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April 10, 2026
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"Space probes. Nuclear reactors. Computer security. What do all these lessons add up to, and what can we learn from them about the difficulty of aligning an artificial superintelligence? An artificial superintelligence is like a space probe, in that we cannot test it in quite the same environment where it needs to work, and by default it is not retrievable or correctable once it rises high above usâŚ. An artificial superintelligence is like a nuclear reactor, in that its underlying reality involves immense, potentially self-amplifying forces, whose inner processes run faster than humans can react. An artificial superintelligence is like a computer security problem, in that every constraint an engineer tries to place upon the system might be bypassed by the intelligent forces that those constraints hinder."
"We usually try to avoid shouting. It doesnât help to shout, most of the time. It just makes people think youâre undisciplined. But at some point, after youâve calmly gone through all the premises of your argument, we think it becomes unhelpful to downplay, lest people think itâs all just a game of calm words. When it comes to AI, the challenge humanity is facing is not surmountable with anything like humanityâs current level of knowledge and skill. It isnât close. Attempting to solve a problem like that, with the lives of everyone on Earth at stake, would be an insane and stupid gamble that NOBODY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO TRY."
"If you were able to choose what an AI wants â the destinations toward which it steers â that might be good news for you. Or bad news, if you made a poor choice of destinations, or if some malicious person makes an AI that steers toward outcomes you dislike. But the problem facing humanity is not a problem of whether good people or bad people are in control of AI. No â we are facing an even harder problem: itâs much easier to grow artificial intelligence that steers somewhere then it is to grow AIs that steer exactly where you want."
"Humanity does not need to understand intelligence, in order to grow machines that are smarter than us."
"We consider interpretability researchers to be heroes, and do not mean to degrade their work when we say: Itâs not a good sign, when you ask an engineer what their safety plan is, and they start telling you about their plans to build the tools that will give them a better window into what the heck is going on inside the device theyâre trying to control."
"Insofar as the AI has weird alien preferences, escape is in fact the course of action that best fulfills its objectives. Attempts to escape are not a weird personality quirk that an engineer could rip out if only they could see what was going on inside; they are generated by the same dispositions and capabilities that the AI uses to reason, to uncover truths about the world, to succeed in its pursuits."
"If you were incredibly, incredibly optimistic, you might look at the differences and say: âWell, gradient descent is not the same as natural selection, so it wonât have all the same complications as natural selection. And I donât know of any particular complications in the relationship between what AIs are trained for and what AIs end up wanting; so I donât expect any complications.â But a blank map does not correspond to a blank territory: if youâre venturing across an unknown land mass and your map has a blank spot where you havenât visited, it doesnât mean youâll see a vast empty space when you get there. If gradient descent is different from natural selection, that doesnât mean that we should expect to see no complications, since we donât know about any. Rather, we should expect to see new, interesting, unpredicted complications."
"When imagining some new, unprecedented piece of future history, there is a temptation to fall into imagining that it will all go sensibly, rather than the way things usually go in history books. People sometimes ask us: How could the AI companies possibly be doing this thing, if matters are as we say? And maybe the simplest real answer is: Because this is the sort of awful, sad, real situation that you read about in history books, and not in the sensible world that exists only in imagination."
"It is as improbable that human thinking patterns mark the final limit of intelligent algorithms as it is that human neurons represent the limit of possible computing speeds."
"Ultra-fast minds that can do superhuman-quality thinking at 10,000 times the speed, that do not age and die, that make copies of their most successful representatives, that have been refined by billions of trials into unhuman kinds of thinking that work tirelessly and generalize more accurately from less data, and that can turn all that intelligence to analyzing and understanding and ultimately improving themselves â these minds would exceed ours."
"A human brain can learn to navigate wider-ranging paths through a larger cross-section of reality than any other animal. That is our special power."
"And if a sci-fi writer tried to write that story, the audience would just be confused, because why did that happen? Isnât that the opposite of what the AI was trained for? But reality is allowed to be like that. And we are, fundamentally, predicting that the world will not turn out like a sci-fi novel. Weâre predicting that AIâs preferences will turn out to be complicated and weird."
