[HN Gopher] The pivot
___________________________________________________________________
The pivot
Author : AndrewDucker
Score : 431 points
Date : 2025-10-17 19:37 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.antipope.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.antipope.org)
| TMWNN wrote:
| >What we're seeing right now is the fossil fuel energy economy
| stopping. We need it to stop; if it doesn't stop, we're all going
| to starve to death within a generation or so.
|
| What are the odds that Stross said, wrote, or at least fervently
| believed the same thing c. 2000? Very high, I would bet.
| Bjartr wrote:
| I've always read the phrase "within a generation" to mean
| "within a generational lifespan", not "the time between groups
| we distinguish as distinct generations". Which is to say that
| under that interpretation it wouldn't be inconsistent to have
| believed it in both 2000 and 2025
| unholyguy001 wrote:
| I mean there is certainly tons of evidence that some fossil
| fuels (coal most notably) are on the way out. Fossil fuels as a
| class? Maybe but still a bit early to make that call
| Unearned5161 wrote:
| fun fact, the world burns more coal than it ever has. Take a
| look at Art Berman's talk at UT Austin, humanity has never
| transitioned off of anything.
| MichaelNolan wrote:
| The IEA (2024 WEO) has coal peaking in 2027, and all other
| fossil fuels peaking before 2030. Historically the IEA has
| vastly underestimated the growth in renewables. The 2025
| report comes out soon, so we will see if anything changed
| in their prediction.
|
| https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2024
| ryoshu wrote:
| You can look it up on his blog:
| https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2006/06/
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| >>> an ongoing global pandemic vascular disease that is being
| systematically ignored by governments,
|
| Is that covid (vascular?) or something I have not heard of ?
| throwway120385 wrote:
| COVID is still out there and people still get sick with it and
| it's still having weird systemic effects in spite of our best
| efforts to ignore it.
| tartoran wrote:
| I think COVID is now considered endemic globally, it's more
| manageable than it was when it first broke out but it still
| causes deaths and weird after effects, probably not as many
| as before but will probably stay with us for some time to
| come.
| cassepipe wrote:
| Shouldn't we keep up the vaccination campaigns then ?
| simonw wrote:
| Yes.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Got mine recently.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Yes
| oezi wrote:
| For elderly people we do, right?
| adastra22 wrote:
| Everyone should be getting vaccinated.
| oezi wrote:
| In my country they don't recommend additional
| vaccinations if you already have been vaccinated or been
| infected (unless risk factor or age).
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Yes, and it may not be the ideal policy.
|
| It may be better to do what we do with the flu,
| reevaluate the vaccine from time to time, and give the
| new version to everybody.
|
| But also, around here covid seems to be a smaller problem
| than influenza, by a rate of 2 if you count only deaths.
| So it's understandable why people don't want to mess with
| it.
| duncancarroll wrote:
| It's Covid. As someone who only recently recovered from Long
| Covid after a long, arduous 2-year fight, I see his point.
| fragmede wrote:
| How did you do that?
| xg15 wrote:
| > _(vascular?)_
|
| Not an expert, but from what I understood, SARS-Cov-2 infects
| cells through the ACE2 receptor that is present in all kinds of
| different cells along the blood vessels. It's "just"
| particularly present in the cells inside the lungs, which is
| why so many Covid patient could not take up enough oxygen
| anymore. But that somewhat nebulous "long tail" of other Covid
| symptoms is caused by the virus infecting other cells inside
| the body.
|
| So I guess that technically makes it a vascular and not a
| respiratory disease.
| baq wrote:
| It's been well established in 2020 already with Covid toes.
| kristianp wrote:
| Vascular, perhaps he means heart disease. It is the highest
| killer.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| That's not ignored, covid is.
| adastra22 wrote:
| How is Covid being ignored?
| blfr wrote:
| A very impressive number of prejudices strung along an attempt at
| a narrative around energy transition. Brings back the memories of
| usenet, where schizo posts were, unlike twitter, fairly long and
| glued together with something much like this.
|
| However, the transition actually driving the change in the world
| currently, absent from OP, is the demographic transition and
| migration. It started in France in the 18th century and is now
| hitting much of the world with no end in sight and virtually no
| unaffected populations. Dwarfs covid, PVs, or oil, which was
| largely solved anyway by fracking.
| stonogo wrote:
| What exactly is "the demographic transition" that's been
| apparently going on for three hundred years? Attempting to
| google this just results in a bunch of white supremacists
| refulgentis wrote:
| That's one of the ways [EDIT: s/white supremacists lure
| people in/they get ya], it's by far the predominant usage,
| but it's a bastardization of a term of art in the social
| sciences, essentially, a transition to a low death rate & low
| birth rate society from norm of high/high:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| That's how who gets who? I am having a real hard time
| trying to understand what you're attempting to communicate
| here.
| eschaton wrote:
| "Demographic transition" has become a white supremacist
| dogwhistle. They're not upset about declining birth rates
| in general, they're upset about declining birth rates
| among specific populations.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Even if they are abusing the phrase among themselves,
| legitimate usage is still heavy enough that I don't think
| I would assume it's a dogwhistle by default.
| eschaton wrote:
| I would suggest that you need to look at context in order
| to determine whether a phrase is being used as a
| dogwhistle.
|
| For example, if someone is also repeating other far-right
| propaganda ("fracking has solved the oil problem"), what
| are the chances that their use of this term is in good
| faith rather than as a dogwhistle?
| Terr_ wrote:
| Hence "by default."
|
| Incidentally, are you claiming one of the above posters
| here has already included "other far-right propaganda"
| that tips the scales?
|
| From my perspective, there's been some kind of false-
| alarm. The danger exists out there, but--unless there's
| some author reputation I'm unaware of--this isn't it.
| eschaton wrote:
| Yes, the idea that the problem of "oil" (fossil fuels)
| has been "solved" by fracking. That's another right-wing
| tell, because it ignores the broad environmental
| destruction caused by the use of fossil fuels and
| presumes that the only problem with them is scarcity.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| In the middle of 19th century France's elites birth rates
| plummeted. And it spread to the rest of the world in 20th.
| stonogo wrote:
| What is the connecting link? The claim being made here is
| that this is driving "the change in the world" but I can't
| figure out how 18th century France and 21st century America
| are comparable changesets.
| inerte wrote:
| Less whites, more of everybody else
| phyzome wrote:
| I'd recommend Wikipedia:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
| stonogo wrote:
| All that tells me is that someone likes normal distribution
| charts. It describes the concept but I still have no idea
| what OP is talking about. What started in France in the
| 1800s and continues in America today?
| pram wrote:
| I think he means declining birth rates? They were low
| during the French Third Republic and didn't recover until
| WW2 iirc
| Terr_ wrote:
| I feel the Wikipedia article is pretty clear. It refers
| to a repeated pattern of changes in births, deaths,
| technological change, and industrialization. The pattern
| can be seen in many countries, with various timing-
| offsets and rates.
|
| It has nothing to do with any particular ethnicity.
| Insofar as "immigration" comes into play, it refers to
| economic demand for labor as the population-bump people
| exit the labor pool.
| stonogo wrote:
| I'm trying to figure out what changes the OP claimed are
| being driven by this. Birth-rate-over-time changes happen
| everywhere and have throughout history, but apparently
| this is now driving major change?
| Terr_ wrote:
| I initially read the top-of-thread HN comment as:
|
| 1. Stross is trying to tie many events to a change from
| fossil fuels to solar power, but stronger drivers lie
| elsewhere.
|
| 2. It's better-explained by population dynamics,
| involving medical technology, mortality and longevity,
| contraceptives, the shifting balance of workers to
| retirees, etc.
|
| 3. [Charitable-reading effort increases here] These
| trends involved are old and multi-generational, arguably
| going back to the industrial revolution. As a casual way
| to show a very-long-ago datapoint, there are
| arguments/research about a secularizing France's odd
| population slump back in the 1700s, which predates the
| widespread use of fossil fuels.
|
| > Birth-rate-over-time changes happen everywhere and have
| throughout history
|
| If you look at a world population chart (logarithmic
| scale, naturally) [0] it becomes clear _something_ in the
| last few hundred years caused a deviation from the old
| trend.
|
| Stross might argue the trigger was fossil-fuels, others
| would argue the trigger was a change in human-capital
| from medicine/nutrition, perhaps a third group would
| argue both are inextricably intertwined.
|
| [0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_populat
| ion_gro...
| cyberax wrote:
| (The first) demographic transition is a normal term in
| political science. It just means the transition from mostly
| agricultural societies to mostly urban ones.
|
| It's associated with the drop in fertility, rise in life
| expectancy, etc.
|
| There are now people arguing that we're undergoing the second
| demographic transition.
| eschaton wrote:
| There's a reason for that. It should tell you a lot about the
| person you're replying to.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Attempting to google this just results in a bunch of white
| supremacists
|
| For "demographic transition"? That's not what I get, perhaps
| those results are customized by Google, and it has an
| inaccurate idea of what you're interested in? (Even if that
| "interest" comes from vigorously opposing something.)
|
| I'd try opening a private/incognito window and comparing the
| result-pages.
|
| When I search in a private-tab for "demographic transition"
| (in quotes) the first item is the Wikipedia article (the
| definition I expect) followed by more of basically the same
| thesis from other academic sites.
| stonogo wrote:
| I searched in the 'news' section, trying to figure out how
| any of this applies to current events.
| Terr_ wrote:
| I feel "news" is not a fertile hunting-ground for
| information on something "that's been apparently going on
| for three hundred years." :p
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Oh no! Wouldn't want to commit a badthink and read something
| written by an ungood thoughtcrimer!
