For more than a century, the prevailing fear, dating back to English economist Thomas Malthus who lived between 1766 to 1834, was of a booming population outrunning its food supply. Famine would ensue. But Von Foerster broke from that view. He assumed (correctly, as it turns out) that human ingenuity would keep the world mostly fed. The problem, he argued, was that the population would keep accelerating, toward “infinity.” In a now infamous quote, [University of Illinois physicist Heinz]von Foerster predicted, “Our great—great—grandchildren will not starve to death,” von Foerster and his co-authors wrote. “They will be squeezed to death.”...