14 ms·

The pivot

• TMWNN 1y ago
  >What we're seeing right now is the fossil fuel energy economy stopping. We need it to stop; if it doesn't stop, we're all going to starve to death within a generation or so. What are the odds that Stross said, wrote, or at least fervently believed the same thing c. 2000? Very high, I would bet.
  • Bjartr 1y ago
    I've always read the phrase "within a generation" to mean "within a generational lifespan", not "the time between groups we distinguish as distinct generations". Which is to say that under that interpretation it wouldn't be inconsistent to have believed it in both 2000 and 2025
  • unholyguy001 1y ago
    I mean there is certainly tons of evidence that some fossil fuels (coal most notably) are on the way out. Fossil fuels as a class? Maybe but still a bit early to make that call
    • Unearned5161 1y ago
      fun fact, the world burns more coal than it ever has. Take a look at Art Berman's talk at UT Austin, humanity has never transitioned off of anything.
      • MichaelNolan 1y ago
        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 https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2024
  • ryoshu 1y ago
    You can look it up on his blog: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2006/06/ https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2006/06/
• lifeisstillgood 1y ago
  >>> an ongoing global pandemic vascular disease that is being systematically ignored by governments, Is that covid (vascular?) or something I have not heard of ?
  • throwway120385 1y ago
    COVID is still out there and people still get sick with it and it's still having weird systemic effects in spite of our best efforts to ignore it.
    • tartoran 1y ago
      I think COVID is now considered endemic globally, it's more manageable than it was when it first broke out but it still causes deaths and weird after effects, probably not as many as before but will probably stay with us for some time to come.
    • cassepipe 1y ago
      Shouldn't we keep up the vaccination campaigns then ?
      • simonw 1y ago
        Yes.
      • JKCalhoun 1y ago
        Got mine recently.
      • anonzzzies 1y ago
        Yes
      • oezi 1y ago
        For elderly people we do, right?
        • 1y ago
• blfr 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • stonogo 1y ago
    What exactly is "the demographic transition" that's been apparently going on for three hundred years? Attempting to google this just results in a bunch of white supremacists
    • refulgentis 1y ago
      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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
      • pavel_lishin 1y ago
        That's how who gets who? I am having a real hard time trying to understand what you're attempting to communicate here.
        • eschaton 1y ago
          “Demographic transition” has become a white supremacist dogwhistle. They’re not upset about declining birth rates in general, they’re upset about declining birth rates among specific populations.
          • Terr_ 1y ago
            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.
            • 1y ago
• hamonrye 1y ago
  > the geopolitics of the post-oil age Goddard called the West Germans "the generation of blue jeans and coca cola," wearing tricolor and driving manual transmission cars. The photovoltaic effect is whale oil for the modern age.
  • pavel_lishin 1y ago
    > The photovoltaic effect is whale oil for the modern age. What?
    • clintonc 1y ago
      Whale oil and solar panels both being signs of high status.
      • lynguist 1y ago
        I still don’t understand. In actual history whale oil made airplane engines go (as lubricants) until the 1970s when they switched to synthetic. Most whales were killed in the 20th century to make planes go, not in the 19th to make city lights burn.
        • lifeisstillgood 1y ago
          TIL - yeah the 20C saw millions killed vs 19C and hundreds of thousands. I mean obviously that was industrialisation. Seems to be mostly meat, fats for cooking and a fair amount of TNT production - as well as lubricants for planes … But in 1986 the whaling moratorium came in, and numbers killed have been hundreds or few thousand since. Yay Star Trek
      • Barrin92 1y ago
        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-boom https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/01/climate/pakistan-solar-bo...
• ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  Potable Water and Stable Coastlines have entered the chat
  • maxerickson 1y ago
    Some of us live near the Michigan-Huron basin.
• lifeisstillgood 1y ago
  Ok - that was a doozy. Well done mr Stross. I’m going to have to chew on that for a while, but if there is one takeaway, it’s we need what might be called “radical” solutions - which frankly are just “sensible - as long as your salary is not tied up in the status quo”
  • throw10920 1y ago
    What exactly do you mean by "radical" solutions?