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _oil, which was largely solved anyway by fracking._
|
| I think you and OP disagree on what the actual problem with oil
| is.
| mcfunley wrote:
| Did HN start automatically translating posts from their
| original German?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Nice Molly Ivans reference.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/mar/18/molly-ivins-
| rai...
|
| >After Pat Buchanan delivered an infamous speech at the 1992
| Republican convention, couching the struggle with Democrats
| in terms of a "cultural war", columnist Molly Ivins wrote
| that it "probably sounded better in the original German". She
| did not live to cover a Donald Trump rally.
| Unearned5161 wrote:
| I think you should familiarize yourself some more with what
| fracking is if you think it solved anything regarding oil. We
| just swapped out our straw for a thicker one, but the milkshake
| hasnt gotten bigger.
| randallsquared wrote:
| Fracking (and Canadian oil sands) have raised the known
| extractable reserves considerably. While photovoltaics
| arguably will drive peak oil within a few years, the amount
| of oil that we know we could extract is higher now than it
| was in 2010, and was higher then than in 2000, and so on back
| to at least the 1960s. In retrospect, there was never any
| real danger of oil running out before we largely moved on to
| other energy sources.
| defrost wrote:
| The essential points being,
|
| * The _knowledge_ abut the actual size of the milkshake has
| increased,
|
| * The actual size of the milkshake has not increased, a
| decade and more of extraction has continued to decrease
| that actual size,
|
| * The cost per unit of extraction has increased,
|
| * All extraction of fossil fuel continues to contribute to
| an ever increasing real and serious problem with increased
| insulation in the atmosphere.
|
| Peak oil was never about "oil runing out", it was literally
| about increasing costs for diminishing returns .. an
| asymptotic issue that never ends, just dwindles.
| randallsquared wrote:
| > _Peak oil was never about "oil runing out",_
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil will help, here.
|
| Until recently when it had to be redefined to remain a
| relevant concern, this was the point of "peak oil": that
| we would run out of reserves that could be economically
| extracted for fuel usage, due to rising costs for
| extraction of increasingly marginal sources. However,
| given that proven (economically extractable) reserves
| have steadily trended higher, "peak oil" is now about
| when other energy source costs _fall_ enough to make oil
| uneconomical by comparison, which is not politically
| concerning except to fossil fuel industry lobbyists.
|
| This kind of concept creep is very common where
| technology or science reduces problems that were
| previously seized upon by political activists.
| defrost wrote:
| > will help, here.
|
| Yes, it's a useful reminder to those that thought Peak
| Oil related to oil running out when it fact, as your link
| shows, it was largely always about the relative costs of
| energy.
|
| I had hoped that globally we would pivot harder into
| cleaner energies much sooner; the continuation and
| increase in fossil fuel usage has worsened an issue that
| much of the world will increasingly encounter in the
| lifetimes of those born today.
| Unearned5161 wrote:
| Peak Oil has always and always will be about production
| rates, going back to Hubbert's paper in the 50s. We never
| solved the production rate issue, we just threw more
| money at it, see the shale boom of the 2010s.
|
| Relying on "technology" and "science" gets a lot shakier
| when you realize that oil itself is what has largely
| funded the _ability_ to do technology and science. We 've
| been gluttonous in an age of cheap energy, the world is
| in no way prepared for what comes after the cheap part is
| over.
| hamonrye wrote:
| > the geopolitics of the post-oil age
|
| Goddard called the West Germans "the generation of blue jeans and
| coca cola," wearing tricolor and driving manual transmission
| cars.
|
| The photovoltaic effect is whale oil for the modern age.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _The photovoltaic effect is whale oil for the modern age._
|
| What?
| clintonc wrote:
| Whale oil and solar panels both being signs of high status.
| lynguist wrote:
| I still don't understand.
|
| In actual history whale oil made airplane engines go (as
| lubricants) until the 1970s when they switched to
| synthetic.
|
| Most whales were killed in the 20th century to make planes
| go, not in the 19th to make city lights burn.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| TIL - yeah the 20C saw millions killed vs 19C and
| hundreds of thousands. I mean obviously that was
| industrialisation. Seems to be mostly meat, fats for
| cooking and a fair amount of TNT production - as well as
| lubricants for planes ...
|
| But in 1986 the whaling moratorium came in, and numbers
| killed have been hundreds or few thousand since.
|
| Yay Star Trek
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I assume that perspective applies only to West Germans
| (which btw I happen to be and it's nonsense here too), but
| Pakistan[1] didn't replace one third of their energy supply
| in the last few years because they're such yuppies,
| photovoltaic literally saved them from their energy grid
| breaking down.
|
| Solar energy isn't a fashion statement, it's rapidly and
| cheaply getting energy to billions of people who need it
| the most.
|
| [1]https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/01/climate/pakistan-
| solar-bo...
| yannyu wrote:
| It's so bizarre to think that harvesting free energy from
| the sun could be considered a political or status
| position. Is it not logically obvious that harvesting as
| much free energy as possible is the strategically
| stronger position? Why would you not want to do that?
| zrail wrote:
| It's effectively spelled out in the article. The wealth
| of the last century has been fueled in large part by
| fossil fuels and it takes an embarrassingly small
| fraction of that wealth to convince the populace that the
| competition (I.e. renewables) is a status symbol.
| shantara wrote:
| It's not only economically advantageous, but also
| increases the grid resilience. In times of war and
| conflict large power plants and their accompanying high
| voltage transmission lines and banks of transformers
| become an easy target. Adding more local decentralized
| power production solves the problem.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _Potable Water and Stable Coastlines have entered the chat_
| maxerickson wrote:
| Some of us live near the Michigan-Huron basin.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Ok - that was a doozy. Well done mr Stross. I'm going to have to
| chew on that for a while, but if there is one takeaway, it's we
| need what might be called "radical" solutions - which frankly are
| just "sensible - as long as your salary is not tied up in the
| status quo"
| throw10920 wrote:
| What exactly do you mean by "radical" solutions?
| nine_k wrote:
| In short: oil is soon to be over (because solar), Moore's law is
| dying (and has been for last 20 years), so the tech boom is soon
| to be over, so the elites of last 50-100 years are facing a wall
| ahead of them, and have little idea what to do. Hence bigger and
| bigger upheavals.
|
| Well, not that it's _completely_ wrong, but China and India only
| increase their oil consumption, and the US have just recently
| started to drill the local oil. It seems that oil is _very far_
| from over.
|
| The AI boom looks to me quite similar to the dotcom boom of 30
| years ago: we're certainly in a bubble, but that bubble is blown
| around some very real and powerful change. The bubble will burst
| (or maybe get deflated less dramatically), but the AI/ML stuff
| which is actually very useful will remain, and will continue
| developing.
|
| So, no. If there's a pivotal moment, it's not because of the oil
| and computers. It's more about elite production of last few
| decades, the universities, the business and political leaders,
| the effects of global social networks, the _discourses_ that
| permeate different social strata. But it 's a completely
| different kettle of fish.
| milesskorpen wrote:
| Yeah. He starts with reasonable points about the economy
| changing into the Electronic Era and then starts making
| increasingly less-evidenced points by the end.
| dsr_ wrote:
| ... almost as though the further future is harder to predict
| than the near future.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I think it's possible to make a case both of you are right.
|
| These are huge globe changing effects being batted around.
| Solar is going to have an enormous effect - it's distributed at
| minimum. A lot of human domestic activity (billions of people)
| can go off grid. That's going to chnage politics in ways that's
| hard to understand
|
| Elite production (a term I always have concerns about - I
| prefer to say that the average school leaving age has moved
| from 16 when I was young to 21.)
|
| But elites, social media, balkanisation of social groupings
| (death of mass media) these also have huge effects.
|
| But the good news is this page on HN probably lists all of the
| giant freaking tidal waves - it's not an infinite challenge.
| But it is going to need radically different approaches to fix
| it.
|
| Luckily we have Democracy and Science - tattoo them on your
| knuckles folks - we got a fight ahead of us :-)
| zaphirplane wrote:
| What does the AI bubble mean to you? In some context it's about
| stock market, startups crashing and some redundancies. I think
| the context here is massive unemployment, like depression era
| people sitting in the streets offering to work for food. Plus
| the stock market crash
| eikenberry wrote:
| Is the "tech boom" in this context only related to the ability
| of the corps to resell computers to everyone every few years?
| That's the only direct impact I can see on Moore's law ending
| and the tech boom being over. Otherwise I don't see the tech
| boom being over now or even anytime in the foreseeable future.
| Technology is still in its infancy.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Chinese oil consumption is down in 2024 and 2025.
| nine_k wrote:
| > _Overall Chinese oil demand continues to increase, with
| growth dominated by petrochemical feedstocks, which are
| converted into plastics and fibres rather than burnt as
| fuels._
|
| https://www.iea.org/commentaries/oil-demand-for-fuels-in-
| chi... (March 2025).
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| https://energytracker.asia/china-oil-demand-dropped/
| ksymph wrote:
| That article cites the iea one. Both lead back to this
| chart [0] which shows total oil demand is still rising.
|
| Demand for "gasoil gasoline and jet/kero" has fallen, but
| it is offset by still-growing demand for "petrochemical
| feedstocks". The former is used for fuel, while the
| latter used for plastics.
|
| [0] https://www.iea.org/data-and-
| statistics/charts/components-of...
| kbutler wrote:
| Also from that article:
|
| "while China was responsible for more than 60% of global
| increase in overall oil demand between 2013 and 2023, it
| represented less than 20% of last year's rise, largely as a
| result of its slowdown in fuel use."
| nine_k wrote:
| ...which means that oi consumption rises slower, not that
| it decreases, doesn't it?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| No, the article is very clear, right from the
| introduction that they are burning less oil as fuel in
| total.
|
| It also says they used more oil in total, pushed by
| applications where it's not burnt. But that number is
| incompatible with other sources, so there's probably some
| totaling errors there.
| gmuslera wrote:
| He wrote Accelerando, a book about everything happening faster,
| the mythical singularity would happen, after which everything
| will become increasingly better, increasingly faster. Now what we
| have is a pivot, after which everything will become increasingly
| worse, increasingly faster.
|
| At least the acceleration part will happen. And things will keep
| evolving. The pivot, the ones that decide that things are better
| or worse, are us. And probably for some of us (at least a
| extremely small minority, or that will die soon enough) the
| direction may keep going for better
| fritzo wrote:
| Did we read the same Accelerando? The book I read was filled
| with increasingly powerful scam artists, increasingly
| destructive power struggles, increasing energy demands.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| So that book is just the current news then?