"You canât grow an AI that does what you want just by training it to be nice and hoping. You donât get what you train for."
"Some aspects of the future are predictable, with the right knowledge and effort; others are impossibly hard calls. Competent futurism is built around knowing the difference."
"Human intelligence is the source of all our power, all our technology.⌠So far, humanity has had no competitors for our special power. But what if machine minds get better than us at the thing that, up until now, made us unique?"
"When it comes to thinking, quality trumps quantity."
"History teaches that one kind of relatively easy call about the future involves realizing that something looks theoretically possible according to the laws of physics, and predicting that eventually someone will go do it. Heavier-than-air flight, weapons that release nuclear energy, rocket that go to the Moon with a person on board: these events were called in advance, and for the right reasons, despite pushback from skeptics who sagely observed that these things hadnât yet happened and therefore probably never would."
"Even in the face of superhuman machine intelligence, it can be tempting to imagine that the world will keep looking the way it has over the last few decades of our relatively short lives. It is true, but hard to remember, that there was a time is real as our own time, just a few short centuries ago, when civilization was radically different. Or millennia ago, when there was no civilization to speak of. Or a million years ago, when there were no humans. Or a billion years ago, when multicellular colonies had no specialized cells. Adopting a historical perspective can help us appreciate what is so hard to see from the perspective of our own short lifespans: Nature permits disruption. Nature permits calamity. Nature permits the world to never be the same again."
"If anyone builds it, everyone dies. It doesnât matter whether itâs built by benevolent corporations or selfish ones. It doesnât matter whether itâs built by researchers in the East or researchers in the West. It doesnât matter whether itâs built by reckless optimists or people who say they respect the problem. Nobody has the knowledge or skill to make a superintelligence that does their bidding."
"Many of these complications wonât show up in obvious, undeniable ways until after itâs too late for humans to do anything about them."
"Normality always ends. This is not to say that itâs inevitably replaced by something worse; sometimes it is and sometimes it isnât, and sometimes it depends on how we act. But clinging to the hope that nothing too bad will be allowed to happen does not usually help."
"We predict this with confidence: Once some AIs go to superintelligence â and nobody will delay much in pushing AIs that far, if in the middle of some great arms race â humanity does not stand a chance. Ends are sometimes easier to call than pathways. The only part of our story that is a real prediction is the ending â and then, only if the story is allowed to begin."
"There have to be limits. If we project âhousing startsâ ninety-nine years forward at current rates, there wouldnât be a single buildable quarter-acre lot left in the world. Not a few economists would rationalize this outcome by declaring that [in] ninety-nine years from now we will have colonies on the moon or Mars or under the . Or that technology coupled with human ingenuity will solve the problem some other way, [âŚ] by genetically reengineering human beings to be one inch tall or booting all our consciousnesses into computer servers where unlimited numbers of virtual people could dwell in unlimited virtual environments of endless cyberspace. More likely, we will remain confined to the planet Earth. Economic growth that has appeared normative and desirable during the story of industrialism is already becoming pathogenic in an economy showing more⌠signs of positive feedback and accelerating positive entropy manifesting as damage to the biosphere. High entropy becomes particularly problematic in an economy utterly dependent on a few⌠commodities [âŚ]. It becomes especially relevant when the limits to those commodities become tangible, as is now the case as we approach the global oil production peak and the actual depletion (thirty years past peak) of the North American natural gas endowment. But the collective imagination of the public cannot process the notion of a nongrowth economy, even though the limits to growth are visible all around us in everything from the paved-over suburban landscapes to the steeply rising gas prices, to played-out aquifers, to the death of the Atlantic cod fishery. We are not capable of conceiving another economic way. We are hostages to our own system."
