Climate change and its impact on our agriculture, infrastructure, and political systems will be an increasing damping force on technological changes this century that I'm surprised didn't get a mention in this article.
The last two sentences of the article seem to at least obliquely address this:
> In this century, we urgently need to undo some of the consequences of the last great boom by developing affordable zero- and negative-emissions technologies. That's another hard problem—and to solve it, we'll need to recapture some of what made the “special century” so special.
That really depends- if we get on war footing to address the problem like we confronted WW2 perhaps. If we procrastinate hunger, water scarcity, and conflict have a tendency to be destructive to knowledge.
Hunger has become far less of a problem in the 21st century than it has ever been before, at any point in human history. And population growth is leveling off - the global population has quadrupled in the last century, but will probably level off about 50% higher than today in the next 50-100 years.
So you're postulating that hunger will get much worse than it is today, without really tremendous population growth, and with significant technological opportunity available in terms of applied computation/robotics and genetic engineering. This seems like an emotional argument, not a scientific one.
it seems you're not considering the effects that the climate crisis is expected to have on the conditions that our food production infrastructure is based upon. Water/soil/temperature are all pretty big components of this process that will (and already are to some extent) impact our ability to grow food.
And we can't change crops? Or change methods? I'm not buying that. Humans grow crops everywhere, from equatorial deserts to the arctic circle. And the changes that make a given crop totally unworkable (as opposed to not quite as efficient as before) are generation-scale, not the flip of a switch.
Water will still exist. Soil will still exist. Short of postulating worst-case scenarios (which are possible), this is all stuff we can handle with existing technology, much less the technology of a century from now.
