This, my friend, is an overly cynical take. You can apply it to your life in any way that serves you. You can imagine it as a good reminder to live life to the fullest, to not let your ego run away from reality, or to give perspective on all the little things we worry about when we consider how many weeks we have left on this planet.

Just curious, which pen are you planning to get?

I admit I'm on the verge of losing sight of the overall point of this thread. But thinking about it more, I will add that looking at the actual tech curve itself may not be that important, depending on where you draw the line between technology and capability. For example, it may not matter that increase in transistor density is slowing down when global total compute keeps increasing exponentially. Further, how would quantum computing factor into this (the movement in the cryptography space suggests that a post-quantum world is imminent). On the topic of LLMs, would it matter if those stagnate while the ability of companies and states to manipulate us and drown us in misinformation keeps growing exponentially? And how would the advent of AGI factor into this - in some ways that would be the last invention we have to make ourselves. I guess the point is that some advancements, even ones that are just incremental, seem to have an outsized effect on our ability to impact the world around us.

Anyway, I read the article you linked and enjoyed it. It reminded me a bit of Meditations On Moloch, also a good read if you haven't seen it yet, attempting to explain the behaviors of civilizations.

Fair enough all good points, but the reason we're all here beyond the natural carrying capacity and eating the planet is because of the exponential tech curve (Haber-Bosch and others) that we've been in since discovering fossil fuels. If the energy is there, we will use it to grow at the detriment to everything else, it's in our nature. If we somehow manage to complete the green energy transition that's probably even worse for our long term survival, because instead of running out of accessible fossil fuels and being forced to degrow, we'll keep the growth machine running and accelerate this mass extinction and knock down the rest of the planetary boundaries. All new technologies will allow us to increase the scale of our impacts to the planet.

Thanks for the link, I haven't read it yet but it looks interesting.

Great video, thanks for posting it.

I find 'metacrisis' more descriptive and satisfying for the reasons Daniel talked about in the video - that it's not just the many crises we face, but the underlying systems that are creating the crises (ie, Moloch). Also, it doesn't matter if AI is not effective at staving off disaster, as long as it creates value for the market it will be deployed with mind-boggling scale and resource use even as the world burns.

This sounds interesting. I'm wondering if you could go into any more detail about what you were trying to do with your opening, and what needs you are seeing out there around storage specifically. I have a small software company and I've been under the impression that storage is pretty much taken care of at all levels by the existing commodity services, but maybe I'm just talking to the wrong people or missing something important. Thanks.

I'm sure we'll see new house policies to prevent this exact thing from happening again, but the stupidity of politicians is a force without bounds. I'm curious how you expect CSIS to have prevented this. Do you mean they should get involved with all of the actions of our political bodies, or to somehow stem the deluge of AI-generated divisive content?

Okay, but this money basically IS going to people that need it, by way of affordable fuel prices. Ever wonder why fuel is so cheap in places like Egypt? It's because the government is subsidizing the cost and picking up a lot of the tab. What happens when people can no longer afford to get around, and food prices skyrocket because transportation is so expensive? Leaders are mostly concerned with keeping their heads attached to their bodies and they'll do anything to keep the economy growing, even if it destroys the environment and explodes the public debt. It's why climate change is such a gnarly problem, it's not just that there's a bunch of corrupt evil people preventing progress, our whole economic system needs to be overturned.

For a livable future, we're going to have to massively reduce our energy usage (like, yesterday) and figure out how to survive in a degrowth scenario, while we try to replace the entirety of our infrastructure and build out resilient systems, all without access to credit. Fun times ahead.

Fall of Civilizations

I haven't seen this mentioned yet, but it's incomparably good (if stories about past civilizations is your thing).

Their greenwashed climate change videos really exposed them as a corporate propaganda outlet. I can't watch them anymore.

You could also try Universal Blue and change images until you find something you like.