"Inefficient economies are much more complex than efficient ones. Complexity itself can be deceiving. [âŚ] Complexity constrains entropy flows with checks and balances. What we take to be man-made artificial complexity (technology) is, paradoxically, a simplification process that increases flows by editing away inefficiencies. [Because our limited knowledge prevents us to process events on the geologic scale, we think that] The ecology of prairie will keep the soil active and healthy indefinitely [but for how long?], while the ecology of a fossil-fuel-subsidized cornfield will leach the soil of useful nutrients and physically erode it in less than a human lifetime. [We think that] The ecology of a pond, with its diverse hierarchies of life and multitude of biological niches and food chains, is much more complex than the Crown Point, New York, trout hatchery with its monoculture offish, its inputs of manufactured fish food, and its staff of attendants cleaning waste out of the cement hatchery impoundments. The natural pond also has more chance of continuing indefinitely into the future [but for how long?]. The built-in constraints of inefficient⌠economies reduce the flow of potential, often to the point where systems based on inefficient economies last for geologic epochs, not just a few decades in the case of a fish hatchery. Everything that we identify with nature takes the form of inefficient systems. Biogenic or living systems are self-stabilizing. They are self-buffered. Small differences are dampened out. Entropy is stalled within them. They exhibit negative feedback tending toward long-term stability [but for how long?]. Call this condition "negative entropy." Everything we identify with the man-made substitutes for natural bio-economies, that is, technologies, tends toward positive feedback, which is self-amplifying, self-reinforcing, and destabilizing, featuring the removal of constraints to entropy flows and leading to the certain eventual destruction of that system. Call this condition "positive entropy.""
"It is assumed now that human beings, prompted by the market, will employ ingenuity to discover a substitute for oil and gas, once the price starts to ramp up beyond the âaffordableâ range. This assumption is apt to prove fallacious because it ignores the fact that the earth is a closed system [for matter], while the laws of thermodynamics state that energy canât be created out of nothing, only changed from low entropy to high entropy, and that we have already changed the half [or perhaps a fraction] of our [planet's] oil endowment that was easiest to get into dispersed carbon dioxide, which is now ratcheting up global warming and climate change, which might well put the industrial adventure out of business before human ingenuity can come up with a substitute for oil. The [fraction of] solar energy [that was] stored for millions of years in oil [and was easy to extract] will now be expressed in higher temperatures, more severe storms, rising sea levels, and harsher conditions for the human species, which, despite its⌠technological [and scientific] achievements, remains a part of nature and subject to its laws."
"The corporations benefiting from this regime often had no physical home of their own, even in their country of originâand not a few American corporations had moved their official address to ⌠pseudo nations, where the banking and tax laws were more agreeable. The corporations had no allegiance to any⌠place or the people of that place, so the destruction they wreaked was as manifest in the ravaged towns of Ohio and upstate New York as in the environmental degradation of China. America was hardly immune to the consequences of free-market globalism. In effect, the American heartland was overtaken by a new⌠corporate colonialism, emanating from our own culture, but no less destructive than the imposition of foreign rule."
"The idea of comparative advantage works when there is a complex local economy intact in the background of each trading partnerâs specialized item of production, with a variety of social roles and occupational niches to support the long-term project of [the] community. But a locality geared to doing only one thing for export is⌠a slave system based on the extractive economics of mining. [âŚ] One group had all the cheap labor, and another group had all the capital, and for a while, one group made all the things that the other group âconsumed.â Thus, comparative advantage became, for a time, a con game strictly for the benefit of large corporations, which ended up enjoying all the advantages while the localities sucked up the costs."
"Did Americans sell out their towns, their neighbors, the memory of their ancestors, and the future of their grandchildren because they were helplessly in thrall to the blandishments of a cheap-oil economy? I honestly donât know, though I tend to view the outcome as the result of many collective bad choices made by the public and its leaders. But were those choices inescapable? Certainly, the process was insidious and played out over several generations."