• nine_k 1y ago
  In short: oil is soon to be over (because solar), Moore's law is dying (and has been for last 20 years), so the tech boom is soon to be over, so the elites of last 50-100 years are facing a wall ahead of them, and have little idea what to do. Hence bigger and bigger upheavals. Well, not that it's completely wrong, but China and India only increase their oil consumption, and the US have just recently started to drill the local oil. It seems that oil is very far from over. The AI boom looks to me quite similar to the dotcom boom of 30 years ago: we're certainly in a bubble, but that bubble is blown around some very real and powerful change. The bubble will burst (or maybe get deflated less dramatically), but the AI/ML stuff which is actually very useful will remain, and will continue developing. So, no. If there's a pivotal moment, it's not because of the oil and computers. It's more about elite production of last few decades, the universities, the business and political leaders, the effects of global social networks, the discourses that permeate different social strata. But it's a completely different kettle of fish.
  • milesskorpen 1y ago
    Yeah. He starts with reasonable points about the economy changing into the Electronic Era and then starts making increasingly less-evidenced points by the end.
    • dsr_ 1y ago
      ... almost as though the further future is harder to predict than the near future.
  • lifeisstillgood 1y ago
    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 :-)
• gmuslera 1y ago
  He wrote Accelerando, a book about everything happening faster, the mythical singularity would happen, after which everything will become increasingly better, increasingly faster. Now what we have is a pivot, after which everything will become increasingly worse, increasingly faster. At least the acceleration part will happen. And things will keep evolving. The pivot, the ones that decide that things are better or worse, are us. And probably for some of us (at least a extremely small minority, or that will die soon enough) the direction may keep going for better
  • fritzo 1y ago
    Did we read the same Accelerando? The book I read was filled with increasingly powerful scam artists, increasingly destructive power struggles, increasing energy demands.
    • anonzzzies 1y ago
      So that book is just the current news then?
  • dwohnitmok 1y ago
    > 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-sheet-accelerando.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/05/crib-sh... Choice quotes from the main article and comments: > In the background of what looks like a Panglossian techno-optimist novel, horrible things are happening. Most of humanity is wiped out, then arbitrarily resurrected in mutilated form by the Vile Offspring. Cspitalism [sic] eats everything then the logic of competition pushes it so far that merely human entities can no longer compete; we're a fat, slow-moving, tasty resource -- like the dodo. Our narrative perspective, Aineko, is not a talking cat: it's a vastly superintelligent AI, coolly calculating, that has worked out that human beings are more easily manipulated if they think they're dealing with a furry toy. The cat body is a sock puppet wielded by an abusive monster. > > The logic of exponential progress at a tempo rising to a vertical spike is a logic that has no room in it for humanity. and >> [Reader question] I didn't read it that way at all. Are insects extinct? Bacteria? Or even Horseshoe crabs? > > Yup, pretty much. By chapter 8 of "Accelerando", Earth has been destroyed -- broken up to make computronium or other stuff of interest to the Vile Offspring. Those humans who didn't get off the planet or upload their minds ("Accelerando" takes a rather naively can-do approach to uploading) are dead. Ditto the biosphere.
• shoo 1y ago
  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/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera... [2] https://reactormag.com/down-on-the-farm/ https://reactormag.com/down-on-the-farm/ [3] https://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm https://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm
  • kristianp 1y ago
    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.
    • zem 1y ago
      I really loved the mechanism of time travel in singularity sky, namely that relativity doesn't suddenly cease being an intrinsic property of spacetime just because you have faster than light travel, and therefore traveling ftl will indeed take you back in time
• nwah1 1y ago
  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.
  • cassepipe 1y ago
    [flagged]
    • nwah1 1y ago
      You have profoundly misdiagnosed my mindset, so perhaps don't make psychoanalysis your day job.
• ternus 1y ago
  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/tomorrow-belongs-to-me.html 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-sinking-feeling.html 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-say-you-want-a-revoluti.html#more 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-update-from-the-revolutiona.html#more 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-gathering-crisis.html#more 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.