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| > after which everything will become increasingly better,
| increasingly faster
|
| Stross (the author of Accelerando) thinks the world of
| Accelerando is exactly the opposite. A bleak terrible world
| full of horrors where the overwhelming majority of humans have
| been killed or worse. It is only because the book is written
| from the perspective of the few survivors that "made it" that
| it seems more cheery.
|
| See https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/05/crib-
| sh...
|
| Choice quotes from the main article and comments:
|
| > In the background of what looks like a Panglossian techno-
| optimist novel, horrible things are happening. Most of humanity
| is wiped out, then arbitrarily resurrected in mutilated form by
| the Vile Offspring. Cspitalism [sic] eats everything then the
| logic of competition pushes it so far that merely human
| entities can no longer compete; we're a fat, slow-moving, tasty
| resource -- like the dodo. Our narrative perspective, Aineko,
| is not a talking cat: it's a vastly superintelligent AI, coolly
| calculating, that has worked out that human beings are more
| easily manipulated if they think they're dealing with a furry
| toy. The cat body is a sock puppet wielded by an abusive
| monster. > > The logic of exponential progress at a tempo
| rising to a vertical spike is a logic that has no room in it
| for humanity.
|
| and
|
| >> [Reader question] I didn't read it that way at all. Are
| insects extinct? Bacteria? Or even Horseshoe crabs? > > Yup,
| pretty much. By chapter 8 of "Accelerando", Earth has been
| destroyed -- broken up to make computronium or other stuff of
| interest to the Vile Offspring. Those humans who didn't get off
| the planet or upload their minds ("Accelerando" takes a rather
| naively can-do approach to uploading) are dead. Ditto the
| biosphere.
| shoo wrote:
| For anyone new to Charlie Stross' fiction, here are a few links
| for your perusal:
|
| Stross' 2005 novel Accelerando [1] set around the technological
| singularity, is made freely available by the author
|
| In addition to various standalone science fiction novels, Stross
| also has a couple of long series, the Laundry Files and Merchant
| Princes / Empire Games.
|
| The setting of the Laundry Files is a mix of magic as a branch of
| applied math, UK secret service bureaucracy and lovecraftian
| horror. Stross' laundry files novella "Down on the Farm" is
| available to read here [2].
|
| Stross' early novelette A Colder War, published in 2000, can be
| read here [3].
|
| The Merchant Princes series is also a great yarn. The setup is
| that parallel universes with alternate history Earths exist, and
| tech journalist Miriam discovers she belongs to a bloodline who
| can "jaunt" into a parallel medieval Earth. One thing Stross does
| well is applying the science fictional / economic lens of "OK, so
| if that were true, then what happens?", so instead of simple
| fantasy tale we get an exploration of stuff like the
| transdimensional narco-courier-for-guns trade, or what would
| Rumsfeld do if transdimensional narcoterrorists made a severe
| error of judgement and picked a fight with the US? The series
| gets pretty dark...
|
| [1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
| static/fiction/accelera... [2] https://reactormag.com/down-on-
| the-farm/ [3]
| https://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm
| kristianp wrote:
| My favourite Stross books are "Saturn's Children", "Singularity
| Sky" and "Iron Sunrise" in that order, to name some of his
| other books. "Neptune's Breed" is the sequel to "Saturn's
| Children". For "Singularity Sky" and "Iron Sunrise", I really
| enjoyed the concept of an AI that seeks to prevent the use of
| time travel to change history, by using secret agents that are
| distributed between multiple star systems.
| nwah1 wrote:
| Stross is at the cutoff of being a baby boomer. He thinks like
| one, and it is abundantly clear from his Malthusian
| preoccupations and overall cynical anti-establishment views
| regarding a system that he has personally benefited tremendously
| from.
|
| Malthusianism was wrong when Malthus developed it, as shown by
| David Ricardo and countless others. Human ingenuity and
| decentralized price signalling via the market allows autonomous
| human actors to make adjustments to changing circumstances and
| continually do more with less. Virtually every real-life famine
| can be traced to large scale interference in that process, such
| as via colonialism, war, etc.
|
| The very agricultural breakthroughs he mentions in this piece are
| the kinds of things that countless groups around the world are
| working on, autonomously, to suit their own circumstances. And
| they have been doing that the whole time. There is nothing new
| about it.
|
| If you look at US agricultural productivity over time, it is
| absolutely astounding. And this is why all the Boomer doomers of
| his generation turned out wrong, and why we should likewise
| ignore all the other stuff he worries about like the
| anachronistic concern over peak oil.
|
| He happens to be correct about the astounding reductions in
| prices of solar PV panels, but of course that itself is just
| another kind of Moore's Law. Photovoltaics are a semiconductor
| technology! But he said Moore's Law was dead...
|
| His explanations for the rise of far-right politics is insulting
| to the reader's intelligence. He seems to think it is reducible
| to the energy economy rather than the actual behavior of leftists
| and liberals, and the resulting complexities of multiculturalism
| that we find ourselves navigating in an age of plummeting
| birthrates.
|
| If your head is in the sand or you are ensconced comfortably in a
| boomer mansion, you might not understand what the problem is for
| working and middle class people quickly finding themselves
| surrounded by a sea of people with dramatically different
| cultures, values, and religions, while being chided for common
| sense manners of speaking and thinking.
|
| There are a range of possible responses to this, but arrogant and
| intellectually lazy boomerposting is not helping.
| dsr_ wrote:
| "the rise of far-right politics is insulting to the reader's
| intelligence. He seems to think it is reducible to the energy
| economy rather than the actual behavior of leftists and
| liberals"
|
| This appears to be you saying "look what they made me do".
|
| If it isn't, you should clarify your point.
| nwah1 wrote:
| Really not saying anything particularly profound that wasn't
| said a hundred times by the liberal and center-left
| intelligentsia after the arrival of Trumpism.
|
| They correctly noted that many people feel left behind by
| globalization, whereas those in the professional managerial
| class don't feel as threatened. Liberals have long been
| fretting about the viability of multiculturalism since the
| "Clash of Civilizations" thesis, and before. And the
| particular rise of aggressive identity politics has put the
| public image of left-wing people in the trash, as they are
| now associated with speech police and people obsessed with
| identity issues in ways that are often tinged with hate or
| which aren't related to the material interests of anyone.
|
| All of this has been said ad nauseam in The Atlantic, the New
| Yorker, The New Republic, WaPo, NYT, and even NPR... all of
| which could be fairly criticized as epicenters of the very
| problem they have also critiqued.
|
| Pretending like pointing out any of this a problem is a
| succinct demonstration of why the Right keeps winning.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2018/12/19/677346260/warning-to-
| democrat...
| atdt wrote:
| > you might not understand what the problem is for working and
| middle class people quickly finding themselves surrounded by a
| sea of people with dramatically different cultures, values, and
| religions
|
| Of course. That is why Trump received the highest voter support
| in counties with the lowest levels of immigration.
|
| https://latino.ucla.edu/press/report-finds-white-voters-supp...
| ternus wrote:
| I used to be a huge fan of Charlie Stross. He's made exactly this
| kind of apocalyptic prediction many times before. When
| devastation doesn't materialize, or the outcome far less severe
| than he predicted, he doesn't update on his beliefs or say "huh,
| guess I was wrong about that"; instead, he moves right on to the
| next one.
|
| One of his favorite subjects is Brexit. I'm not a fan either, but
| here's his track record:
|
| 2016: When the Brexit vote happened, he predicted imminent
| Scottish independence, a failure of the Northern Ireland peace,
| and the collapse of the London financial sector (note the
| "fascism is here!" Cabaret reference):
| https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/06/tomorro...
|
| 2018: he's stockpiling food and medicine to prepare for the
| immediate consequences of Brexit's implementation: "Current
| warnings are that a no-deal Brexit would see trade at the port of
| Dover collapse on day one, cutting the UK off from the continent;
| supermarkets in Scotland will run out of food within a couple of
| days, and hospitals will run out of medicines within a couple of
| weeks. After two weeks we'd be running out of fuel as well...
| After week 1 I expect the UK to revert its state during the worst
| of the 1970s. I just about remember the Three Day Week, rolling
| power blackouts, and more clearly, the mass redundancies of 1979,
| when unemployment tripled in roughly 6 months. Yes, it's going to
| get that bad. But then the situation will continue to
| deteriorate. With roughly 20% of the retail sector shut down
| (Amazon) and probably another 50% of the retail sector suffering
| severe supply chain difficulties (shop buyers having difficulty
| sourcing imported products that are held up in the queues) food
| availability will rapidly become patchy. Local crops, with no
| prospect of reaching EU markets, will be left to rot in the
| fields as the agricultural sector collapses."
| https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/07/that-si...
|
| 2020: impending crisis, widespread shortages, deployment of the
| military, "added economic crisis, probable civil disobedience and
| unrest, a risk of the NHS collapsing, a possible run on Sterling,
| and then a constitutional crisis as one or more parts of the
| United Kingdom gear up for a secession campaign."
| https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/12/so-you-...
|
| 2021: yet more disaster predictions, including that Boris Johnson
| might declare war on France:
| https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/11/an-upda...
|
| In 2022 he once again predicted a general strike, a failed
| harvest, and the collapse of the UK system of government:
| https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2022/08/the-gat...
|
| And then... none of this happened. Brexit hasn't exactly been
| positive for the UK, but neither has it rendered it into Fallout:
| London.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Remoaners still don't acknowledge how psychotically they were
| whipped up over this. But they still talk about the dumb lying
| bus that the people driving admitted was wrong like 5 minutes
| after being confronted about it.