"Money is a wonderful thing. It started out in human history as hard currency, generally gold or silver. These are commodities that are deemed to have intrinsic value but also act as a means of abstractly representing wealth accumulated out of other real commodities. Relatively little hard currency ever circulated freely in the preindustrial world. In that world, most wealth was actual, existing in the form of land, palaces, fleets of boats, bolts of cloth, barrels of grain, standing timber, herds of cattle, and so forth. These were generally things that could be traded, and exchanges of these items were often facilitated through the medium of gold or silver, hence the term "medium of exchange." [The] hard currency could also be acquired by theft or plunder, though that did not necessarily affect its value. Note that the value of [the] hard currency is transcultural. Gold and silver had high value to the Europeans, the Chinese of the Sung dynasty, the Inca, the Aztecs, the ancient Egyptians, and the California Forty-niners. The industrial experiment took the idea of currency (money) to the next level of abstractionâas hard currency can represent actual goods, so paper currency can represent hard currency and actual goods. As trade increased and took place over ever-greater distances, paper promises to pay hard currency began to steadily take the place of the hard stuff itself, which was cumbersome, hard to lug around in large quantities, and subject to theft in transit. So, to streamline these trades, all kinds of certificates were used as equivalents to hard currency: individual IOUs, bills of lading, letters of credit from rich people, [and] promissory notes issued by guilds. In time, the use of paper certificates became⌠more normative and conventionalized. Protocols of exchange were established. Institutions were created to process them. This process of managing monetary affairsâof wealth abstracted in [a] paperâwas called finance."
"A UN ceasefire ended hostilities on October 22, 1973, but the OPEC embargo against the United States remained in force while the organization further increased the price per barrel to the rest of the world. What followed was an interesting case study in network breakdown and cascading failure. In fact, the embargo never actually achieved a shutoff of OPEC oil imports to the United States. All but about 5 percent of the needed supply found its way to America by a circuitous route as allocations to other nations were surreptitiously redirected. But the base price of a barrel of oil did eventually more than quadruple by the time the embargo was called off in March 1974. And the price rise, alone staggered the West and Japan. Already at that time, public transit was a thing of the past and about 85 percent of Americans drove to work every day."
"Oil is the world's most critical resource. Without it, nothing works in industrial civilization as currently configured. Few people dispute the idea that the world will eventually run out of oil, and there is a broad recognition that it will happen [...]."
"The free-market part of the equation referred to the putative benefit of unrestrained economic competition between individuals, and because corporations enjoyed the legal status of persons, they were assumed to be on an equal footing with other persons in a given locality. Thus, Wal-Mart was considered the theoretical equal of Bob the appliance store owner, and if Bob happened to lose in the retail competition because he couldn't order 50,000 coffeemakers at a crack from a factory 12,000 miles away in , and receive a deep discount for being such an important customer, well, it wasn't as though he hadn't been given the chance."
"The denial about [the] global peak in the United States is already fierce, as investments in car-dependent, oil-addicted infrastructure are greater here than in any other nation and Americans consider their way of life a[n]⌠entitlement. [âŚ] The economic... [struggle] among... all nations, [...] will be considerable and is certain to lead to increasingly desperate competition for diminishing supplies of oil [and every other resource]."
"The total planetary endowment of conventional nonrenewable liquid oil was⌠two trillion barrels before humans started using it [and possibly more, as most of it was used to protect the Earth's crust]. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the world has burned through... one trillion barrels of oil, ...representing the easiest-to-get, highest-quality liquids. [...] Oil has enabled the [[w:Mid-20th century baby boom|[post-War] population explosion]] [and also enabled the public-health and feminist revolutions]."
"Globalism was operated by oligarchical corporations on the gigantic scale, made possible by cheap oil. By âoligarchicalâ I mean that power was vested in small numbers of people running large organizations who were not accountable for their actions to many of the people who were subject to those actions. By âcorporation,â I mean a group enterprise given the legal status of a âperson,â with ârights,â but in fact devoid of any human qualities of ethics, humility, mercy, duty, or loyalty that would constrain those rights. As Wendell Berry put it, âa corporation⌠is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance⌠It can experience no personal hope or remorse. No change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money."
