That quote always bugged me because it disregards that our economic growth is not really tethered to natural resources. Sure a company like Coca-Cola can only grow so much before it effectively covers the entire planet, but they can still reduce costs to improve their profit margins and displace existing drinks from other companies with a new product.
The cloud as a business is mostly about building products that address ever changing needs and making the clients more dependent on said products. There are no environmental restrictions here you could grow for as long as user needs grow.
> There are no environmental restrictions here you could grow for as long as user needs grow.
All this demand for software and ever changing needs, and more cloud computing environment is coming from somewhere. You want to know where?
Merely 2 decades ago, the average household had one computer in the house, and it was typically a desktop, and the adults and teenagers had had cellphones.
Now, almost everyone that is middle class or above has multiple computing devices in their possession at all times. Every member of the family has their own laptop or tablet and cellphone, probably even a smartwatch or two, even kids as young as 4. There's probably multiple TV screens and gaming consoles as well. Devices that are designed to be replaced in a mere 2-3 years through planned obsolesce. We have more cheap shit than ever before and it gets thrown in the trash at an ever increasing rate. There are screens literally everywhere now: My gas station pump, the wine and beer isle at my grocery store, at the checkout line, walking out into the parking lot, on my wrist, in my pocket, at my coffee shop, in my restaurants.
That results in more companies needing to have digital presences, more apps, more games, more features, more data collection and spyware tracking you around the internet, more ML models being trained and draining energy, more crypto-mining and 4,000 watt PSU's coming online, so on and so forth.
All this stuff requires an ever increasing amount of rare earth materials and burned fossil fuels to produce and operate.
That kind of economic growth requires more resources, but not all does. When Google tweaks a caching algorithm to enable 10% more with the same hardware/energy input, that contributes to economic growth with less resources. Same as if we discovered a new steel smelting technique that uses 10% less coking coal for the same quality steel.
> When Google tweaks a caching algorithm to enable 10% more with the same hardware/energy input, that contributes to economic growth with less resources.
Sure, but that also increases Google's net profit and allows its users to make more queries. That profit is then maybe invested to penetrate new market segments like transportation or hardware production, or is distributed among CEOs who buy bigger houses and more cars.
In essence, the efficiency gains of improving the algorithm are lost because of the free-flowing streams of capital.
I don't think it allows its users to make more queries. When is the last time you've done a google search and have seen "too many queries, try again later"?
The efficiency gains of improving the algorithm ARE free-flowing streams of capital.
Fiat-denominated economic growth may not be tethered to natural resources, but real economic growth is.
We may well develop technologies that allow us to generate more with less, but there are limits to this.
Yes, Coca-cola may invent a new soda, but that soda will always have some material inputs.
Cloud computing most definitely does not escape this - it relies on massive networks of physical infrastructure that require huge investments of natural resources and human capital to build.
Even the monetization of things that appear at first blush to avoid this issue such as the monetization of human attention do not do so in reality as our mental faculties themselves rely on the continued sustenance of our physical bodies.
It's a never-ending vicious cycle between the strive for more energy- and resource- efficient production of goods, and the dispersion of these efficiency gains through increased consumption and market expansion, both geographically and through new classes of products/services. The "airy" fiat currency together with the impersonal profit-seeking multinational corporations create this fairy-tale illusion of infinite growth, which may look efficient from the perspective of a single company, but isn't when viewed holistically on a global level.
This is a wildly out of touch view of how economic growth works.
First off, where do you think "the cloud" comes from? Even if we assume 100% renewable grid (which is currently impossible) the computers that run the cloud require an enormous amount raw materials and labor to manufacture.
But far more importantly, where does your clients capital come from?
The greatest accounting trick capitalism every pulled was to get people to think of individual parts of a system rather then the entire thing.
There's real magical thinking involved to think that capital just appears in these clients at now real cost. At some point labor and resource exploitation is required to create economic value which is then passed around throughout the system. Just because you can skim off some surplus value selling some SaaS product in the cloud doesn't mean that the value you are paid with doesn't come from the exploitation of resources.
Finally, you can easily dispel this myth by looking at the current state of our global environment. Show me any period of economic growth that isn't also tied to increased energy and resource usage.
The only growth that could be tied to non-natural resources is something like the combinatoric possibilities between a set of options.
Everything else links back to matter. Even my "internet points" on HN are tied back to the food I had to eat to type in that sweet sweet snark.
This notion that economics isn't ultimately a resource scheduling theory that falls out of a base set of behaviors (commerce). If we removed choice, we get operations research.
Capitalism is akin to wanting to cook a hotdog on a campfire and burning down an entire house to do it.
The cloud as a business is mostly about building products that address ever changing needs and making the clients more dependent on said products. There are no environmental restrictions here you could grow for as long as user needs grow.