Energy Transitions. Transition 4.0

Energy is one of the prime factors of human evolution and civilisation. While we confront the costs of the fossil fuel era, we might consider that this is not the first energy transition in the history of our species.

The first energy transition was perhaps Neolithic Agrarian Transition. Not industrial agriculture but the basic act of planning and organising the cultivation, storage and transport of calories on the small scale.

It took us from the calorific calculus of the hunter, weighing the calorie yield of the hunt against the expenditure of energy obtaining it, to an economy based on delayed consumption and storage. This structural shift fundamentally altered human relationships and social hierarchies. In hunter-gatherer society, mobility acts as a natural leveling mechanism since you can’t own more than you can carry. Agriculture changed the economic calculus by creating storable surpluses (grains like wheat, rice, and barley). The ability to monopolize this surplus led directly to social stratification, creating distinct classes of elites, priests, warriors, and peasants. Also, surplus assets had to be defended or could be stolen, giving birth to organized, large-scale warfare and the construction of fortified cities. Land transitioned from a shared resource into private or state property. Women’s roles were increasingly restricted to high-frequency domestic reproduction and intensive domestic labor. Living in close, permanent proximity to garbage, human waste, and domesticated animals created a perfect storm for pathogens. Foragers ate an incredibly diverse diet of hundreds of species of plants, nuts, insects, and wild game. Farmers became heavily reliant on a single “monocrop” starch. Skeletal remains of early agriculturalists display severe osteoarthritis in the spine, knees, and toes, the direct result of hours spent bending over fields or kneeling to grind grain on stone metates. Foragers had virtually no cavities because their diets were low in simple carbohydrates and sugars. Grains, however, break down into fermentable carbohydrates. When combined with the fine granite grit that wore off stone mills into the flour, early farmers suffered from catastrophic dental decay, abscesses, and premature tooth loss.

The energetic (calorific) properties of agriculture must have seemed myriad and mysterious to the populations in the transition.
Much as we struggle to understand the complex options and interrelations of electric power generation, evacuation and distribution.
Why is the cost of power often zero or negative? Why did the Spanish grid fail? Why does it take so long to obtain approval for a new energy project? What are the relative costs of each type of power when electrons are all the same?
The demand, supply and pricing of power depends on more than science and engineering, the availability of resources or capital, but on regulations that mediate the interests of a host of stakeholders. Producers, users including households and businesses, municipalities and states, conservationists and activists have interests and voices.

Transport by wind at sea was dominant for thousands of years peaking in the late 1800s. This was thermal energy of solar driven convection harnessed by sail. At the same time that sail was peaking, steam driven railways were rising. Sail and rail were the main modes of transporting people and goods until

The last major energy transition was the regime of hydrocarbon energy in the form of crude oil later joined by natural gas. Post WW1, oil helped to propel automobiles, trucks, tanks, planes, and it was post WW2 when it demand skyrocketed. The discovery of massive, cheap, and easily extractable oil fields in the Middle East flooded the market with cheap crude. By the late 20th century, the transition was complete. Civilization was no longer reliant on a single dominant fuel (like wood in the agrarian era or coal in the Victorian era), but on a diversified triad of fossil fuels, split roughly equally between crude oil, nat gas and coal.

The fourth transition, the age of electricity.

In the first energy transition, the Agrarian regime, nearly all energy was directed toward sustaining human and animal life. The vast majority of a civilization’s energy was spent on agriculture (producing calories to fuel muscle power) and heating (burning wood for cooking and basic survival in winter). Construction, transport and information were indirectly supplied and then not in any scale.

In the era of coal and steam, the regime was entirely optimized for manipulating physical matter. Construction exploded. Steam-powered pumps allowed for deep-core mining, and coal-fired blast furnaces allowed for the mass production of cheap iron and structural steel. Steam cranes, steam shovels, and mechanized factories completely transformed the built environment. Steam revolutionized mobility. For the first time, overland transport was decoupled from muscle. The steam railway and steamship compressed global geography, allowing food, raw materials, and armies to move across continents and oceans at unprecedented speeds.

The hydrocarbon regime was about fluidity, speed, and synthetic materials. Oil completely conquered transport. The internal combustion engine powered the automobile, the diesel truck, the container ship, and the airplane. This regime created the modern, hyper-mobile, globalized “just-in-time” supply chain. This era built the concrete-and-asphalt world. Oil powered heavy earth-moving equipment, while natural gas became the essential feedstock for the chemical synthesis of plastics, polymers, and modern cement production. Natural gas and fuel oil became the dominant, automated baseline for residential and industrial HVAC.

This fourth transition, the age of electricity is about the total electrification of material life and information. And we have officially crossed a significant milestone. In the global electricity mix, the combined generation from low-emissions sources (renewables and nuclear) has climbed to 43%. For perspective, in advanced economies and major hubs like the EU, wind and solar have structurally surpassed the total share of electricity generated by fossil fuels. The electrification of the industrial economy is one thing, but the expansion of cloud computing, blockchain networks, and AI data centers requires continuous, high-density, uninterrupted baseload power. We are literally harvesting the sun, wind, and atom to compute abstract data.