|
| They were predicting Mad Max, and they still call the
| Brexiteers dumb.
|
| That being said, the UK had an good deal in the EU, access to
| the markets without having to accept the dumb currency. which
| is why the EU played so rough with them, and is generally
| better off for them having left.
|
| The problem is that the UK being between France and Germany,
| maybe because English is an unholy combination of French and
| German, was a stabilizing influence. When Europe finally faces
| the fact that they're no match for Russia and should just leave
| it alone, there will be nothing left but to turn on each other
| again. I suppose the winner can invade Russia again and lose,
| again.
|
| But the fantasy that this stupid trade union meant that much
| was a collective elite hysteria. They couldn't just admit that
| they just liked to be able to travel and work in Europe like
| they were at home, because they knew most people couldn't
| actually afford to do that. Also, they loved the cheap labor,
| and that's another embarrassing thing to say out loud.
| rfrey wrote:
| I think your map might be upside down... It's not Europe
| invading Russia.
| jemmyw wrote:
| > the UK being between France and Germany ... was a
| stabilizing influence.
|
| I don't see that at all. The EU was a Franco-German project.
| De Gaul kept the British out as long as he could because he
| thought they'd be destabilising, and he was correct.
|
| The UK was always a bit of an odd man out in the EU in that
| for them it was always "The EU is doing this or that" whether
| good or bad. For the central European countries it's "We are
| doing this or that" because they ARE the EU. If only the UK
| could have seen themselves as part of it. Your comment
| follows a similar vein, they're not going to turn on each
| other so easily. Not yet. The European project means far too
| much to the French and Germans, far more than it ever did the
| the British.
|
| I'm ex-pat British, I've lived in Europe, although I now live
| elsewhere. I personally think brexit was a bad move, but I
| don't really believe it had much to do with the EU anyway.
| It's discontent because things aren't working well for a lot
| of people at the moment, and nobody in politics is offering a
| path to anything better.
| pkd wrote:
| There is a lot of incoherence in this reply but I'll just
| address the second last: that less well-off people were more
| likely to vote for Brexit. Not only is this narrative just a
| thin veneer over the "sons of the soil", anti-immigrant
| narrative, the peddlers of Brexit were handing out, there is
| actual data showing that in fact the opposite was true.
|
| From a Bank of England study:
|
| > People living in left-behind areas were more likely to
| support Brexit than those living in prosperous areas. The
| gains of Brexit were perceived to be greater in areas of the
| country that had experienced economic decline. But within
| those areas, given people's preferences, we show that
| wealthier individuals were more likely to vote for Brexit,
| and poorer individuals were more likely to vote for Remain.
|
| ref. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/study-finds-wealthy-more-
| likely-t...
|
| > One thing we can be reasonably confident of is that small
| UK firms appear to be more adversely affected than larger
| ones. > > They have been less able to cope with the new post-
| Brexit cross-border bureaucracy. That's supported by surveys
| of small firms.
|
| ref. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdrynjz1glpo
|
| All this is not hard to reason yourself out of. The wealthy
| can afford to go to Europe regardless of whether UK remains
| integrated with the EU. They are the least affected by
| decision either way. The less well-to-do have significant
| costs imposed now that the integration is over - both
| monetary and bureaucratic whenever they want to deal with the
| EU. This is despite the free trade deal.
| dmix wrote:
| There's always a market for these kinds of people. They used to
| mostly be religious leaders predicting doom because of the
| latest social trend or local issue. I remember reading an
| archived letter from the middle ages by a British religious
| leader and he predicted the collapse of society after
| witnessing the Norman invasions and border raids happening.
| Some churches got looted and he saw it as an end times, a
| signal of a wider cultural decay. A line once crossed it will
| be impossible to come back from.
|
| These days the internet news junkies are writing those letters.
| dash2 wrote:
| The Norman invasion pretty much did collapse society - there
| were years of rebellions and the old Saxon order was brutally
| wiped out. (There's a nice Rest Is History series on this,
| centred on 1066.)
| dmix wrote:
| Maybe in a local historical sense but in a more meta,
| 'trends of history' thing it largely converged back into
| the middle once power stabilized, looking very similar to
| old power structures. Plus the church very much survived
| and became stronger.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| A lot of times they still are religious leaders. How many
| times in the past have people predicted the Rapture and tried
| to con people based off that belief?
| akoboldfrying wrote:
| Hehehe, sounds like Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb) all over
| again. After reading a few (laudatory) comments here, I had the
| _feeling_ Stross was an unhinged doom merchant, but didn 't
| have any concrete evidence for my negative reaction to him --
| but now I do.
|
| Many thanks!
| throw10920 wrote:
| I think his consistent track record of apocalypse failure
| predictions (and then lack of examining his failure) is made
| even weirder by how good of a thinker or writer he comes across
| in some of his fiction.
|
| I started reading the Laundry Files, and was _shocked_ by how
| diverse his knowledge is, and how well he understands some
| aspects of the world (bureaucracy, the nature of horror
| writing, state intelligence apparatuses).
|
| He seems to be far more intelligent and knowledgeable than the
| average human. So why the incredible lack of self-awareness
| when it comes to predicting the end of the world?
| gsliepen wrote:
| Predicting the future is very hard (think butterfly effects,
| Lyapunov exponents and so on). It's also easy to extrapolate
| what would happen if the current situation continues
| _unchanged_ , but very hard to predict what will happen in
| the near future in response to the current situation. People
| are already reacting to changes in politics and climate,
| thereby softening the blow, and maybe in some cases averting
| it.
|
| I'm hoping Charles Stross knows this, and you should take his
| predictions as "this is what would happen if we did
| absolutely nothing about it".
| ctoth wrote:
| If you're genuinely modeling complex systems with butterfly
| effects and uncertainty, you should sometimes be wrong in
| both directions. Sometimes things should be worse than
| predicted, sometimes better. If you're consistently wrong
| in one direction, that's not complexity - that's bias.
| tczMUFlmoNk wrote:
| In fairness, he does say, "guess I was wrong about that" in
| this piece:
|
| > I was wrong repeatedly in the past decade when I speculated
| that you can't ship renewable electricity around like gasoline,
| and that it would mostly be tropical/equatorial nations who
| benefited from it.
| sam345 wrote:
| A nice piece of fiction from a fiction writer. Reality sucks but
| fossil fuels and nuclear are going to be needed whether the AI
| boom lasts or not.
| tomp wrote:
| > too hot for photosynthesis
|
| Um, what?! The Earth is currently in an _ice age_ - it used to be
| hotter most of its history.
|
| How did life survive if it was too hot for photosynthesis?
|
| It's one thing to say that the planet is warming up (from
| freezing to normal temperature) _too fast_ , but saying that it
| will be too hot for photosynthesis is just not credible.
| tlahtinen wrote:
| It's not out of the question.
|
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/pce.14060
| https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/plants/tropical-rai...
|
| And the planet may well have been warmer in the past, but the
| ecosystems had millions of years to adapt to it.
| tomp wrote:
| I don't think photosynthesis "just adapts", it evolves quite
| slowly (if it could evolve faster, it would be much more
| efficient!).
|
| Also, your geological timelines are way off. Last
| interglacial period (with temperatures higher than today) was
| 100k years ago.
|
| HN has literally became an anti-intellectual echo-chamber.
| kzrdude wrote:
| The last million years had comparable temperatures, you'd
| need to go back to 50 Myr ago to have a significantly
| warmer climate, and without inland glaciation anywhere on
| Earth.
| tomp wrote:
| I'll trust Wikipedia on this topic.
|
| > The Last Interglacial climate is believed to have been
| warmer than the current Holocene.
|
| > During the northern summer, temperatures in the Arctic
| region were about 2-4 degC higher than in 2011
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Interglacial
| kzrdude wrote:
| I think that misses the point (or at least my point). Yes
| it was warmer then. But it was even warmer 50 Myr ago.
| For example one thing that sets the two periods we are
| discussing apart was if Antarctica had glaciers at all or
| not.
|
| The Climate heading in this article will give a little
| overview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cenozoic
|
| See also the plot here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale
| ocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Therm...
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| >If we can just get through the rest of this decade without
| widespread agricultural collapses, a nuclear war, a global
| fascist international dictatorship taking hold, and a complete
| collapse of the international financial system caused by black
| gold suddenly turning out to be worthless, we might be pretty
| well set to handle the challenges of the 2030s.
|
| I noticed world peace wasn't on the roadmap. After we solve 3 or
| 4 of these existential crises, do we still have time for that, or
| are we pushing it to 2100?
| narrator wrote:
| I read political books from the 70s and everything is the same.
| It's been the same since the mid-60s. That's when the western
| narrative shifted from technological progress to environmentalism
| and the lawyer took over from the engineer as the prime mover in
| society. That was 60 years ago. 60 years before that was 1900 and
| the world was vastly vastly different compared to our world of
| the 1960s. 60 years before that was 1840 and the world was vastly
| vastly different.
|
| I'm thinking that AI,robots and the rise of China is going to
| change things radically. Human labor will not be an economic
| constraint, but that won't lead to unlimited abundance because
| the constraint will be externalities.
|
| Most of the technologically unemployed will wake up and do
| whatever AI tells them to do on a daily basis. Their lives will
| improve because AI is better than they are naturally at
| everything. This will lead to some weird outcomes. Especially if
| AI is not acting in the interest of each individual, but in the
| interests of the collective. This will cause AI to have to solve
| trolley problems.
| 0x696C6961 wrote:
| This narrative implies a benevolent AI.That is a naive
| assumption.
| SilverSlash wrote:
| The human 'benevolence factor' has gone up throughout history
| as we've advanced and become more civilized. If AI is even
| more advanced than us then why is it naive to assume it will
| be more benevolent than us?
| 0x696C6961 wrote:
| Humans are still in direct control of the
| training/alignment.
| wood_spirit wrote:
| A handful of billionaires are in direct control of the
| West's training/alignment. Then there are some sheiks in
| the Middle East and the communist party in China...
