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
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/09/16/the-shattering-peace-...
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 7000× 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.
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.
I find myself in this odd internal conflict. I genuinely care about the planet, but I'm approaching 60 and childfree, and have definite misanthropic tendencies. While there's big part of me that's a tree-hugging greenie and who wants to attend every protest about human rights abuses and war, here's always a loud voice in my head telling me "it only all needs to last another couple of decade without completely collapsing".
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.
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...
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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).
If someone could show that paying a fair wage to workers would still leave solar compellingly cheap then it might incentivise some parts of the supply chain to clean up their act. That's "if" of course.
You can be certain that forced labor would be considered a "subsidy", although I don't recall ever having seen it mentioned in these filings, so my inference is that it's not a significant factor.
The last one I examined in any detail was https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/07/11/2023-14..., which imposed a 10.33% countervailing duty on Jinko panels, a 14.27% countervailing duty on Risen panels, and a 12.61% countervailing duty on all other PRC panels. This was enough to ensure that under 1% of panels sold in the US were Chinese solar panels.
But we're talking about competitiveness with fossil fuels here, which are about 200% more expensive than solar power, not 14.27%.
In no way am I saying slavery is no longer a problem, one slave is too many. I chose not to go after the parent comment's claim that slavery has ended because that wasn't the important to the point I was raising.
You have: 6 gigajoules / 10 years (8 hours/day)
You want: W
* 57.039776
/ 0.017531626
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.
Most people probably consider slavery something that can only be imposed on another human. I'd be in the minority considering animals raised in industrial farms and meat operations to be enslaved. I'd be in an even smaller minority to consider that plants raised in commercial fields may be enslaved, there is at least the possibility that plants may experience the world around them and their existence in it more than we give them credit for.
I don't know that I'd say we enslaved oil, I'd say we enslaved nature more broadly.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
This already happened
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.
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.
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.
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").
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.
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.
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.
Is that covid (vascular?) or something I have not heard of ?
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 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.
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.
Nobody has all the answers. Humanity is profoundly and hilariously bad at predicting the future, and every generation has both doomsayers and prophets. Rather than getting caught in the emotional swings of siding with one or the other, I personally have focused on becoming as informed as possible so that I can make my own decisions.
"China set goals for reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2030 in 2019 and met their 2030 goal in 2024, so fast is their transition going."
There's no citation, but an internet search says that the 2030 goal is peak carbon emissions.
The goal for net-zero is 2060.
That goal was set in 2019.
So, fast progress, and even China is needing to update its goals in response to the unexpected success of solar.
You are right that their net zero goal is by 2060, though they recently stated that they intend to have peaked GHG emissions and be 10% below peak by 2035.
Some observers feel they may have peaked this year or last which might also be influencing what he was trying to say.
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.
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.
https://www.iea.org/commentaries/oil-demand-for-fuels-in-chi... (March 2025).
"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."
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.
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...
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 :-)
> (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)
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
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.
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.
What?
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.
But in 1986 the whaling moratorium came in, and numbers killed have been hundreds or few thousand since.
Yay Star Trek
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...
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?
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
What are the odds that Stross said, wrote, or at least fervently believed the same thing c. 2000? Very high, I would bet.
COVID caused permanent damage to society
The transition to solar and batteries is rumbling forward. The economics are just too good. Nobody can stop it now. Trump is a transient. The US has been a net energy exporter since 2019. Energy isn't going to be a big problem going forward.
1) Moore’s law is “dead”, but the AI boom is being built on GPUs that get faster, smaller, and cheaper every year? Their biggest problem is that they can’t be manufactured fast enough, and that humanity doesn’t produce enough electricity to meet demand.
2) Oil and its byproducts are in extremely high demand. He wants it to be a dying industry, and I can see why, but it sure looks to me that oil and its derivatives (which don’t look anything like crude or fuel) are in extremely high demand, with no replacement in sight. If you know someone in the oil industry, they might have concerns, but “people don’t seem to want to pay us shocking amounts of money to pump this stuff out of the ground every day because of those darn clean energy sources, so I guess we will stop drilling” isn’t one of them.