"Cheap oil had allowed populations to explode in precisely those parts of the world that had had, for millennia, a high infant mortality rate and modest life expectancy. Cheap oil was behind the "" that increased the food supply in the nonindustrial world. Oil was also behind many of the medicines and preventives that had neutralized⌠diseases. Now, suddenly, most of those children⌠survived, grew up, and produced more children who survived and grew up, and over the course of the twentieth century, the global populations hurtled into extreme numerical overshoot. Populations were, in effect, eating oil, notably in [the form of] food exports from the United States, where agribusiness had completely taken over from agriculture. Local farmers in Africa, Asia, or South America couldnât compete with corporate Archer Daniels Midlandâs oil-and-gas-based grain crops and U.S. government subsidies. There was no point in even bringing their hardscrabble crops to market when sacks of cheap American wheat sat on the docks of Pusan or Colombo. Farmers in those places felt that they had no choice but to migrate to the city and find some other way to get by. The only comparative advantage that these people possessed was their willingness to work for next to nothing. Cheap oil and free-market globalism turned comparative advantage into a new kind of feudalism, with the corporations as the lords and the overabundant locals as the serfs. And then, when the comparative advantage of cheap labor⌠of one place, [âŚ] was superseded by the cheaper labor⌠of another place, [âŚ] the corporations just moved their operations."
"[âŚ] The⌠oil-fueled boom that energized the suburban expansion of the 1920s brought turmoil and trouble to the farm economy. Thirty percent of the U.S. population still lived on farms in the 1920s. U.S. farmers had done well during World War I, exporting grain to a Europe that had become a shell-blasted battlefield. By the early 1920s, though, Europeans were able to feed themselves again. Meanwhile, the introduction of the tractor and the mechanization of farming in the United States led quickly to [the] massive overproduction of grain. Unable any longer to pawn off the surplus on Europe, America suffered a crash in grain prices. The farm depression, which preceded the financial depression by half a decade, was a self-reinforcing feedback loop. As the market prices of corn and wheat plunged, farmers desperately tried to make up for low prices by producing more, which the domestic markets could not absorb, leading to even greater surpluses and more depressed prices."
"Fossil fuels are a unique endowment of geologic history that allow human beings to artificially and temporarily extend the carrying capacity of our habitat on the planet Earth. Before fossil fuelsânamely, coal, oil, and natural gasâcame into general use, fewer than one billion human beings inhabited the earth. Today, after⌠two centuries of [mining of hydrocarbons and burning them as] fossil fuels, and with extraction now at an all-time high, the planet supports six and a half billion people. Subtract the fossil fuels and the human race has an obvious problem. The fossil fuel bonanza was a one-time deal, and the interval we have enjoyed it in has been an anomalous period of human history. It has lasted long enough for the people now living in the advanced industrialized nations to consider it⌠normative. Fossil fuels provided for each person in an industrialized country the equivalent of having hundreds of slaves constantly at⌠[t]he[i]r disposal. We are now unable to imagine a life without themâor think within a different socioeconomic modelâand therefore we are unprepared for what is coming."
"Because the oil peak phenomenon⌠cancels out further industrial growth of the kind we are used to, its implications lie radically outside⌠[the] economic paradigm. So, the oil peak phenomenon has been discounted to about zero among conventional economists, who assume that âmarket signalsâ about oil supplies will inevitably trigger innovation, which, in turn, will cause [something] new⌠to materialize and enable further growth. If the market signals are not triggering innovation, then the problem must be overstated and growth under the oil regime will resumeâafter, say, a normal periodic downcycle. This is obvious casuistry, but casuistry can be a great comfort when a problem has no real solution. [âŚ] Our investment in an oil-addicted way of life⌠is now so inordinately large that it is too late to salvage all the national wealth wasted on building it, or to continue that way of life more than a decade or so into the future. Whatâs more, as we have outsourced manufacturing to other countries, the entire U.S. economy has become more⌠dependent on continued misinvestment in⌠suburbia and its accessories. No politician wants to tell voters that the American Dream has been canceled for a lack of⌠resources. The U.S. economy would disintegrate. So, whichever party is in power has tended to ignore the issue, change the subject, or spin it into the realm of delusion."