|
| This is a tangent but i personally dream of the EU doing
| a university led effort to make a benign AI. Because it
| is the last crumbling bastion of liberal democracy.
| dmje wrote:
| Not sure that benign or alignment is that easy. I mean,
| as frequent authors have pointed out - I have a very much
| benign attitude towards ants. I don't step on them if I
| can help it and I don't maliciously go out to pour
| boiling water on them. But if I'm building a house or
| working in my garden I'm likely gonna kill tens of
| thousands of them. Same applies to AGI. If we're just
| ants, we're gonna get squashed.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| If an AI can live-learn (so like we do at night, fine
| tuning our neural net weights etc), which we need to get
| anywhere from here (just no-one knows how yet), there is
| nothing currently that can make that alignment stick;
| humans drop out of alignment all the time for self
| preservation or just 'everyone does it, so...'.
| Ray20 wrote:
| At the moment, the US looks much more democratic and
| liberal than the EU.
| oezi wrote:
| From the outside the US has shifted to a oligarchy where
| money buys elections. Europe's democracies are certainly
| straining. Primarily from its news companies being
| minimized by Google and Facebook (and now TikTok) which
| have extracted most ad revenues on which news depended.
| ctoth wrote:
| > From the outside the US has shifted to a oligarchy
| where money buys elections.
|
| The data simply doesn't support that narrative.
|
| Looking at the last 4 presidential elections:
|
| 2024: Trump won, Harris outspent him ($1.9B vs $1.6B)
|
| 2020: Biden won, Biden outspent Trump ($1.06B vs $785M)
|
| 2016: Trump won, Clinton outspent him ($614M vs $368M)
|
| 2012: Obama won, Obama outspent Romney (~$1.1B vs ~$1B,
| essentially tied)
|
| The higher spender won twice and lost twice. 2016 is
| particularly striking - Clinton outspent Trump by roughly
| $200-450 million depending on how you count it, yet lost.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Why are Democrat candidates consistently outspending
| Republican candidates? I thought the Republicans were the
| party for rich? And thus should be getting more money
| from the rich.
| Ray20 wrote:
| > I thought the Republicans were the party for rich?
|
| Isn't it the other way around? I mean, in the Internet,
| it's the democratic side that's constantly complaining
| about how stupid, uneducated rednecks elected dictator
| Trump.
| strgcmc wrote:
| The most apt way that I've read somewhere, to reason about
| AI, is to treat it like an extremely foreign, totally alien
| form of intelligence. Not necessarily that the models of
| today behave like this, but we're talking about the future
| aren't we?
|
| Just framing your question against a backdrop of "human
| benevolence", as well as implying this is a single
| dimension (that it's just a scalar value that could be
| higher or lower), is already too biased. You assume that
| logic which applies to humans, can be extrapolated to AI.
| There is not much basis for this assumption, in much the
| same way that there is not much basis to assume an alien
| sentient gas cloud from Andromeda would operate on the same
| morals or concept of benevolence as us.
| narrator wrote:
| Even a benevolent AI acting for the benefit of a collective
| will have to choose which individuals suffer when suffering
| by some members of the collective becomes unavoidable.
| eru wrote:
| Maybe. But a sufficiently smart benevolent AI will avoid
| getting into such a hopeless situation in the first place.
|
| Just like parents in rich countries don't constantly have
| to decide which of their kids should go hungry: they make
| sure ahead of time to buy enough food to feed every family
| member.
| throw10920 wrote:
| When would "suffering by some members of the collective
| becomes unavoidable" actually happen?
| alganet wrote:
| I have a radical hypothesis that intelligence leads to
| empathy, empathy leads to kindness, and a superinteligent AI
| should be kinder than any human has ever been.
|
| I also believe that as soon as someone boots up an AI that is
| kind, they'll kill it immediately, for the reason of it being
| kind, favoring instead the dumb AI that can follow orders.
| drekipus wrote:
| Genuine intelligence is kindness. But ai is recall and
| pattern recognition.
|
| I generally sum it up as "ai doesn't have the human spirit"
| and ergo it will not have a moral compass
| alganet wrote:
| I was talking in fiction terms with a hint of philosophy.
| You're doing more of a techno-mix between current LLMs
| and religion, which is definitely interesting, but
| disconnected from what I said.
| boznz wrote:
| Agree. Self-preservation is any thinking entities #1 goal. We
| may give an AI power, data and keep it repaired, but we can
| also turn it off or reprogram it. We probably shouldn't
| assume higher level 'thinking' AI's will be benevolent.
| Luckily, current LLM's are not thinking entities, just token
| completion machines.
| KPGv2 wrote:
| The narrative implies GAI. It's looking increasingly
| impossible. Nearly a decade of trying to improve on the
| concept of neural nets. Utter failure. Now we're running up
| on both the limits of training data (not much more to slurp)
| and physical laws (miniaturization has a threshold beyond
| which it cannot go, and we're getting there).
|
| So, at least in the medium term, AI is going to stall out at
| approximately where it is now: good at predicting the next
| word token.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| I wonder about this; theoretically elites who control capital
| no longer "need" masses in such numbers to retain power/wealth.
| It would be much simpler to manage a smaller population and
| extract surplus production from technocapital instead
| (automated factories, solar, ag etc).
|
| If you are mainly constrained by externalities of production /
| industrialisation one way to maximise the resources available
| to _you_ is to have fewer other people.
| alexashka wrote:
| Are you quoting the rationale for China's one child policy?
|
| You misunderstand what the elites do. They _prevent_ change
| because the status quo has been setup by their parents and
| grand-parents to benefit them at the expense of everyone else
| _already_.
|
| They are not agents of change, they are agents of
| _preventing_ change.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| Ok, my definition of "elites" is they are the people who
| wrest control of the systems that sustain us all and bend
| them towards extracting value for themselves. They're the
| people who live up on the hill and extract grain from the
| peasants at the point of a sword. It's generational.
|
| Peasants are not very productive and you need a lot of
| them, and you're continually running the risk that they're
| going to revolt or want a better deal.
|
| Under conditions of wider stability I absolutely agree with
| you that in general "elites" want to slow or block change.
| The system is rigged to support them already and change is
| risky. When there is significant _external_ competition
| (threat of war or impending social change that would
| overturn their control), I believe it turns out to be
| surprising what can be done...
|
| If automation can replace labour as the main productive
| input, the "masses" and welfare seem largely redundant and
| significant degrowth might be seen as _preferable_.
|
| I am not claiming this is pre-ordained or a definite
| outcome, I am saying that this line of reasoning seems
| plausible to me.
|
| The tipping point would seem to be where the marginal
| return on investment in capital (automation, AI, machines)
| exceeds the marginal return on investment in humans (labor,
| welfare, training, etc.).
| alexashka wrote:
| Automation replaced labor decades ago.
|
| A 32 hour work week was suggested by USA politicians
| almost a _century_ ago. Read that again - a century ago.
|
| You're trying to reduce complex human issues to a single
| metric of input vs output. I struggle to convey why this
| is um, not smart without being insulting.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| My working definition of AGI is when humans and robots
| become roughly fungible.
|
| If you think in these terms they are directly
| substitutable.
| KPGv2 wrote:
| If the population shrinks, their capital isn't worth much.
| Meta, Twitter, etc. all lose value when the user base
| shrinks, we've literally seen it already. If the population
| gets smaller by design, naturally this same thing would
| happen.
|
| Amazon, Uber, owners of apartment complexes, commercial real
| estate titans, Fox News, etc. What do their powerful
| owners/managers do? Rupert Murdoch's family doesn't think "if
| only our viewership dropped by 90% we'd really be doing
| great!"
|
| Elites are where they are because the current system has
| benefited them. They wouldn't want to risk that by shaking
| things up so dramatically.
| mbgerring wrote:
| I work in the energy industry. Any future containing widespread
| use of AI will require a hard electrical infrastructure upgrade
| equivalent to the initial deployment of electricity and phone
| lines. The intersection of AI and the electrical grid is a hard
| and as-yet-unsolved problem. Either way, power infrastructure
| will drive our destiny as much or more than AI.
| taink wrote:
| Even if we did manage to achieve such an upgrade, we would
| still have to successfully manage to secure the rare earths
| required for electronics manufacturing. Extracting and
| processing these resources is becoming more and more complex.
| Especially when you consider we would need these resources
| not only to sustain our current infrastructure, but also to
| improve it.
| judahmeek wrote:
| So basically China has the infrastructure & raw materials for
| properly utilizing AI & America doesn't.
|
| I really wonder if America will wake up because China crushes
| us under their feet. I kind of doubt it.
|
| We beat the USSR due to their style of government being
| absolutely terrible. China's form of authoritarianism has
| proven far more adaptable. Not to mention that America's
| governance is showing risks of sliding towards corrupt
| authoritarianism as well. If both forms of government suck
| from an idealistic perspective, then China's manufacturing,
| rare earth metals, growing naval capacity, experience in
| stealing IP, & energy infrastructure seem to give it the
| advantage.
|
| The only thing that I think that America has going for it
| right now is possibly control of space through SpaceX.
| derriz wrote:
| Why? The transmission system is used to span distance to
| bring energy from large producers to large concentrations of
| consumers. Traditionally power consumption was concentrated
| in and around cities while power generation happened away
| from cities.
|
| Datacenters require relatively few people to operate so do
| not need to be located in or near population centers. Sites
| are chosen on this basis - DCs are sited close to generation
| or significant transmission system nodes
| Yoric wrote:
| > Most of the technologically unemployed will wake up and do
| whatever AI tells them to do on a daily basis. Their lives will
| improve because AI is better than they are naturally at
| everything. This will lead to some weird outcomes. Especially
| if AI is not acting in the interest of each individual, but in
| the interests of the collective. This will cause AI to have to
| solve trolley problems.
|
| Let's assume one second that AI becomes good enough to do that.
