People say that economic growth leads to improvements in living conditions, and that this civilization is (and perhaps past civilizations were) addicted to growth. They also say that technology can lead to economic growth. But what is economic growth exactly?
For example: Robotics and AI are predicted to increase economic growth. But how exactly? And also people are concerned about AI causing mass unemployment, which surely is not economic growth?
I say that technological advancement and economic growth are equivelant - they are different names for the same thing. As long as we are prepared to include process improvements into the definition of technological advancement. Which brings us to: what exactly is a technology?
It is common to think that technology is about computers or advanced physics. But technology is not just about these things. Wikipedia says that technology is "the application of knowledge to reach practical goals in a specifiable and reproducible way". Technology lets us do more things with less stuff. Let's take two extreemes of technology: a) absolutely zero technology and b) infinite technology.
Imagine a world where there was no language, no speaking and no writing, no communication at all and no knowledge. Each individual living entity must build itself up from scratch. This takes us way back to early life, possibly even the boundry of life and non-life. In fact we could say that life itself is a technology - and by life I mean the machanisim that allows Darwinian evolution to take place. DNA and the cycle of life allows the "application of knowledge" (encoded in DNA) "to reach practical goals" (finding and consuming food) "in a specifiable and reproducible way" (reproduction of living entities is of course reproducable). With life itself the baseline technology we can see the technology enabled "growth" in the form of living entities growing to occupy evolutionary neiches.
Jump forwards a few billion years and we have early humans that have the technology of verbal communication. Yet every person must hunt or grow their own food, make their own clothes, make their own tools etc.
Not imagine a world where every person (excluding animals for the sake of argument) has a solar powered magic wand that lets them materialize anything physical that they can imagine. And every person has a brain implant that gives them instant access to all available knowledge. The only limitation being how the brain of an individual person can interpret this knowledge and apply it to a usage of their magic wand. All that would happen in this civilization is the pure act of converting energy into "stuff" in a highly efficient manner. The civilization would "grow" economically at the rate of it's energy consumption, restricted only by how peoples brains are capable of interpreting information.
We could even take it to the ultimate extreeme where infinite technology is some kind of pure entity of intellegence, completely surrounding a star to extract al available energy and using that energy to... what? Replicate itself to other stars? Grow itself to encompass more stars? The entire universe enclosed inside a super brain extracting all energy from the universe in order to... I don't know what.
Highly advanced Robotics and AI are a bit like a magic wand. If you have a factory filled with highly advanced and "intelligent" robots, this factory (assuming an equally advanced supply chain) could manufacture anything at cost - the cost of the energy to extract the resources and manufacture the goods. Pure energy in, insanely cheap stuff out.
Perhaps life itself is a process: the process of searching for and identifying food, consuming that food and reproducing. And Darwinian evolution is a method of improving on that process. Information (or knowledge) about process improvements are encoded in DNA, and by a process of extreeme trial-and-error the "process of life" is improved over generations.
Writing is a process that allows more efficient forms of communication, which in turn improves other processes. The scientific method is a process that allows us to more quickly and reliably understand reality, allowing practical applications of scientific discoveries, thus improving the process of life.
Likewise computer technology allows us to encode processes digitally as software and execute those processes in a reproducable way very cheaply. We then have another process for improving software and "evolving" it towards more efficient execution of a process. This is why "software is eating the world" - because it is an extention and improvement of the process of life itself. Completely aside from connected computing allowing easier communication, computer software itself is a form of communication. Because once you encode a process in a chunk of software you can communicate it losslessly and efficiently (eg: software library repositories, communicating useful algorythims).
So perhaps growth is simply the improvement of the process of extracting energy from the environment and turning that energy into order and structure (as opposed to the natrual process of entropy). And economic growth is simply growth measured and cast in the frame of economics. Like economics is a technology for understanding the more general process of growth.
Since life itself is a process, and a process requires order and reproducability, life converts low entropy energy into high entropy energy.
High entropy energy is energy that is evenly distributed. Because it is evenly distributed, there are no boundaries between high and low energy states. And these boundaries are required in order to do "work" (in the physics sense). In order to do work there must be a process - eg: a turbine, a sail or a nuclear reactor placed at the boundary. For example sunlight falling on the sea and tht heat being eventually distributed evenly throughout the ocean. Here there is a lot of opportunity for life (a process) to capture this energy and convert it into order and structure.
The universe was born with an abundance of hydrogen. This state is the maximum possible number of boundaries between high and low energy states. Total entropy is a universe that contains a single solid sphere of bismuth.