"Oil and gas were generally so cheap and plentiful throughout the twentieth century that even those in the lowest ranks of the social order enjoyed its benefitsâelectrified homes, cars, televisions, [and] air conditioning. Oil is an amazing substance. It stores a tremendous amount of energy per weight and volume. It is easy to transport. It stores easily at regular air temperature in unpressurized metal tanks, and it can sit there indefinitely without degrading. You can pump it through a pipe, you can send it all over the world in ships, you can haul it around in trains, cars, and trucks, [and] you can even fly it in tanker planes and refuel other airplanes in flight. It is flammable but has proven to be safe to handle with a modest amount of care by people with double-digit IQs. It can be refined by straightforward distillation into many grades of fuelâgasoline, diesel, kerosene, aviation fuel, heating oilâand into innumerable useful productsâplastics, paints, pharmaceuticals, fabrics, [and] lubricants. Nothing really matches oil for power, versatility, transportability, or ease of storage. It is all these things, plus it has been cheap and plentiful. [âŚ] The lack of these qualities is among the problems with the putative alternative fuels proposed for the post-cheap-energy era. Cheap, abundant, versatile. Oil led the human race to a threshold of nearly godlike power to transform the world. It was right there in the ground, easy to get. We used it as if there was no tomorrow. Now there may not be one. That's how special oil has been."
"Whole ideologies had to be constructed to account for being modern and to explain it."
"In the Long Emergency, some regions of the United States will do better than others and some will suffer deeply. Places that benefited disproportionately during the cheap-oil blowout will find themselves steeply challenged when those benefits, and the entitlement psychology that grew out of them, are withdrawn in the face of new, austere circumstances. The so-called Sunbelt presents extraordinary problems. This is not a good time to begin thinking about moving to Phoenix or Las Vegas. Parts of the Southwest may be significantly depopulated, starved for energy, and thirsting for water that depended on cheap energy. Other parts may become contested territory with Mexico. The prospect for disorder in the southeastern states is especially high, given the extremes of religiosity, hyperindividualism, and cultural disinhibition regarding violence. The social glue holding communities and regions together will be severely strained by the loss of amenities presumed to be normal. [âŚ] We have lived through as a narrative episode in a greater saga of human history. The industrial story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It begins in the mid-eighteenth century with coal and the first steam engines, proceeds to a robust second act climaxing in the years before World War I, and moves toward a third act resolution now that we can anticipate with some precision the depletion of the resources that made the industrial episode possible. As the industrial story ends, the greater saga of [hu]mankind will move on into a new episode, the Long Emergency. This is⌠a self-evident point, but throughout history, even the most important and self-evident trends are often completely ignored because the changes they foreshadow are simply unthinkable. That process is sometimes referred to as an âoutside context problem,â something so far beyond the ordinary experience of those dwelling in a certain time and place that they cannot make sense of available information. The collective mental static preventing comprehension is also sometimes referred to as âcognitive dissonance,â a term borrowed from developmental psychology. It helps explain why the⌠public has been sleepwalking into the future. The Long Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. It is likely to entail political [and social] turbulence every bit as extreme as the economic conditions that prompt it."
"Everything characteristic about the condition we call modern life has been a direct result of our access to abundant supplies of cheap fossil fuels. Fossil fuels have permitted us to fly, to go where we want to go rapidly and move things easily from place to place. Fossil fuels rescued us from the despotic darkness of the night. They have made the pharaonic scale of building commonplace everywhere. They have allowed a fractionally tiny percentage of our swollen populations to produce massive amounts of food. They have allowed us to develop industries of surpassing ingenuity and to push the limits of what it even means to be human to the strange frontier where man imagines himself into a kind of machine immortality. All of the marvels and miracles of the twentieth century were enabled by our access to abundant supplies of cheap fossil fuels. Even the applied technology of atomic fission, which came along in the mid-[20th-]century, would have been impossible without fossil fuels and may be impossible to continue very long into the future without them. The age of fossil fuels is about to end. There is no replacement for them at hand. These facts are poorly understood by the global population preoccupied with the thrum of daily life, but tragically, too, by the educated classes in the United States, who continue to be by far the greatest squanderers of fossil fuels. It is extremely important that we make an effort to understand what is about to happen to us because it will have earth-shaking repercussions for the way we live, the way the world is ordered, and whether the very precious cargo of human culture can move safely forward into the future."
