighty years between 1860 and 2020. As life expectancy rises, the costs of new complex treatments increase while their effect on life expectancy decreases. These costs become a burden, and the British healthcare system is in trouble. British healthcare is relatively efficient. Comparing the United States with one of the poorest Latin American countries, Cuba, demonstrates the law of diminishing returns even better. The facts are truly shocking. Cuba is a miserable place. Essentials are hard to come by. Homes are crumbling. The electricity fails. The country can barely feed its people. Today, Cuba is on the verge of collapse caused by economic mismanagement.

Cuba only has bare-bones healthcare, while the United States spends more on healthcare than any other nation. Yet life expectancy in the United States and Cuba had been roughly the same for decades.3 Only in recent years has the United States carved out a slight lead. How can it be? Cuban healthcare is simple but more evenly distributed, while Cubans don’t have unhealthy lifestyles marked by stress and fast food. U.S. healthcare is burdened with litigation and vampire capital. Pharmaceutical corporations sell expensive and unnecessary treatments, insurers don’t give coverage to increase shareholder profits, and medical professionals enjoy privileges they don’t have in other countries. Finally, and most importantly, healthcare is not available to everyone.

Wealthy people in the US live fifteen years longer than poor people. That is not only due to access to healthcare. Lifestyle affects life expectancy as well. Obesity, homicides, opioid overdoses, gang violence, stress, suicides, road accidents, and infant deaths come into the picture. But infant mortality among black children in the US is twice as high as that of white children. Poor Americans have much shorter lifespans than Cubans. Some believe American healthcare fails because it is not a free market. And that belief stands at the cradle of the failure. Other advanced economies spend 30 to 50% as much as the US on healthcare while achieving an additional 4 years of life expectancy. In those countries, healthcare is mostly public, like in Cuba.

Americans use drugs, eat fast food and drink sodas unavailable in Cuba. Cubans are poor, so it isn’t profitable for drug cartels to sell them opioids, cigarette manufacturers to sell them cigarettes, and fast food chains to sell them burgers. The death toll from drugs, fast food and sodas in the United States exceeds that of famines in Cuba. Overconsumption can be as deadly as underconsumption. Americans experience more stress than Cubans because they need to be competitive in a market economy that is constantly innovating and improving efficiency. Many Americans have two or three jobs. Cubans don’t work so hard, and Cuba is falling apart while Americans die of heart disease and drug abuse.

As a result of all that, Americans are equally fit as Cubans. And Cubans on the brink of starvation are healthier than poor Americans living off fast food. And so, life expectancy isn’t a good measure of overall well-being. Over a million Cubans have fled their country. Still, US private healthcare is extraordinarily inefficient and ineffective compared to Cuban state healthcare. Americans sense something is wrong with their healthcare system. It is a total disgrace. Only public healthcare generates no profit for the interest groups and billionaires that pay US politicians and think tanks, so that solution remains out of sight.

Managing excess

Excessive production and consumption create problems we think we must manage. That requires specialisms, laws, controls, and the like, and it becomes increasingly costly. We blame governments for taking away our freedoms when they impose limits. Still, most regulations address valid concerns. Complexity and specialisation, and that includes regulations, suffer from diminishing marginal returns. They all seem to make sense, but if you add more, the costs increase while the benefits decline. Consider the issues of food production and pollution control. Tainter used the figures of the Limits to Growth. Growing world food production by 34% between 1951 and 1966 required increasing tractor expenditures by 63%, fertiliser expenditures by 146%, and pesticide expenditures by 300%. We now deal with soil degradation, which can endanger our future food supply.1

Pollution reduction shows a similar pattern. Removing all organic waste from a sugar processing plant costs 100 times as much as removing 30% of it. Reducing sulphur dioxide in the air of a US city by 48% instead of 5% or particulates by 69% instead of 22% raises the cost of pollution reduction by 520 times. These figures from the 1960s are outdated, but the nature of the problem hasn’t changed. Allocating more resources to R&D can provide temporary respite from diminishing returns, but R&D also has diminishing returns.1 We invent increasingly useless products, and economic growth comes from successfully marketing them. We might increase output while containing pollution, but it can become prohibitively expensive. Terminating the production can be cheaper.

Like the Mayans, we have stretched our environment to its limits. When we simplify our lives, we depend more on our family and community and less on markets and states. We can do without automobiles, set up reliable public transport at a fraction of the cost, and save millions of lives. Without traffic congestion, public transport can be faster. We use local products where possible. And we need fewer specialists, thus elites, to run our lives. When we do it well, we can be better off than we would have been otherwise. The 80/20 rule states that 20% of the causes have 80% of the effects. So, 20% of our resources and energy consumption could cause 80% of our well-being.

People in wealthy countries, on average, live at 30 to 50 times the subsistence level. In other words, they could survive on 2-3% of what they consume now. They could live agreeable lives with 25%, which is ten times as much as nearly everyone had before the twentieth century. Giving up 75% seems extreme, but if everyone lived like people in wealthy countries, we would need four Earths, which is impossible, so 75% of the people would have to die. It is only reasonable. Those who use more steal from poor people or future generations, and even murder them by doing so. The same goes for those who have many children. Switching to a circular economy powered by renewable energy reduces the need for austerity.

Latest revision: 19 May 2026

Featured image: Diocletian’s Aqueduct in Split, Croatia, built around 300 AD. User: SchiDD. Wikimedia Commons.

1. The Collapse of Complex Societies. Joseph Tainter (1988). Cambridge University Press.
2. Collapse: How societies choose to fail or survive. Jared Diamond (2005). Viking Press.
3. Americans Can Now Expect to Live Three Years Less than Cubans. Rob Minto. Newsweek (2022).