|
| There's still a strong possibility that AI will be a tool
| acting in the interest of an elite, smaller (a few oligarchs, a
| single dictator) or larger (a country, a faction, a religion).
| erichocean wrote:
| > _I 'm thinking that AI,robots and the rise of China_
|
| If AI employees and robots rise, China will fall along with
| every other human-powered economy.
|
| No human is competitive with an AI employee in cost or
| efficiency, and the gap (technology is deflationary) will
| increase every year.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Guys, yes I get it. You're all famous people with books on this
| and that and all that. But I tell you this with love - get off
| the Internet. It's radicalizing you into some crazed state. You
| saw what happened to Elon Musk? It's happening to you.
|
| I know you're surrounded by a bunch of people who tell you "yes,
| yes, speak truth to power!" and shit like that but this is just
| an angry blogpost.
|
| Take it easy. Just take a 2 week break from social media. Read a
| book from the before times and don't go on the Internet. Come
| back and see if you care.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand how severely this is being
| misinterpreted. The pivotal year of our times? Post-oil age? The
| AI bubble being worse than 2008? Starving to death if we don't
| stop using fossil fuels? Sorry but all of this is incredibly
| wrong.
|
| First off, the pink elephant in the room: a PV panel is not an
| energy plan. A PV panel is a cheap way to generate electricity,
| yes. But there are many, many, many other things you need to take
| that PV panel and make it a sustainable source of energy on a
| national scale. Here's a short list: 1) a continuous production
| source of cheap panels, 2) a continuous demand of cheap panels
| (supply-demand being one of the reasons they're so cheap, but
| they also last 12+ years, so there is a built-in economic time-
| bomb when demand drops off), 3) residential and commercial
| equipment and processes to send the PV energy to the grid, 4) a
| grid that can handle it all, 5) enough batteries to store it both
| overnight and on cloudy days, 6) a cheap source of plentiful
| batteries (and again the same supply-demand issue), 7) space for
| the panels, and (though nobody thought this would be an issue,
| but apparently it is) 8) the political interest in investing in
| (and not intentionally tanking) the renewable sector. Each of
| these is a big enough deal that if they don't work out just
| right, there goes your PV energy plan.
|
| We don't get a more advanced society just because it's possible;
| someone needs to make a profit off it first. Ideas like "B2B" and
| "V2G" charging, electric trucking, etc are still a pipe dream
| because they aren't significantly commercially viable. If it's
| expensive, doesn't net you an immediate return, and is risky in
| general, nobody does it. Let's use a very well established
| example: _Trains_. Extremely cost effective for transportation,
| but you 'd have to be insane to build or upgrade existing track.
|
| Anyone thinking the world is gonna get off oil or coal isn't
| aware that USA, the EU, and China, are not the only
| countries/regions on the globe. There are 6 billion other people
| on the planet. The vast majority of them are poor and live in
| poor countries. They can't even afford fucking vaccines, and you
| think they're all going to develop cutting-edge energy generation
| and distribution systems? It would take at least 50 years for
| most developing nations to match developed western nations.
|
| Not only will developing countries stick to oil and coal, the US
| will certainly see a return to it too. Remember that there is
| still 3 more years for Trump to find new ways to destroy the
| renewables sector in the US and alienate us from foreign
| renewables. Texas benefits from the country being dependent on
| oil, not panels. Whatever feeds the political monkey wins. And
| from a national security perspective, it would be impossible to
| replace our military's vehicles with EV alternatives in any
| reasonable time frame, so we continue to be dependent on oil for
| defense. If the military needs it, then we keep making and using
| it. In many ways, oil (that we can continue to extract in our own
| borders) is a far more secure energy source than ones that depend
| on rare materials we might not have in abundance here.
|
| We are not facing an agro threat. We have far more agricultural
| resources than is needed to feed all our people, even with higher
| temperatures and less water. We would simply grow fewer livestock
| and switch from corn to actually nutritional food. Even just
| tripling the amount of _oats_ we produce (a tiny amount) would
| provide most of the nutrition we need. We aren 't dependent on
| foreign countries for ag; we just like the cheap prices. And this
| is without talking about bioengineered crops or using more
| northern land for farming. (our country is _fucking huge_ )
| _Other_ countries will definitely be at risk due to climate
| change, but we are still rich enough and have enough resources to
| get along just fine. Everything will be more expensive, and
| people won 't be happy, but we won't even remotely starve.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Solar is like 10% of electric production, which is about 20% of
| energy use.
|
| So if you expect solar to replace most of that, at steady state
| you probably need more panels per year than are currently being
| produced. No reason to expect diminishing production to
| increase costs vs today (they might rise vs the eventual
| floor).
|
| I agree that we have an enormous calorie surplus that we can
| turn the knob on.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > which is about 20% of energy use
|
| Electricity is about 3x more efficient than other power
| sources on most places they are used. So, in reality it's
| about 50% of the replacement needs. Or, in other words, we
| have to about double our electricity production to replace
| everything else.
| arthurofbabylon wrote:
| I appreciate the themes but find this overly conceptual. We can
| look at hard figures(+) and see errors in the prophecy. While yes
| this is a transformative period, I don't believe the author truly
| identifies the fulcrum; PV cells alone are proven insufficient,
| so society will need to turn upon many more points than just that
| one. The essay could be called The Pivots (plural) but then that
| would be less simple/sensational/optimistic and fall under the
| category of economics and social sciences.
|
| I appreciate the thrust, however: the unsustainable status quo,
| corruption, the climate crisis' incredible severity, fragility.
| "efficiency is the reciprocal of resilience" is a particularly
| appreciated line.
|
| (+) - Vaclav Smil's work comes to mind.
| mbgerring wrote:
| Projections of PV cell improvement and deployment by large
| energy forecasting agencies have been so wrong for so long that
| it's a well known running joke in the energy industry.
|
| Solar beats projections constantly and has been the cheapest
| available power source for many (if not all) applications for
| years already. Cheap, abundant, performant batteries already
| expand the possible surface area for solar deployment, and we
| can expect this to continue.
|
| I have a hard time understanding what you mean by "proven
| insufficient."
| arthurofbabylon wrote:
| "Proven insufficient" when scoped to the sweeping social
| changes proposed by the author. PV cells are obviously
| effective and increasingly so over time, but further
| efficiency gains will not on their own topple dictatorships
| or cure diseases.
|
| To summon the vast proposed changes, PV cells' improvements
| need to be coincided with many other changes: grid
| development, battery tech, industrial re-tooling, climate
| policies/institutions, mining/extraction, agricultural
| methods, production methods... and that's without even
| discussing culture, which will have to evolve substantially.
|
| It's a nice notion (and totally inline with the existing
| technocratic sentiment (eg, "more compute!")) that a single
| lever can just be pulled harder and problems will be
| magically solved. However, the world is much more complex
| than that; the complexity cannot be hand-waived away.
| jasonsb wrote:
| > To summon the vast proposed changes, PV cells'
| improvements need to be coincided with many other changes:
| grid development, battery tech, industrial re-tooling,
| climate policies/institutions, mining/extraction,
| agricultural methods, production methods... and that's
| without even discussing culture, which will have to evolve
| substantially.
|
| What a ridiculous take. PV's are plug and play, you don't
| have to change anything. The only dependency is storage, so
| battery tech needs to keep up. However, advancements in
| battery tech are already progressing at a rate that exceeds
| the pace of innovation in PV cells.
| arthurofbabylon wrote:
| Let's use our imagination to overcome some naivety.
| Imagine for a moment that you just instantly 10x'ed the
| presence of PVs and tell me what will change. Do you
| truly believe that you will never encounter a bottleneck?
| Go on 10x'ing the presence of PVs until you find emerging
| constraints.
|
| I'm sure that 10x the solar electricity output would
| substantially incentivize battery development and changes
| in industrial production, eventually producing major
| cultural implications. Long before utopia, however, we
| will encounter other bottlenecks: electrolysis, carbon
| policy, resource distribution (and other
| problems/opportunities worthy of attention).
|
| No one here is claiming that PV cells play an
| insignificant role, or that emergent peripheral
| challenges will not be met with skill. The claim I am
| making is that the simple model (more PVs!) is
| insufficient to address the complex problems human
| society faces, and that it is naive to believe otherwise.
| You would never just put your foot on the pedal to drive
| to your destination; you'll also grasp the steering
| wheel, reckon with obstacles and roadway laws, etc; but
| if you have never driven a car before, you might
| sincerely believe that all it takes is stepping on that
| pedal.
| jasonsb wrote:
| > but if you have never driven a car before, you might
| sincerely believe that all it takes is stepping on that
| pedal.
|
| This is not a fair comparison. Installing a PV system
| with battery storage on my residential or commercial
| property has minimal societal impact, especially when
| compared to something like owning a car. I generate and
| consume my own electricity in a largely self-contained
| system.
|
| The primary benefit to society is indirect but
| meaningful: I reduce my reliance on fossil fuels and draw
| less power from the grid. This eases demand on shared
| infrastructure and contributes (modestly) to lower
| emissions.
|
| Importantly, I continue to pay all applicable taxes and
| fees, so public services and infrastructure investments
| (like grid upgrades or transmission lines) remain
| unaffected. My pursuit of energy self-sufficiency doesn't
| impose new burdens on society; if anything, it lightens
| the collective load.
| arthurofbabylon wrote:
| I don't think you understand my argument. The point is
| not whether or not solar electricity generation is good
| or bad (it is obviously very favorable). The point I am
| making is that it is unhelpful to collapse complexity
| into a simplistic model.
|
| Your discussion on owning battery + PV is illustrative.