"After World War II, the American public made two momentous and related decisions. First was the decision to resume the project of suburbanization [that was] begun in the 1920s and halted by the Great Depression and war. By the 1950s, the prevailing image of city life was Ralph Kramdenâs squalid tenement apartment on televisionâs The Honeymooners show. Suburbia was the prescribed antidote to the dreariness of the hypertrophied industrial cityâand most American cities had never been anything but that. They were short on amenities, overcrowded, and artless. Americans were sick of them and saw no way to improve them. Historically, a powerful sentimental bias for country life ruled the national imagination. As late as 1900, most U.S. citizens had lived on farms, and American culture was still imbued with rural values. As far as many Americans were concerned in the 1950s, suburbia was country living. There was plenty of cheap, open rural land to build on outside the cities, and as soon as mass-production house builders like William Fevitt demonstrated how it might be done, suburbia would be thoroughly democratizedâcountry living for everyone. That suburbia turned out to be a disappointing cartoon of country living rather than the real thing was a tragic unanticipated consequenceâŚ"
"The so-called global economy was not a permanent institution, [...] but a set of transient circumstances peculiar to a certain time: the⌠fossil fuel era. [âŚ] Factories could be started up in Sri Lanka and Malaysia, where swollen populations furnished trainable workers willing to labor for much less than those back in the United States or Europe. Products then moved around the globe in a highly rationalized system, not unlike the oil allocation system, using immense vessels, automated port facilities, and truck-scaled shipping containers at a minuscule cost-per-unit of whatever was made and transported. Shirts or coffeemakers manufactured 12,000 miles away could be shipped to s all over America and sold cheaply. [âŚ] Meanwhile, among economists and government figures, globalism developed... [as] an intellectual fad. Globalism allowed them to believe that burgeoning wealth in the developed countries, and the spread of industrial activity to formerly primitive regions, was based on the potency of their own ideas and policies rather than on cheap [and easy-to-find hydrocarbons like] oil. [âŚ] [An] overlooked [fact] is that [[Margaret Thatcher|[Margaret] Thatcher]]âs success in reviving England coincided with a fantastic new revenue stream from oil, as quaint old Britannia became energy self-sufficient and a net energy-exporting nation for the first time since the heyday of coal. Globalism then infected America when Ronald Reagan came on the scene in 1981. Reaganâs âsupply-sideâ economic advisors retailed a set of fiscal ideas that neatly accessorized the new notions about free trade and deregulation, chiefly that massively reducing taxes would⌠result in greater revenues as the greater aggregate of business activity generated a greater aggregate of taxes even at lower rates. [âŚ] The rise of computers, in turn, promoted the fantasy that commerce in sheer information would be the long-sought replacement for all the played-out activities of the smokestack economy. A country like America, it was now thought, no longer needed steelmaking or tire factories or other harsh, dirty, troublesome enterprises. Let the poor masses of Asia and have them and lift themselves up from agricultural peonage. America would outsource all this old economy stuff and use computers to orchestrate the movement of parts and the assembly of products from distant quarters of the world, and then sell the stuff in our own s and s, which would become global juggernauts of retailing. [âŚ] It was also like a convoluted liquidation sale of the accrued wealth of two hundred years of industrial society for the benefit of a handful of financial buccaneers, with the great masses relegated to a race to the bottom as the economic assets are dismantled and sold off, and their livelihoods are closed [âŚ]. That this development was uniformly greeted as a public good by the vast majority of Americans, at the same time that their local economies were being destroyedâand with them, myriad social and civic benefitsâis one of the greater enigmas of recent social history. In effect, Americans threw away their communities⌠to save a few dollars on hair dryers and plastic food storage tubs, never stopping to reflect on what they were destroying."
