AI, digital currency, and the blind spot in The Limits to Growth
Igor Kaminnyk https://orcid.org/0009-0008-0981-965X
The Limits to Growth (1972) is usually remembered as an environmental forecast. This essay looks at it from another angle — at how its model was built. The World3 model described the world through five quantities: people, industry, resources, food, pollution. Money was not among them.
The consequences were lopsided. Financial growth simply never entered the picture — it was not counted as a burden on the planet at all. Social commitments, on the other hand — wages, pensions, guarantees — became easy, within this logic, to recast as an extra drain on resources, and so as a threat. Fair redistribution fell under suspicion; finance stayed off the books.
Fifty years have passed. Finance has gone digital — artificial intelligence, data centers, cryptocurrency. And this “weightless” economy turns out to have a very heavy footprint: electricity and water. A footprint the old model still cannot see.
