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...
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
A few years back I visited an old water mill called Itaipú. 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
It is true that many older water mills are no longer in use, though. Maybe 50 years to you is not old!
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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")
(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).
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.
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.
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.”
"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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
> 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.
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.
"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."
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.
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 :-)
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.
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
>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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
* 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.
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.
>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
> 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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
(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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”
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-...
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?
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".
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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)
>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 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.
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.
> 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.
"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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...'.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.).
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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...
> 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.
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.
A few years back I visited an old water mill called Itaipú. 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
It is true that many older water mills are no longer in use, though. Maybe 50 years to you is not old!
Also, human slaves have been almost completely marginalized even thought they were the main source of mechanical energy in ancient Rome.
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.
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.
Yes, famines were unavoidable before the steam-engine; since then they have become purely politically produced.
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?
Possibly you read an early version of the comment before I edited it.
> 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.
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.
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I am at a loss to imagine what you believe the connection is. Did you post this comment in the wrong thread?
> 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.
I'd never done that calculation, but that's about right; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_of_oil_equivalent is 6 gigajoules:
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.
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
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).
Wait, are you saying we ... enslaved oil? Type Error! I'm reading that wrong, right?
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.
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.
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.”
"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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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/
>>> an ongoing global pandemic vascular disease that is being systematically ignored by governments,
Is that covid (vascular?) or something I have not heard of ?
> (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 Covid. As someone who only recently recovered from Long Covid after a long, arduous 2-year fight, I see his point.
How did you do that?
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.
For elderly people we do, right?
Everyone should be getting vaccinated.
In my country they don't recommend additional vaccinations if you already have been vaccinated or been infected (unless risk factor or age).
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.
Yes
Got mine recently.
It’s been well established in 2020 already with Covid toes.
Vascular, perhaps he means heart disease. It is the highest killer.
That's not ignored, covid is.
How is Covid being ignored?
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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.
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.
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
> 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)
Doubling capability every 18 months while halving in price, is not the opposite of 'compute capacity staying roughly the same from now on'.
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.
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.
> 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).
https://energytracker.asia/china-oil-demand-dropped/
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...
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."
...which means that oi consumption rises slower, not that it decreases, doesn't it?
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.
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 :-)
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.
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
>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?
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.
So that book is just the current news then?
> 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...
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?
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.
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.
Potable Water and Stable Coastlines have entered the chat
Some of us live near the Michigan-Huron basin.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
> 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.
I searched in the 'news' section, trying to figure out how any of this applies to current events.
I feel "news" is not a fertile hunting-ground for information on something "that's been apparently going on for three hundred years." :p
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?
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.
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?
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_population_gro...
I think he means declining birth rates? They were low during the French Third Republic and didn’t recover until WW2 iirc
(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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Less whites, more of everybody else
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Oh no! Wouldn't want to commit a badthink and read something written by an ungood thoughtcrimer!
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.
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”
What exactly do you mean by "radical" solutions?
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.
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?
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".
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
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.
I think your map might be upside down... It's not Europe invading Russia.
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.
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)
>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.
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
> the American Puritan Empire project failed, therefore the world is literally ending
Actually, no. It's healing. :)
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.
> 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...
"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.
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...
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You have profoundly misdiagnosed my mindset, so perhaps don't make psychoanalysis your day job.
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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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 °C higher than in 2011
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Interglacial
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/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Therm...
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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This narrative implies a benevolent AI.That is a naive assumption.
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.
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.
When would "suffering by some members of the collective becomes unavoidable" actually happen?
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?
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.
Humans are still in direct control of the training/alignment.
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.
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.
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...'.
At the moment, the US looks much more democratic and liberal than the EU.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.).
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.
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.
> 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.