• sam345 1y ago
  A nice piece of fiction from a fiction writer. Reality sucks but fossil fuels and nuclear are going to be needed whether the AI boom lasts or not.
• tomp 1y ago
  > too hot for photosynthesis Um, what?! The Earth is currently in an ice age - it used to be hotter most of its history. How did life survive if it was too hot for photosynthesis? It’s one thing to say that the planet is warming up (from freezing to normal temperature) too fast, but saying that it will be too hot for photosynthesis is just not credible.
  • tlahtinen 1y ago
    It's not out of the question. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/pce.14060 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/pce.14060 https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/plants/tropical-rainforests-could-get-too-hot-for-photosynthesis-and-die-if-climate-crisis-continues-scientists-warn https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/plants/tropical-rai... And the planet may well have been warmer in the past, but the ecosystems had millions of years to adapt to it.
    • tomp 1y ago
      I don't think photosynthesis "just adapts", it evolves quite slowly (if it could evolve faster, it would be much more efficient!). Also, your geological timelines are way off. Last interglacial period (with temperatures higher than today) was 100k years ago. HN has literally became an anti-intellectual echo-chamber.
      • kzrdude 1y ago
        The last million years had comparable temperatures, you'd need to go back to 50 Myr ago to have a significantly warmer climate, and without inland glaciation anywhere on Earth.
        • tomp 1y ago
          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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Interglacial
• 1970-01-01 1y ago
  >If we can just get through the rest of this decade without widespread agricultural collapses, a nuclear war, a global fascist international dictatorship taking hold, and a complete collapse of the international financial system caused by black gold suddenly turning out to be worthless, we might be pretty well set to handle the challenges of the 2030s. I noticed world peace wasn't on the roadmap. After we solve 3 or 4 of these existential crises, do we still have time for that, or are we pushing it to 2100?
• narrator 1y ago
  I read political books from the 70s and everything is the same. It's been the same since the mid-60s. That's when the western narrative shifted from technological progress to environmentalism and the lawyer took over from the engineer as the prime mover in society. That was 60 years ago. 60 years before that was 1900 and the world was vastly vastly different compared to our world of the 1960s. 60 years before that was 1840 and the world was vastly vastly different. I'm thinking that AI,robots and the rise of China is going to change things radically. Human labor will not be an economic constraint, but that won't lead to unlimited abundance because the constraint will be externalities. Most of the technologically unemployed will wake up and do whatever AI tells them to do on a daily basis. Their lives will improve because AI is better than they are naturally at everything. This will lead to some weird outcomes. Especially if AI is not acting in the interest of each individual, but in the interests of the collective. This will cause AI to have to solve trolley problems.
  • 0x696C6961 1y ago
    This narrative implies a benevolent AI.That is a naive assumption.
    • SilverSlash 1y ago
      The human 'benevolence factor' has gone up throughout history as we've advanced and become more civilized. If AI is even more advanced than us then why is it naive to assume it will be more benevolent than us?
      • 0x696C6961 1y ago
        Humans are still in direct control of the training/alignment.
        • wood_spirit 1y ago
          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.
• renewiltord 1y ago
  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.
  • Apocryphon 1y ago
    Oh, cstross? He’s been at it for over a decade https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9106983 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9106983
    • renewiltord 1y ago
      Nice. If that’s been his shtick this long, I guess it can’t be hurting him too badly.
• 0xbadcafebee 1y ago
  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.
• EverydayBalloon 1y ago
  [dead]
• arthurofbabylon 1y ago
  I appreciate the themes but find this overly conceptual. We can look at hard figures(†) and see errors in the prophecy. While yes this is a transformative period, I don't believe the author truly identifies the fulcrum; PV cells alone are proven insufficient, so society will need to turn upon many more points than just that one. The essay could be called The Pivots (plural) but then that would be less simple/sensational/optimistic and fall under the category of economics and social sciences. I appreciate the thrust, however: the unsustainable status quo, corruption, the climate crisis' incredible severity, fragility. "efficiency is the reciprocal of resilience" is a particularly appreciated line. (†) – Vaclav Smil's work comes to mind.
