Stellar is a bonkers book, full of crazy word salad arrow-filled diagrams that make very little sense. At the same time, it makes a credible argument for an amazing future — an optimistic, beautiful, qualitative leap forward for humanity that I want to be part of. Even if you don’t buy all of their conclusions, Arbib and Seba set a challenge and opportunity worthy of our attention. Stellar should be required reading and part of the conversation at every high school around the world. Buy a copy for your young adults!
Because it’s a non-fiction book, by law (apparently) it’s too long. I’m going to try to boil it down; let’s see how I do. You’ll have to suspend disbelief a bit — I’ll offer some critical thoughts towards the end. Here’s their pitch:
1. Extraction & the Growth Imperative
The emergence of agriculture thousands of years ago changed us from a species that lived as part of nature (hunter-gatherers) into one that sees nature as a source of resources to be extracted and refined into the stuff we use to live.
This “extraction” economy has been an amazing, wonderful ride — no back-to-the-land nostalgia here. But it has also shaped virtually everything about modern humanity, individually and collectively. Extraction requires a constant, never-ending source of input materials (land for agriculture, fossil fuels, etc.), and those inputs are (at least regionally) scarce, finite, and often unpredictable (droughts, etc.).
The impetus, then, is to capture as much input material as we possibly can, plus extra as a buffer against disruption. This is the “growth imperative” — an extraction economy must grow forever to keep a steady supply of inputs. This is of course ultimately unsustainable, but it also impacts us dramatically in the near term. Nation states, war, religion, worker exploitation, monopolistic markets … they all can be traced back to the need to maintain a steady supply of extraction inputs. Even counter-concepts like the welfare state are part of the machine, creating just enough stability to keep folks “in the game” so they keep producing.
2. SWB, AI and the Zero-Input Economy
For only the second time in our history, humanity is right now on the cusp of a fundamental transformation. We are witnessing the convergence of a set of technologies that will completely obsolete the extraction economy, leading to a society so different from today’s that it’s tough for our extractive minds to even imagine.
Solar, wind, and batteries are the key technologies — the trinity that makes everything else possible. Unlike other energy sources, SWB (once built) uses zero “extractive” inputs. The hardware just sits there, year after year, generating power. It is very reasonable to believe that we can build enough SWB capacity to not just carry us through our darkest days, but to deliver near-infinite surplus during the good ones.
Of course there are inputs — but sunshine (and therefore wind too) is effectively infinite and non-extractive. No matter what we do, it just keeps showing up. And yes, of course SWB infrastructure doesn’t keep working forever; it requires maintenance and replacement. But performance over the last few decades has improved by orders of magnitude; we are approaching “close-enough-to-zero” to call it good.
Further, with the emergence of AI and next-generation robotics, it won’t be long before we don’t even need human labor inputs to keep this machine running. Proactive maintenance, repair and replacement will all be handled by AI, leaving humans to pursue fulfillment and learning far beyond what we currently consider “work.”
And once you have infinite power, all the extraction dominos start to fall. Clean water through desalination instead of aquifer depletion. Food manufactured from base molecules with precision fermentation, rather than covering the planet with farms. 3D-printed environments instead of concrete and lumber. Even climate change can be reversed.
3. Overcoming the Extraction Mindset
The potential changes are so profound and feel so magical that it’s really hard to stop my inner cynic from calling bullsh*t and just checking out. Today’s world is so messed up and just gets worse every day. The Stellar promise feels like an easy cop out — an imaginary white knight excusing us from the hard work of making things better right here, right now.
So don’t feel bad if your spidey sense is tingling; it may be right! But that’s also same reflex that has caused so many of us to miss the boat on other smaller but still dramatic transformations. And it’s also something the Stellar authors don’t shy away from — they have a lot to say about the “transition” and how it could easily go one of three ways: (a) successful transformation; (b) civil collapse; or (c) a hybrid “chimera” where Stellar technologies are hoarded and controlled by today’s capitalist class.
It’s important to note that Arbib and Seba are careful to keep from falling into today’s unhelpful zero-sum “capitalism vs. socialism” tropes. They believe that individual ownership will be unnecessary in a Stellar economy, but that’s because the dynamics of infinite energy will simply make ownership irrelevant. If you never need to worry about having “enough,” there’s no reason to carry around extra baggage.
These are the kinds of things that I’d like our next generation to be thinking about. Maybe there really is an opportunity to create a world without scarcity. And if so, what would humans born into that world look like? Is it actually possible that greed, fear, envy and the rest are all just the side-effects of living in an extractive world? We’ll never know unless / until we get there. But to me, it looks like the only credible offramp from our current run towards the cliff.
4. Living the Transition
As confident they are about the potential, Arbib and Seba freely admit they’re pretty clueless as to how we’ll actually make the transition. A lot of stuff we’ll need has yet to be invented. And many comfortable, familiar ways of looking at the world will have to be reimagined. A few that resonate with me:
- We can’t retreat our way to success. Less extraction is still extraction; we’re never going to become sustainable by living smaller. Infinite energy is the means by which we will solve our problems.
- Work is going to go away. Outsourcing jobs to AI and robots is inevitable. And that’s actually a good thing, freeing humans to explore and create, not just survive. But losses will hurt before they help — solutions like UBI will be critical to soften the transition.
- We need a new economic vocabulary. Metrics like GDP only make sense in an extractive world. We need new numbers to measure our progress: watts per person, happiness indices, calories per watt, etc..
Perhaps most of all, we’re going to have to force ourselves, again and again, to question things that we “know to be true” — but are really just byproducts of extraction and the growth imperative. My generation, and probably the next, and definitely the one before — are going to suck at this. We’re just going to have to figure it out as we go, and hope that a Stellar “north star” will help us correct mistakes before they become too entrenched.
Or maybe that spidey sense is right and we’re just screwed. But the dead-end nature of extraction makes intuitive sense to me, and the numbers for infinite energy actually pencil out pretty good. And trying to build a Stellar world will be a heck of a lot more fun than living through the alternative. So let’s get busy.
