I see no technology that will be able to deal with the coming demand for resouces from China and India just to name two. Everyone there is going to want a new car and a plasma TV and everything else the West can offer and no one really has the right to deny it.
If this happens in the next 20 years or so, what sort of pressure will be put on an evironment already on the brink of collapse? The sea is running out of fish NOW. How will tech remedy that? No more fishing?, well we know that won't happen. Indonesian fishermen are constantly entering Oz waters and taking their chance. No law will stop it.
Tech is not keeping up with the population explosion. In fact in many ways I think its hindering the natural order of things. Take the on-going African famine. Some people in Africa and elsewhere are saying the very reason for the never-ending starvation there, is because of well-intentioned humanitarian assistance from the west. ie: they're getting just enough food stay alive and procreate and produce the next generation of starving kids. So are we helping them or perpetuating the problem?
The first Australians lived and thrived in harmony with their environment for more than 40.000 years. What we need is someone to design a system where we can live and enjoy life for the next 40.000. Not much to ask?
Well, the thing about technological evolution is that it potentially alters our abilities/modes of interaction in ways transcendent to our 'original' biology, and likewise in ways transcendent to current technological states. Which means that we won't necessarily see change coming simply because it's outside of what we already recognize as possible or likely.
You're right that unsupported food inputs to a human ecology can lead to nasty boom and bust cycles, but this is as true of New York City or Sydney as it is of Somalia. The difference is that these developed places have the social and organizational structures (technologies) in place to coordinate and sustain their own food inputs from outside. There are a lot of geopolitical reasons why certain regions do or don't have such structures in place, so suggesting that letting people starve for want of this is somehow more 'natural' than continuing to feed them or helping to develop sustainability structures isn't entirely accurate IMHO.
I also take exception to the idea that Australian aborigines, or any indigenous people, lived in 'harmony' with their surroundings to any great extent. Any human population causes ecological change/disruption/destruction when it first enters an area, as does any other invasive terraformer or top predator. The best that can be said is that some societies live in relative equilibrium with their broader ecologies; these are typically not equilibria of choice but rather of necessity. Once techs are gained that allow transcendence or expansion of some of the basic ecological constraints eg local food availability, things almost always re-equilibriate unless there are sociocultural techs constraining this in some way.
@biothanasis: I'm not talking about technology in the narrow sense of gadgets and gizmos, but in the broad sense of any human tool (physical, conceptual, whatever) not intrinsically present in all humans from birth. This includes language, art, religion, sociopolitics, in addition to computers, GMO, etc. Our biology is so irrevocably intertwined and grafted with technology at this point that anything you say is impossible for technology to achieve is implicitly also humanly impossible, though we may have human capacities (eg making babies) that aren't YET possible via technological means. Technology (ie the ability, by any means, to graft and modify capacities of self and other) is what makes us human.
Lest anyone mistake me for an unalloyed technology Pollyanna, I'm not. I don't think we necessarily WILL solve our current problems through better technology, just that we CAN and MIGHT. Ecological carrying capacity isn't a fixed value anymore than human techno capacity is, and I think talking as if population control will solve everything (or even anything) is not only simplistic but also quickly gets into inhumane territory.
You all feel free to disagree with me now, I gotta get back to work...