  • mbgerring 1y ago
    Projections of PV cell improvement and deployment by large energy forecasting agencies have been so wrong for so long that it’s a well known running joke in the energy industry. Solar beats projections constantly and has been the cheapest available power source for many (if not all) applications for years already. Cheap, abundant, performant batteries already expand the possible surface area for solar deployment, and we can expect this to continue. I have a hard time understanding what you mean by “proven insufficient.”
    • arthurofbabylon 1y ago
      "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.
• kragen 1y ago
  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.
  • zhivota 1y ago
    The way you describe the transition events elides the incredible instability that people living through them experienced (wars, revolutions, famines, etc.), which I think is what Stross is getting at here, and ultimately is probably right about. Will things end up better? Maybe, and based on history you could even make a case for "probably", but will it be better for _us_, the ones alive _right now_? Again, based on history, almost certainly not.
    • kragen 1y ago
      Possibly you read an early version of the comment before I edited it.
    • csomar 1y ago
      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?
• zhivota 1y ago
  I was nodding along until the bashing of neoliberalism, which I believe to be unfounded left-woo essentially. If we were to apply neoliberalism a bit more in the present moment, we may be much better off, but that's not what the current trend is anyway. We're currently experimenting with some unholy mix of populism and authoritarianism which has basically no predictable endpoint, because it's just based on the whims of one man (in each respective country doing this at the moment). Also the view of climate change as primarily being about photosynthesis is laughably myopic... he does acknowledge weather instability as being an issue as well, but it's that and sea level rise which really seems to be poised to disrupt the current iteration of civilization.
  • _def 1y ago
    Currently to me it seems that neoliberalism is exactly the mechanic that enables that populism and authoritarianism - is this the connection you see as unfounded? (I am genuinely asking, to understand your point of view)
    • jancsika 1y ago
      I'll take a stab at it very quickly-- The subsidies for green energy in the Inflation Reduction Act targeted a lot of red/purple states. So you get a burgeoning battery industry going in Georgia, solar and wind in Arizona and Texas, and so forth. A Harris presidency would have beefed up those programs for another 4 years. So if you got a Trumpism in 2028, that green energy sector of the economy would have an 8-year head start. Republicans would either have to battle a much more powerful green energy lobby or figure out how to do green Trumpism. Either would be a substantial hurdle. So if you're not in favor of having a random number generator in charge at the White House, you'd probably agree we'd be better off with the neoliberalism. As to "much better off," I'm going to need to hear more substance from OP to believe that. Harris didn't have an anti-monopolist stance, and I see no reason to think that state/corporate surveillance-tech and cryptobros bullshit would have been curtailed in any meaningful sense. And someone who is currently relying on Klarna to pay for groceries now would not exactly be thriving at the end of a first Harris term.
• otabdeveloper4 1y ago
  > the American Puritan Empire project failed, therefore the world is literally ending Actually, no. It's healing. :)
• mmaunder 1y ago
  There's this "now that I'm exiting, you're all fucked" phenomenon that exists among older folks. Perhaps a result of optimism waning at the end of a life. I'm not young. But I guess I'm more optimistic than this.
  • gman83 1y ago
    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.
  • empiricus 1y ago
    I wonder how much is related to the aging of the population. You see the world differently when surrounded by young and children. Which is now gone in many parts of the world.
• jmward01 1y ago
  I can agree this may be a (the?) pivot year, but I don't think it is energy. It is everything. It seems weird to say the death of fossil fuels is 'not that big of a deal compared to...' but when it was only a minor news story that life on ancient Mars is a growing probability, all the political, well, everything, is beginning to look like the norm and I just spent the day talking to an AI to help me code. Well, the death of fossil fuels just seems like it is maybe only a top 10 story of this decade.
  • jbeninger 1y ago
    I think the point though is it's not a "story". It's a fundamental shift. The shift is subtle and doesn't lend itself to sensationalism. Entire countries have built their clout on fossil fuels. Wars have been fought. Now any country with a sufficient manufacturing base can be energy independent. And the resource is less controllable by a small group of people. AI and geopolitics and everything else is huge right now, but they're being bent to the will of the current world order. The article is saying that that world order is going to change.