3) So much faith in solar panels…and the mention of ship power as a metric, but no mention of the nuclear power plants that actually power modern (or heck, even aging) fleets for shockingly long periods of time. We aren’t decommissioning those power plants to plate the ships in PVs. When we need consistent, orders of magnitude more power, we use nuclear. Data centers are incentivized to find the best way to power these mega-centers they are planning, and they don’t seem very excited about the ability to install a lot of solar panels on the roof. They are however trying to build or restart their own nuclear power plants…
Once you have access to enough energy, as in orders of magnitude more energy, the economics and physics change. This isn’t just about powering cars and houses. If you need hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon chains in a particular form to make portable, energy dense fuels, lubricants, and plastics, the raw materials are in seawater and the air (h2o and co2). We are “just” missing the affordable energy input to make those chemical reactions worth it when comparing it to the ease of taking this pre-formed stuff literally out of the ground. Solar is neat, and will hopefully replace certain types of energy needs on a local level, but it’s not the end of oil or society’s unlock for the next big thing.
Moore's law doesn't mean that things get smaller, faster and cheaper every year. It is specifically that number of transistors doubles about every two years. That ceased to be ~reliably the case about 15 years ago, becoming more modest.
> So much faith in solar panels…and the mention of ship power as a metric, but no mention of the nuclear power plants that actually power modern (or heck, even aging) fleets for shockingly long periods of time.
Eh? Nuclear ships are a rounding error. There are effectively none of them, versus oil-powered ships.
> They are however trying to build or restart their own nuclear power plants…
I'm endlessly fascinated by this, because, based on real-life nuclear build-out times, it _has_ to be a scam; if you're building a data centre now, there's just no point talking about nuclear, because building a nuclear plant will take 15 to 20 years, by which time the data centre will be obsolete. But it's unclear what the scam _is_.
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.
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?
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".
These days the internet news junkies are writing those letters.
> 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.
Many thanks!
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.
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.
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.
Actually, no. It's healing. :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
This appears to be you saying "look what they made me do".
If it isn't, you should clarify your point.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 °C higher than in 2011
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/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Therm...
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.
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
Also, AI data centers aren’t just sited for proximity to power generation. They're often sited for access to water for cooling. Not all of those sites already have appropriate power infrastructure.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I generally sum it up as "ai doesn't have the human spirit" and ergo it will not have a moral compass
However, our definitions for those things are murky. I'm making a bold claim that being evil is ultimately a dumb move.
I'm also making a bold claim by estabilishing a path from intelligence to empathy to kindness. Actually, before intelligence, comes communication.
Communication -> Intelligence -> Empathy -> Kindness
In that sense, when empathy does not lead to kindness, it's because whoever has it stopped before moving to the next step.
The empath who is not kind stopped at an important step. He is able to relate to others, but is not able to observe higher dynamics except for when those dynamics include himself.
Maybe you're being naive about what kindness means. It seems that you are relating it to altruism and charity in a very superficial sense.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.).
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.
Think like Zuck on a private island. The thing that matters to you is economic output that is available for you to direct and consume. From a certain point of view, everything else is just resources spent for no benefit - inefficiency. Naturally you need some other people because a) the unit of human survival is a community and b) status remains the ultimate good and that is unlikely to change.
My working definition of AGI is when humans and robots become roughly fungible.
The structure of the economy seriously changes with the introduction of a robot slave class.
You can cut out the middleman in terms of production. At a certain point it stops making sense to think about things in terms of money because robots don't need to be paid. You have to think about the inputs you have and the goods and services you want them to produce for you.
It's pretty rational to start asking questions about "what's the desired human/robot ratio" under these circumstances.
The only political questions that matter become "who controls the robots" and "who controls the land", but perhaps they become the same question.
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.
But it doesn't matter! People are unpredictable and difficult. You don't meet most of them anyway!
You don't need to think about money in the same way anymore if you can produce the goods and services you need directly, using land, productive capital and robots that are approximately as capable as humans.
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).