Historically, energy transitions are not civilizational upgrades; they are civilizational rewrites. When agriculture replaced foraging, it didn’t just change the diet; it invented the state, private property, and institutionalized hierarchy. When coal-fired steam replaced wood and water, it didn’t just speed up weaving; it created the urban proletariat, global empires, and linear clock-time.

For the first time in human history, civilizational energy demand has decoupled from a linear relationship with the material world. We are transitioning from an era where energy was consumed to manipulate atoms to an era where an accelerating, non-linear share of energy is consumed to organize bits and bytes.

Historically, industrial energy demand grew in a largely linear fashion, bound tightly to demographics and physical limits. To transport twice as much cargo overland via steam railway or diesel truck, you needed roughly twice as many tracks, vehicles, and fuel. To heat a city, your energy consumption scaled proportionally with the number of households and ambient winter temperatures.

Even the current electrification of the material economy, converting ICE vehicles to EVs, or domestic gas furnaces to electric heat pumps, follows this predictable, linear trajectory. There is a firm physical ceiling to how many kilometres a population can drive, how many tons of steel a society needs to smelt, and how many calories a human body must consume.

Informational energy demand, by contrast, operates under no such physical caps. It is driven by the insatiable, self-reinforcing loops of hyperscale computing, LLMs, GPTs and RSIs. AI models are utilized to generate synthetic data, which is then used to train larger, more resource-intensive next-generation models. The process is entirely software-driven, meaning it can scale at a velocity that completely detaches from human demographic growth. The better our models, the more efficient they are, the more we demand of them and their energy appetites increase. Compute demand expands exponentially to fill all available capacity.

The scale and speed of this transition makes extrapolation and inference challenging? Who knows what the future will look like, if trajectories are non-linear but exponentially and dimensionally generative. But let us focus on one dimension: cost.

Through the transitions, the matter of costs is of interest. In the hunter gatherer regime, part of the cost was the calories invested to obtain more calories, In the Agrarian it was the same, calories invested to calories harvested. In the coal and steam era it was the cost of extraction. The same applies to the era of hydrocarbons. Over these transitions, up front or coincident costs have been easy to identify if not to measure or quantify. However, deferred costs have been less easy to identify or quantify, especially if these costs were indirect and non-monetary, I refer of course to the environmental costs which we can proxy with carbon dioxide and other GHGs. What other costs might there have been in the early transitions? Did sedentary comforts make us weaker or more sickly or less resilient? Will the age of AI make us dumber? What other deferred costs might we have missed and when and how might they come to haunt us?

In the Agrarian regime, the deferred costs included skeletal and structural weakening: Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherer skeletons present bone densities matching modern ultra-marathon runners. Their long bones were thick, straight, and virtually free of degenerative disease. Agrarian skeletons show widespread cortical thinning (bone loss), joint degeneration, and shorter statures. Sedentism meant living in permanent proximity to human feaces, contaminated water, and domesticated livestock. This created the First Epidemiological Transition: a massive, deferred explosion of zoonotic diseases (smallpox, influenza, measles) that systematically weakened the human immune baseline. The Nutritional Single-Point Failure: Foragers ate hundreds of varied species, making them hyper-resilient to localized ecological shocks. If one plant died, they moved to another. Farmers hitched their entire survival to a single monocrop (wheat, rice, or maize). When the weather failed, the deferred cost was catastrophic, system-wide famine. The Forfeiture of Autonomy: Foragers maintained highly egalitarian social structures. If a leader became tyrannical, the group simply walked away. Agriculture anchored people to fixed assets (cleared fields, irrigation canals). You could no longer leave. This spatial trap forced humanity to accept the deferred social cost of permanent hierarchy, institutionalized slavery, and the surrender of personal autonomy to the early bureaucratic state.

The hydrocarbon regime brought is own costs. The Invention of Chronic Stress: Foragers and early farmers worked intensely but intermittently, punctuated by long periods of rest, storytelling, and social bonding. The industrial engine required continuous, unyielding output. The deferred cost was the enforcement of clock-time, disciplining the human nervous system to operate like a mechanical piston. This severed our connection to natural circadian rhythms, inventing modern sleep disorders, chronic anxiety, and industrial fatigue. While greenhouse gases (like $CO_2$) are the headline environmental proxy, the immediate deferred costs were local and visceral: the lead poisoning of urban soils, the destruction of aquatic ecosystems via industrial runoff, and the inhalation of particulate matter that permanently altered human respiratory health centuries before global warming was quantified.

What about this Fourth Transition? I cannot see, I wonder who can. Will AI make us dumber? From an evolutionary perspective, the risk of cognitive atrophy is immense. Human intelligence is a “use-it-or-lose-it” system. When we outsource navigation (GPS), memory (search engines), and synthesis, analysis, and critical writing (generative AI), we are systematically stripping the brain of the cognitive resistance training required to build deep neural pathways. If AI handles the heavy lifting of processing information, humans risk becoming mere “attention managers” or syntax-checkers. We lose the capacity for deep, sustained focus and the serendipitous cross-pollination of ideas that occurs when a human brain struggles with complex problems.

Then there is a more fundamental limitation. Efficiency X Robustness = a Constant.