Every major part of our history where a technology or resource became insufficient for the growth of the economy or society would have been heralded by huge disasters. Like the great Horse and Buggy Collapse of the early 1900s, maybe?

My furnace burns piped-in natural gas, not coal. I have electric lights, not whale-oil lamps. My computer is on my desk, not somewhere in an air-conditioned university. We fly planes instead of taking trains. I don't remember a lot of major problems moving from one thing to another.

Right now, something like 16 percent of U.S. families live in a house where there is a cell phone, but no land line. This number is steadily increasing, in an industry where both options have enormous complexity and infrastructure issues. And it's happening mostly without a ripple.

If I had time, I could come up with other examples. Most of these things shifted into place over time without "going over a cliff" as you put it.

In fact, most technological changes in this country, while not painless of for certain industries of course, were relatively smooth for society as a whole as the markets changed. And quite a lot of this was long before governments developed the idea that nothing could possibly work unless the hand of the State was firmly on the tiller.

Not all of these situations involved limited natural resources, of course, but some did. It's amazing how much more productive we are now on fewer energy resources. You've seen graphs of energy use per unit of GDP for western nations.

The "algorithm's code" works most of the time. You just don't tend to notice it when it does.