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...
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
> 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.
> 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.
Did we read the same Accelerando? The book I read was filled with increasingly powerful scam artists, increasingly destructive power struggles, increasing energy demands.
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.
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.
>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.
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
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?
(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.
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
“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.
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.
>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?
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.
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.
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”
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.
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.
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-...
>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.
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
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
"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".
> 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.
Oh right so the rise of the far-right can't be summed up as the fight for resources and people trying to capitalize on their citizenship status, it' because of those people that make you angry then let's call it a boomer (boooh you're old) and call him a day.
You are insulting my intelligence. It was fine to live around foreigners before billionaire owned medias started drilling down the message that it was awful to live around those people
Written from my very small mansion with a high rent in a sea of multiculturalism that is to be fair the least of my problems. I want clean air, good public transportation and a walkable neighborhood. I also want quality affordable food, quality housing and cheap energy.
Yes safety matters but guess what, people don't generally have guns on them and there is some welfare here so it's totally fine
I am sorry about the downfall of your white carbrain suburbian paradise but to be fair, I grew up in one and it wasn't that great nor sustainable
I am also sorry for this emotionally loaded not-hn-worthy comment but hey, you started this by trying to smuggle culture war elements in your comment. I just hope your comment will be dead before mine is.
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.
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.
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 :-)
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
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.
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.
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
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
> 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.
Did we read the same Accelerando? The book I read was filled with increasingly powerful scam artists, increasingly destructive power struggles, increasing energy demands.
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.
> oil, which was largely solved anyway by fracking.
I think you and OP disagree on what the actual problem with oil is.
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.
Did HN start automatically translating posts from their original German?
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.
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
There’s a reason for that. It should tell you a lot about the person you’re replying to.
I'd recommend Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
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?
(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.
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
That's how who gets who? I am having a real hard time trying to understand what you're attempting to communicate here.
“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.
In the middle of 19th century France's elites birth rates plummeted. And it spread to the rest of the world in 20th.
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.
[dead]
>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?
>>> an ongoing global pandemic vascular disease that is being systematically ignored by governments,
Is that covid (vascular?) or something I have not heard of ?
It's Covid. As someone who only recently recovered from Long Covid after a long, arduous 2-year fight, I see his point.
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.
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.
Shouldn't we keep up the vaccination campaigns then ?
Yes.
> (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.
It’s been well established in 2020 already with Covid toes.
[dead]
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.
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”
> 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.
> The photovoltaic effect is whale oil for the modern age.
What?
Whale oil and solar panels both being signs of high status.
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.
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
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...
Potable Water and Stable Coastlines have entered the chat
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.
>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.
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
You can look it up on his blog: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2006/06/
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
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.
[flagged]
"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.
“[R]ather than the actual behavior of leftists and liberals”—way to indicate just where your ideology lies, fascist.
> 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.
Oh right so the rise of the far-right can't be summed up as the fight for resources and people trying to capitalize on their citizenship status, it' because of those people that make you angry then let's call it a boomer (boooh you're old) and call him a day.
You are insulting my intelligence. It was fine to live around foreigners before billionaire owned medias started drilling down the message that it was awful to live around those people
Written from my very small mansion with a high rent in a sea of multiculturalism that is to be fair the least of my problems. I want clean air, good public transportation and a walkable neighborhood. I also want quality affordable food, quality housing and cheap energy. Yes safety matters but guess what, people don't generally have guns on them and there is some welfare here so it's totally fine
I am sorry about the downfall of your white carbrain suburbian paradise but to be fair, I grew up in one and it wasn't that great nor sustainable
I am also sorry for this emotionally loaded not-hn-worthy comment but hey, you started this by trying to smuggle culture war elements in your comment. I just hope your comment will be dead before mine is.
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.
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.
Chinese oil consumption is down in 2024 and 2025.
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 :-)
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
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.
... almost as though the further future is harder to predict than the near future.
> 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.