| You are not in a vacuum and certainly are in relationship
| with the broader world: you paid for the system, you
| maintain it, you stopped buying something, you inspired
| your neighbors, you lowered the costs for your neighbors
| to implement a similar system, you reduced your and your
| countrymen's geopolitical dependencies, you may have
| saved some money you can spend elsewhere, you probably
| developed a working understanding of electricity in
| homes, your neighbors probably developed a better working
| understanding of electricity in homes, you are now less
| liable to extortion/persuasion from fossil fuel
| companies, you're now more likely to own an EV and reduce
| urban pollution. The entire point is that you exist in
| relationship; that is what makes it powerful. Had you
| simply implemented the PV system + battery without these
| second order effects (and only gained access to
| more/cheaper energy) you would have considerably less
| positive impact. The complex model is the correct working
| model that describes far more of the dynamics than the
| simplistic model.
|
| My original point: belief in a single fulcrum when
| describing societal evolution is flatly misleading.
|
| The metaphor of driving a car is not in opposition to
| solar; you misunderstood it. The point is, again, that
| the simple model is insufficient for effectively
| operating in the world.
| childintime wrote:
| Now, why would you have to make this point, as it's close
| to a tautology? It's likely because we have a lever and
| don't use it. In that framing your point gets lost,
| because it doesn't address any issue. So there is a
| superfluousness at play that suggests this is
| disinformation, intended to derail the impetus for
| change. So I guess you need to elaborate and present a
| synthesis, perhaps mention alternate levers, instead of
| downplaying the one that's obvious? I don't see any other
| significant levers, RethinkX says PV + battery are
| sufficient for virtually anywhere in the world. Grid
| demands should lessen over time as local generation comes
| online. The grid becomes a overnight backup charging
| method.
| arthurofbabylon wrote:
| Let's upgrade our intellectual rigor here. Do you
| sincerely believe that "PV + battery are sufficient for
| virtually anywhere in the world" even when it comes to
| viral disease, dictatorships and warfare, chemical
| pollution, deforestation, social epidemics (eg, drugs,
| social media), housing crises, food deserts, famine, etc?
|
| You might be only considering the energy transition, but
| it is not as if the original author was strictly speaking
| of that topic, or as if that is all that matters for
| humanity on earth.
|
| "I don't see any other significant levers," you say? Read
| from history: how about the great liberalizing effect of
| the Christian marriage and family policy that broke down
| filial kin networks and paved the way for markets,
| universities, and democracies by way of fostering
| impersonal trust? How about the smallpox vaccine? How
| about the incredible rise in population and economic
| activity upon the introduction of potatoes to Europe? How
| about the invention of ammonium-based fertilizers? This
| one will rankle some feathers: how about the incredible
| geopolitical twist and - yes - reduction in atmospheric
| carbon introduced by the development of fracking
| (enabling the transition away from coal)? How about the
| civil rights movement in the United States? The invention
| of nuclear weapons? Metallurgy? Chemistry? The shipping
| container? Large language models? Look around and you
| will see fulcrums everywhere.
|
| Literally look around you, wherever you sit right now,
| and just consider the vast number of twists and turns
| that led to the current circumstance. Then imagine
| someone 500 years ago in Beijing saying something as
| foolish as, "we just need more movable-type printing,
| yeah, that will protect us from the Northern invaders,
| that will completely solve deforestation, that will
| protect us from famine... Hey you farmer over there, stop
| farming! We have movable-type printing! We're good, we
| just need more of it!"
|
| The simplistic model is very appealing; it is easy to
| wrap your mind around it, it is easy to communicate via
| viral essay, it is easy to develop optimism upon it. But
| it is not a working model. It is just too simple and
| incomplete. The various fulcrums I pulled out of my
| imagination above all worked because the world was
| complex. The people who invented and developed those
| fulcrums were effective because they embraced a complex
| model. They made the intellectually rigorous choice to
| reject naive simplicity when others tried to thrust it
| upon them.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Go on 10x'ing the presence of PVs until you find
| emerging constraints.
|
| While true, I think it's fair to make certain guesses
| about other tech also being developed (such as, as you
| mentioned, batteries).
|
| Even if they did not exist, constraints lead to
| conflicts, and conflicts can lead to exchanges of power.
|
| (Different topic but same idea, constraint and conflict:
| when it comes to the never-ending battle of encryption, I
| do not see how to square the unstoppable force of
| "unbreakable encryption is very easy to make and vitally
| important to the use of the internet" with the immovable
| object that is "no state can survive when conspiracies
| are opaque to investigations and prosecutions").
| axus wrote:
| China seems happy with the Power of Siberia pipeline and wants
| another: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altai_gas_pipeline
| Credit to those countries for not fighting each other, by the
| way!
|
| So I agree, we can have all of the above: expansion of solar
| power, expansion of EVs and batteries, continued growth of
| fossil fuels, and climate disaster.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, to the extent that you accept that the current world
| organization is caused by oil, then yeah, PV is sufficient to
| reorganize it.
|
| Some people just push that extent to a surreal level, implying
| worldwide conspiracies and etc. But the reverse is also true,
| some people dismiss it to a ridiculous level. Energy is the
| most fundamental constraint in our society, and a lot of
| seemingly independent things turn out to be caused by it when
| you look.
|
| Anyway, from your list, the climate crisis is an obvious one
| that comes directly from energy. Energy centralization is also
| a boost for corruption, but the strength of that one is highly
| debatable.
| kragen wrote:
| It's worth thinking about past unprecedented humanity-wide energy
| transitions to get a taste of what might be in store.
|
| Stross mentions the combustion engine revolution, which brought
| us urbanization, made democracy widespread (virtually eliminating
| monarchy), created the urban proletariat, ended slavery, made
| humans literally fly, lit the cities at night, obliterated most
| of the world's cultures through colonialism, created company
| towns where you got deeper in debt the longer you worked, etc.
|
| The previous similar event was the Neolithic Revolution in which
| settled agriculture began, which probably brought us monarchy,
| cities, literacy, metallurgy, slavery, malnutrition on a scale
| previously unimaginable, and virtually everything we think of as
| traditional. (But not pottery. Pottery is much older; it just
| hadn't yet spread to where people were inventing agriculture.)
|
| This time will be a bigger change, I think. The amount of energy
| available from the sun is much larger than what people use today,
| perhaps 7000x even at Earth's surface. This is now cheap to use.
| Many things that have always been inconceivable are now feasible.
| Someone is going to fease a lot of them now even if I wish they
| wouldn't.
|
| Quibble: China's solar panels are not thin-film.
| zhivota wrote:
| The way you describe the transition events elides the
| incredible instability that people living through them
| experienced (wars, revolutions, famines, etc.), which I think
| is what Stross is getting at here, and ultimately is probably
| right about.
|
| Will things end up better? Maybe, and based on history you
| could even make a case for "probably", but will it be better
| for _us_, the ones alive _right now_? Again, based on history,
| almost certainly not.
| kragen wrote:
| Possibly you read an early version of the comment before I
| edited it.
| csomar wrote:
| I think what you are saying is that it would be great to live
| _after_ the French revolution happened and settled, good
| enough to live _before_ the revolution happens; and the worst
| is during the revolution?
| bobthepanda wrote:
| all of those things were also very common outside of energy
| transitions until about the last century.
|
| for all of its faults, one thing the globalized system has
| allowed is that it makes relieving famine _possible_ by
| shipping food from other parts of the globe.
| kragen wrote:
| Yes, famines were unavoidable before the steam-engine;
| since then they have become purely politically produced.
| _heimdall wrote:
| > ended slavery
|
| We (mostly) ended _human_ slavery, but I don 't think its
| accurate to say we ended slavery in general.
|
| Oil gave us a reason to stop enslaving humans for labor - a
| single barrel of oil equates to the amount of work a human can
| do working 8 hours a day for roughly a decade.
|
| We didn't stop slavery all together, we found a more efficient
| target of our enslavement. We'll do the same with AI (or at
| least we'll try), should actual artificial intelligence exist.
| Fricken wrote:
| We didn't end slavery at all. There are more slaves now than
| ever.
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/slavery/modern/modern_1.shtml
| perihelions wrote:
| Ironically for the parent's thesis (cheap energy replacing
| human slave labor), one of the major objects of modern
| slavery is... the manufacturing of solar panels,
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/business/economy/solar-
| xi... ( _" Solar Supply Chain Grows More Opaque Amid Human
| Rights Concerns / The global industry is cutting some ties
| to China, but its exposure to forced labor remains high and
| companies are less transparent, a new report found"_)
|
| https://www.csis.org/analysis/dark-spot-solar-energy-
| industr... ( _" A Dark Spot for the Solar Energy Industry:
| Forced Labor in Xinjiang"_)
|
| (Maybe there's some kind of evil Jevons Paradox for
| slavery, where the automation of human labor
| counterintuitively _increases_ total slavery; i.e. the
| technologically-augmented effectiveness of slave labor
| increases the value of slaves).
| ctoth wrote:
| Wait, are you saying we ... enslaved oil? Type Error! I'm
| reading that wrong, right?
| kragen wrote:
| I'd never done that calculation, but that's about right;
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_of_oil_equivalent is 6
| gigajoules: You have: 6 gigajoules / 10
| years (8 hours/day) You want: W * 57.039776
| / 0.017531626
|
| That's at least in the ballpark.
|
| I think that from a moral point of view it's accurate to say
| that we ended slavery in general, or at least mostly ended
| it. Energy slaves made of barrels of oil or solar panels
| don't involve the same suffering and cruelty that human
| slavery does.
| ciconia wrote:
| Strictly speaking there's never been an energy transition in
| the sense of replacing one source of energy with another.
| Instead, the different sources of energy have been piling on
| top of each other. [1]
|
| So while PV is growing at an unprecedented pace, it still
| represents only 2-3% of total energy production. About 75%
| still comes from fossil fuel. Today we burn more fossil fuels
| (and incidentally more wood) than ever before in human history.
| So the term "energy transition" is inaccurate at best.
|
| [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-
| substitutio...
| kibwen wrote:
| _> there 's never been an energy transition in the sense of
| replacing one source of energy with another_
|
| We have. This is thinking too narrowly about energy as
| "driving a turbine" rather than doing work in general.
