From <i>The Limits to Growth</i> to Greenhouse Gas Emissions Pathways: Technological Change in Global Computer Models (1972–2007)
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From the World2 and World3 models to contemporary Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) that model carbon neutral emission pathways, global computer models have served as virtual laboratories for addressing economic, environmental and technological concerns together. Representing technological change has been a controversial element of global modelling efforts because, to a great extent, it sets the parameters on conceivable futures. To retrace this history, this article analyses four moments when modellers debated technological change: the controversy spurred by The Limits to Growth in the 1970s; subsequent global future studies during that decade; the IIASA Energy in a Finite World study in the 1980s; and the shift to endogenous technological change in IAMs in the 2000s. It shows that the notion of technological change as a predictable parameter affecting the future of society was not a given. Technological change progressively became a parameter in models as more elaborate methodologies were developed to simulate it. When modellers began to focus on climate action in the 1990s and 2000s, their interest in the relationship between technological change and social change dwindled. The increasing skill with which modellers formally represented technological dynamics was commensurate to the decline of heated discussions over how conflicting worldviews shaped simulations.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it