• kzrdude 1y ago
  Refreshing with an actual blog. However, I found one problem: The atom feed doesn't parse, so I can't add it to my RSS reader.
• xg15 1y ago
  > All of this is without tackling the other elephant in the room, which is the end of Moore's Law. Moore's Law has been on its death bed for over a decade now. We're seeing only limited improvements in computing and storage performance, mainly from parallelism. > (it's one of those goddamn bubbles: to the limited extent that LLMs are useful, we'll inevitably see a shift towards using pre-trained models running on local hardware) I don't completely disagree with his main theses, but this part seems contradictory. You cannot state at the same time that Moore's law is over - so the compute capacity of consumer PC will roughly stay the same from now on - but also that we will all just casually run GPT-5 locally on those same PCs in the future and therefore the data center buildout is a waste of money. (I also think it's a bubble, but more because there might be a lack of demand, not because some technological miracle might make all the infrastructure obsolete)
  • Jedd 1y ago
    Doubling capability every 18 months while halving in price, is not the opposite of 'compute capacity staying roughly the same from now on'.
• Havoc 1y ago
  It seems improbable to me that energy experiences a sharp pivot. Takes time to replace fossil fuel gear with electric - it's by necessity a progressive transition. Doesn't just flip like a switch. Still...if it happens over a couple years that would still be pretty sharp
• gurjeet 1y ago
  It's easy to be swayed by the latest thing you read. Can someone please recommend an opinion or book that counters this doom-and-gloom view of the world future presented here. I'm not insinuating that this view is wrong, just that I need something to balance out this negative view of our current and future state.
  • kibwen 1y ago
    Not to put too fine a point on it, but as a species we have basically stopped writing fiction that presents an optimistic outlook of the future. The solarpunk genre is the best we can do these days, which is to say, the best that humanity can possibly collectively imagine in the present era is stridently coping with the collapse as best we can. The center cannot hold. (More solarpunk would still be welcome, though.)
  • klelatti 1y ago
    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/ https://jordanwtaylor2.substack.com/
  • cbility 1y ago
    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/ https://polycrisis.org/library/ to be a good resource. Also Nate Hagens podcast.
  • joshtbradley 1y ago
    Balaji's book "The Network State" doesn't refute Charlie's arguments directly but it does a great job of constructing an optimistic vision for the future. The techno-optimists definitionally don't have a doom-and-gloom view of the future, and I find their perspective useful for rounding out my own. Nobody has all the answers. Humanity is profoundly and hilariously bad at predicting the future, and every generation has both doomsayers and prophets. Rather than getting caught in the emotional swings of siding with one or the other, I personally have focused on becoming as informed as possible so that I can make my own decisions.
• tim333 1y ago
  The post starts good but wanders into some questionable deductions. It makes sense that the guy's a fiction writer as I guess that's what you do in fiction - start from where we are and then let your imagination come up with things. The first point he loses me a little is mid paragraph four: >and the insecurity-induced radicalization—is due to an unprecedented civilizational energy transition I buy insecurity but most of it seems due to globalization, concentration of money in the 1% and big tech. Like in America a lot of blue collar workers got laid off and short of money when the production moved to China and aren't going to get jobs at Google. But none of that is due to an 'energy transition'. I put that in quotes as the world is using more fossil fuel than ever but adding on some solar too.
• foobarbecue 1y ago
  I love Stross' fiction, but found this post unconvincing. His Ehrlichian claim that that "if [the fossil fuel economy] doesn't stop we're all going to starve to death within a generation or so" is laughable. Solar is great, but I don't believe that access to energy is the limiting factor when it comes to the major issues of today. The article seemed to contend that 2025 in particular is special. If this year will go down in history for anything (which I doubt it will -- felt like a continuation of trends to me), it might be the beginning of fascism in the USA. Stross alludes to that but doesn't focus on it.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
  "The engine that powered the tech venture capital culture (and the private equity system battening on it) is sputtering and dying."
