Every technology requires the use of energy, but changes in complexity do not depend on changes in the amount of energy used. Mastering more energy does not necessarily lead to an increase in meanings: technologies, organizations and psychologies. “…A deterministic linking of the level of energy use with cultural achievements is a highly arguable proposition” (Smil 2017, p. 3). The fact is that the complication of meanings is often based on social and abstract technologies, the development of which does not require large energy inputs:
“But even in much simpler societies than ours a great deal of labor was always mental rather than physical—deciding how to approach a task, how to execute it with the limited power available, how to lower energy expenditures—and the metabolic cost of thinking, even very hard thinking, is very small compared to strenuous muscular exertion. On the other hand, mental development requires years of language acquisition, socialization, and learning by mentoring and the accumulation of experience, and as societies progressed, this learning process became more demanding and longer lasting through formal schooling and training, services that have come to require considerable indirect energy inputs to support requisite physical infrastructures and human expertise” (Smil 2017, pp. 18-9).
An increased complexity of meanings is not necessarily the result of increased energy use, but the opposite is the case: changes in energy use depend on changes in the complexity of meanings. Increasing complexity requires a more efficient use of energy (cf. Smil 2017, pp. 417-8). Applied to culture-society, the principle of least action is first and foremost an information principle and only then an energy principle.
Productivity improvements are aimed at increasing the efficiency of activity and reducing the volume of activity required to meet needs. This can be done in two ways:
(1) by excluding redundant figurae, that is, by bringing the mass of an action closer to the possible minimum (economy of action);
(2) by complicating the meaning in a way that increases its effectiveness and/or reduces its intensity.
Productivity growth means increasing efficiency and saving labor, including through the use of indirect or roundabout production methods and tools: domestic animals, machines and mechanisms, etc.