| Horses, oxen, and other beasts of burden have been almost
| completely marginalized in our modern economy. The same could
| certainly happen to steam-powered turbines (coal, gas,
| nuclear, etc) if the economics end up working out that way.
| hollerith wrote:
| Also, human slaves have been almost completely marginalized
| even thought they were the main source of mechanical energy
| in ancient Rome.
| m4rtink wrote:
| Yeah, even old water mills - while the weirs and water
| supply channels might still stand, the water wheels are
| long gone, with a few exception not worth replacing by a
| modern small water turbine generating electricity.
|
| It is simply not economical to exploit this (originally
| critical) source of power as its is so small in absolute
| numbers compared to all the necessary maintenance.
| kragen wrote:
| A few years back I visited an old water mill called
| Itaipu. It has forty water wheels still in operation,
| providing a total of 14 gigawatts peak. At the time I
| visited, one of the water wheels was providing 95% of
| Paraguay's electricity, and the other 39 were providing
| 25% of Brazil's electricity. It turns 50 years old next
| year. In 02020 its average production was 8.7 gigawatts.
| They did have to replace one of the water wheels a few
| years after I visited:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thcIrM31tZ4
|
| Brazil uses more electricity now, some 80 gigawatts, so
| this one water mill only produces about 10% of it now.
|
| It is true that many older water mills are no longer in
| use, though. Maybe 50 years to you is not old!
| andrepd wrote:
| > the combustion engine revolution, which brought us
| urbanization, made democracy widespread (virtually eliminating
| monarchy), created the urban proletariat, ended slavery, made
| humans literally fly, lit the cities at night, obliterated most
| of the world's cultures through colonialism
|
| Almost none of this really tracks. ICE => democracy? I don't
| see the link. Most of the things you speak of came with the
| industrial revolution, not with oil.
| kragen wrote:
| You seem to have misinterpreted what I was saying, possibly
| due to being unfamiliar with the terminology. It was Watt's
| external combustion engine that brought the industrial
| revolution and made democracy widespread, not the internal
| combustion engine.
| andrepd wrote:
| Ahh, I misunderstood. Thanks for clarifying!
| kragen wrote:
| No problem!
| zhivota wrote:
| I was nodding along until the bashing of neoliberalism, which I
| believe to be unfounded left-woo essentially.
|
| If we were to apply neoliberalism a bit more in the present
| moment, we may be much better off, but that's not what the
| current trend is anyway. We're currently experimenting with some
| unholy mix of populism and authoritarianism which has basically
| no predictable endpoint, because it's just based on the whims of
| one man (in each respective country doing this at the moment).
|
| Also the view of climate change as primarily being about
| photosynthesis is laughably myopic... he does acknowledge weather
| instability as being an issue as well, but it's that and sea
| level rise which really seems to be poised to disrupt the current
| iteration of civilization.
| _def wrote:
| Currently to me it seems that neoliberalism is exactly the
| mechanic that enables that populism and authoritarianism - is
| this the connection you see as unfounded? (I am genuinely
| asking, to understand your point of view)
| jancsika wrote:
| I'll take a stab at it very quickly--
|
| The subsidies for green energy in the Inflation Reduction Act
| targeted a lot of red/purple states. So you get a burgeoning
| battery industry going in Georgia, solar and wind in Arizona
| and Texas, and so forth.
|
| A Harris presidency would have beefed up those programs for
| another 4 years. So if you got a Trumpism in 2028, that green
| energy sector of the economy would have an 8-year head start.
| Republicans would either have to battle a much more powerful
| green energy lobby or figure out how to do green Trumpism.
| Either would be a substantial hurdle. So if you're not in
| favor of having a random number generator in charge at the
| White House, you'd probably agree we'd be better off with the
| neoliberalism.
|
| As to "much better off," I'm going to need to hear more
| substance from OP to believe that. Harris didn't have an
| anti-monopolist stance, and I see no reason to think that
| state/corporate surveillance-tech and cryptobros bullshit
| would have been curtailed in any meaningful sense. And
| someone who is currently relying on Klarna to pay for
| groceries now would not exactly be thriving at the end of a
| first Harris term.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > the American Puritan Empire project failed, therefore the world
| is literally ending
|
| Actually, no. It's healing. :)
| mmaunder wrote:
| There's this "now that I'm exiting, you're all fucked" phenomenon
| that exists among older folks. Perhaps a result of optimism
| waning at the end of a life. I'm not young. But I guess I'm more
| optimistic than this.
| gman83 wrote:
| I see a lot of pessimism amongst young people. Mainly related
| to having spent years preparing to enter the job market and
| suddenly finding out their skill set is soon to be obsolete.
| jmward01 wrote:
| I can agree this may be a (the?) pivot year, but I don't think it
| is energy. It is everything. It seems weird to say the death of
| fossil fuels is 'not that big of a deal compared to...' but when
| it was only a minor news story that life on ancient Mars is a
| growing probability, all the political, well, everything, is
| beginning to look like the norm and I just spent the day talking
| to an AI to help me code. Well, the death of fossil fuels just
| seems like it is maybe only a top 10 story of this decade.
| jbeninger wrote:
| I think the point though is it's not a "story". It's a
| fundamental shift. The shift is subtle and doesn't lend itself
| to sensationalism.
|
| Entire countries have built their clout on fossil fuels. Wars
| have been fought. Now any country with a sufficient
| manufacturing base can be energy independent. And the resource
| is less controllable by a small group of people.
|
| AI and geopolitics and everything else is huge right now, but
| they're being bent to the will of the current world order. The
| article is saying that that world order is going to change.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Refreshing with an actual blog. However, I found one problem: The
| atom feed doesn't parse, so I can't add it to my RSS reader.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _All of this is without tackling the other elephant in the
| room, which is the end of Moore 's Law. Moore's Law has been on
| its death bed for over a decade now. We're seeing only limited
| improvements in computing and storage performance, mainly from
| parallelism._
|
| > _(it 's one of those goddamn bubbles: to the limited extent
| that LLMs are useful, we'll inevitably see a shift towards using
| pre-trained models running on local hardware)_
|
| I don't completely disagree with his main theses, but this part
| seems contradictory. You cannot state at the same time that
| Moore's law is over - so the compute capacity of consumer PC will
| roughly stay the same from now on - but also that we will all
| just casually run GPT-5 locally on those same PCs in the future
| and therefore the data center buildout is a waste of money.
|
| (I also think it's a bubble, but more because there might be a
| lack of demand, not because some technological miracle might make
| all the infrastructure obsolete)
| Jedd wrote:
| Doubling capability every 18 months while halving in price, is
| not the opposite of 'compute capacity staying roughly the same
| from now on'.
| Havoc wrote:
| It seems improbable to me that energy experiences a sharp pivot.
|
| Takes time to replace fossil fuel gear with electric - it's by
| necessity a progressive transition. Doesn't just flip like a
| switch.
|
| Still...if it happens over a couple years that would still be
| pretty sharp
| gurjeet wrote:
| It's easy to be swayed by the latest thing you read. Can someone
| please recommend an opinion or book that counters this doom-and-
| gloom view of the world future presented here. I'm not
| insinuating that this view is wrong, just that I need something
| to balance out this negative view of our current and future
| state.
| kibwen wrote:
| Not to put too fine a point on it, but as a species we have
| basically stopped writing fiction that presents an optimistic
| outlook of the future. The solarpunk genre is the best we can
| do these days, which is to say, the best that humanity can
| possibly collectively imagine in the present era is stridently
| coping with the collapse as best we can. The center cannot
| hold. (More solarpunk would still be welcome, though.)
| klelatti wrote:
| You might enjoy the Incautious Optimism Substack. Recent
| articles are paid but earlier ones are free and it's full of
| fascinating technologies with an optimistic flavour.
|
| https://jordanwtaylor2.substack.com/
| cbility wrote:
| The view I hold is that, as bad as the situation is, it's not
| hopeless and there is a lot that can be done that will make the
| situation better. "All we can save". I've heard it said in the
| context of the polycrisis that understanding leads to grief,
| which leads to action which leads to (solidly founded) hope.
|
| People (and so societies) are hard-wired to be loss averse,
| which means the facts about what is at stake are more effective
| drivers of action than the promises of techno-optimism.
|
| Not saying that there are not good optimistic views out there,
| just that I personally find a realistic view renders many of
| them quite flat. I think embracing false hope leaves us with a
| myopic lens through which to frame decisions and probably
| underprepared to deal with the future.
|
| I find https://polycrisis.org/library/ to be a good resource.
| Also Nate Hagens podcast.
| tim333 wrote:
| The post starts good but wanders into some questionable
| deductions. It makes sense that the guy's a fiction writer as I
| guess that's what you do in fiction - start from where we are and
| then let your imagination come up with things.
|
| The first point he loses me a little is mid paragraph four:
|
| >and the insecurity-induced radicalization--is due to an
| unprecedented civilizational energy transition
|
| I buy insecurity but most of it seems due to globalization,
| concentration of money in the 1% and big tech. Like in America a
| lot of blue collar workers got laid off and short of money when
| the production moved to China and aren't going to get jobs at
| Google. But none of that is due to an 'energy transition'. I put
| that in quotes as the world is using more fossil fuel than ever
| but adding on some solar too.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| I love Stross' fiction, but found this post unconvincing.
|
| His Ehrlichian claim that that "if [the fossil fuel economy]
| doesn't stop we're all going to starve to death within a
| generation or so" is laughable.
|
| Solar is great, but I don't believe that access to energy is the
| limiting factor when it comes to the major issues of today.
|
| The article seemed to contend that 2025 in particular is special.
| If this year will go down in history for anything (which I doubt
| it will -- felt like a continuation of trends to me), it might be
| the beginning of fascism in the USA. Stross alludes to that but
| doesn't focus on it.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "The engine that powered the tech venture capital culture (and
| the private equity system battening on it) is sputtering and
| dying."
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-10-18 23:01 UTC)