• groundzeros2015 1y ago
  > ongoing global pandemic vascular disease that is being systematically ignored by governments COVID caused permanent damage to society
• TheTaytay 1y ago
  This is bizarre to me on many levels. 1) Moore’s law is “dead”, but the AI boom is being built on GPUs that get faster, smaller, and cheaper every year? Their biggest problem is that they can’t be manufactured fast enough, and that humanity doesn’t produce enough electricity to meet demand. 2) Oil and its byproducts are in extremely high demand. He wants it to be a dying industry, and I can see why, but it sure looks to me that oil and its derivatives (which don’t look anything like crude or fuel) are in extremely high demand, with no replacement in sight. If you know someone in the oil industry, they might have concerns, but “people don’t seem to want to pay us shocking amounts of money to pump this stuff out of the ground every day because of those darn clean energy sources, so I guess we will stop drilling” isn’t one of them. 3) So much faith in solar panels…and the mention of ship power as a metric, but no mention of the nuclear power plants that actually power modern (or heck, even aging) fleets for shockingly long periods of time. We aren’t decommissioning those power plants to plate the ships in PVs. When we need consistent, orders of magnitude more power, we use nuclear. Data centers are incentivized to find the best way to power these mega-centers they are planning, and they don’t seem very excited about the ability to install a lot of solar panels on the roof. They are however trying to build or restart their own nuclear power plants… Once you have access to enough energy, as in orders of magnitude more energy, the economics and physics change. This isn’t just about powering cars and houses. If you need hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon chains in a particular form to make portable, energy dense fuels, lubricants, and plastics, the raw materials are in seawater and the air (h2o and co2). We are “just” missing the affordable energy input to make those chemical reactions worth it when comparing it to the ease of taking this pre-formed stuff literally out of the ground. Solar is neat, and will hopefully replace certain types of energy needs on a local level, but it’s not the end of oil or society’s unlock for the next big thing. https://www.seadragon.energy/seawater-to-jet-fuel https://www.seadragon.energy/seawater-to-jet-fuel https://xkcd.com/1162/ https://xkcd.com/1162/
  • rsynnott 1y ago
    > Moore’s law is “dead”, but the AI boom is being built on GPUs that get faster, smaller, and cheaper every year? Moore's law doesn't mean that things get smaller, faster and cheaper every year. It is specifically that number of transistors doubles about every two years. That ceased to be ~reliably the case about 15 years ago, becoming more modest. > So much faith in solar panels…and the mention of ship power as a metric, but no mention of the nuclear power plants that actually power modern (or heck, even aging) fleets for shockingly long periods of time. Eh? Nuclear ships are a rounding error. There are effectively none of them, versus oil-powered ships. > They are however trying to build or restart their own nuclear power plants… I'm endlessly fascinated by this, because, based on real-life nuclear build-out times, it _has_ to be a scam; if you're building a data centre now, there's just no point talking about nuclear, because building a nuclear plant will take 15 to 20 years, by which time the data centre will be obsolete. But it's unclear what the scam _is_.
• lIl-IIIl 1y ago
  There's an incorrect claim in the article (possibly a typo, but a big one): "China set goals for reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2030 in 2019 and met their 2030 goal in 2024, so fast is their transition going." There's no citation, but an internet search says that the 2030 goal is peak carbon emissions. The goal for net-zero is 2060.
  • badc0ffee 1y ago
    China hitting a peak in 2024 is a lot more believable.
  • ZeroGravitas 1y ago
    The fact this is probably misinterpreting or typo-ing is that they met their 2030 target for deployment of solar and wind 6 years early in 2024. That goal was set in 2019. So, fast progress, and even China is needing to update its goals in response to the unexpected success of solar. You are right that their net zero goal is by 2060, though they recently stated that they intend to have peaked GHG emissions and be 10% below peak by 2035. Some observers feel they may have peaked this year or last which might also be influencing what he was trying to say.
• Animats 1y ago
  This article feels about five years old, although it's current. The transition to solar and batteries is rumbling forward. The economics are just too good. Nobody can stop it now. Trump is a transient. The US has been a net energy exporter since 2019. Energy isn't going to be a big problem going forward.
• vagab0nd 1y ago
  I just want to say that the information density and the clarity of this short piece is off the chart. My next book will be Accelerando.