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.

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.

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...

> 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.

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> 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.