In short: oil is soon to be over (because solar), Moore's law is dying (and has been for last 20 years), so the tech boom is soon to be over, so the elites of last 50-100 years are facing a wall ahead of them, and have little idea what to do. Hence bigger and bigger upheavals.

Well, not that it's completely wrong, but China and India only increase their oil consumption, and the US have just recently started to drill the local oil. It seems that oil is very far from over.

The AI boom looks to me quite similar to the dotcom boom of 30 years ago: we're certainly in a bubble, but that bubble is blown around some very real and powerful change. The bubble will burst (or maybe get deflated less dramatically), but the AI/ML stuff which is actually very useful will remain, and will continue developing.

So, no. If there's a pivotal moment, it's not because of the oil and computers. It's more about elite production of last few decades, the universities, the business and political leaders, the effects of global social networks, the discourses that permeate different social strata. But it's a completely different kettle of fish.

Is the "tech boom" in this context only related to the ability of the corps to resell computers to everyone every few years? That's the only direct impact I can see on Moore's law ending and the tech boom being over. Otherwise I don't see the tech boom being over now or even anytime in the foreseeable future. Technology is still in its infancy.

Chinese oil consumption is down in 2024 and 2025.

I think it’s possible to make a case both of you are right.

These are huge globe changing effects being batted around. Solar is going to have an enormous effect - it’s distributed at minimum. A lot of human domestic activity (billions of people) can go off grid. That’s going to chnage politics in ways that’s hard to understand

Elite production (a term I always have concerns about - I prefer to say that the average school leaving age has moved from 16 when I was young to 21.)

But elites, social media, balkanisation of social groupings (death of mass media) these also have huge effects.

But the good news is this page on HN probably lists all of the giant freaking tidal waves - it’s not an infinite challenge. But it is going to need radically different approaches to fix it.

Luckily we have Democracy and Science - tattoo them on your knuckles folks - we got a fight ahead of us :-)

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