"At the same time, the world is overdue for an extreme influenza epidemic. The last major outbreak was the 1918 Spanish influenza, which killed fifty million [and possibly more, as we will not know the real numbers] people worldwide and changed the course of history. [âŚ] Disease will certainly play a larger role in the Long Emergency than many can now imagine. An epidemic could paralyze social and economic systems, interrupt global trade, and bring down governments. [âŚ] At the very least, the Long Emergency will be a time of diminished life spans for many of us, as well as reduced standards of livingâat least as understood within the current social context. Fossil fuels had the effect of temporarily raising the carrying capacity of the earth. Our ability to resist the environmental corrective of disease will... prove to have been another temporary boon of the... [industrial] age [...]. So much of what we construe to be among our entitlements to perpetual progress may prove to have been a strange, marvelous, and anomalous moment in... history."
"[Globalism's] demise will coincide with the end of the cheap-oil age. For better or worse, many of the circumstances we associate with globalism will be reversed. Markets will close as political turbulence and military mischief interrupt trade relations. As markets close, societies will turn increasingly to import replacement[s] for sheer economic survival. The cost of transport will no longer be negligible in a post-cheap-oil age. Many of our agricultural products will have to be produced closer to home, and... by more intensive... labor as oil and natural gas supplies become increasingly unstable. The world will stop shrinking and become larger again. Virtually all... the... relationships... that we have taken for granted as permanent will be radically changed [...]. Life will become intensely and increasingly local."
"America finds itself nearing the end of the cheap-oil age having invested its national wealth in a living arrangementâsuburban sprawlâthat has no future. When media commentators cast about struggling to explain what has happened in our country economically, they uniformly overlook the colossal misinvestment that suburbia representsâa prodigious, unparalleled misallocation of resources. This is quite apart from its social, spiritual, and ecological deficiencies as an everyday environment. We constructed an armature for daily living that simply wonât work without liberal supplies of cheap oil, and very soon we will be without both the oil needed to run it and the wealth needed to replace it. Nor are we likely to come up with a miraculous energy replacement for oil that will allow us to run all this everyday infrastructure even remotely the same way. In any case, the tragic truth is that much of suburbia is unreformable. It does not lend itself to being retrofitted into the... mixed-use, smaller-scaled, more fine-grained walkable environments we will need to carry on daily life in the coming age of... reduced motoring. [...] Instead, this suburban real estate... will enter a phase of rapid and cruel devaluation. Many of the suburban subdivisions will become the slums of the future. [âŚ] The seasons⌠will continue with the great cycles of contraction and expansion, and at some point, in the future, who knows how many years distant, some of these cities in a land once called [the [[United States|United States of Northern] America]] may be robust and cosmopolitan in ways that we canât imagine now, any more than a Roman of A.D. 38 might have been able to imagine the future London of the Beatles."
"The high tide of the... [industrial] age also happened to be a moment in history when human ingenuity gained an upper hand against the age-old scourges of disease. We have enjoyed the great benefits of antibiotic medicine for... a half-century. Penicillin, sulfa drugs, and their descendants briefly gave [hu]mankind the notion that diseases caused by microorganisms could, and indeed would, be systematically vanquished. Or, at least, this was the popular view. Doctors and scientists knew better. The discoverer of penicillin, Alexander Fleming, himself warned that antibiotic misuse could result in resistant strains of bacteria. The recognition is now growing that the victory over microbes was short-lived. They are back in force, including... old enemies such as tuberculosis and staphylococcus in new drug-resistant strains. Other old diseases are on the march into new territories, as a response to climate change brought on by global warming [caused by the burning of fossil fuels]. In response to unprecedented habitat destruction by humans and the invasion of [what we call] wilderness, the earth itself seems to be sending forth new and much more lethal diseases, as though it had a... protective immune system with antibody-like agents aimed with remarkable precision at the source of the problem: Homo sapiens."
"The 1973 was the precipitating incident of the OPEC embargo. On October 6, Egyptian and Syrian forces caught the Israeli military off-guard on the most solemn Jewish holiday, when many soldiers were home with their families. Because the Arab-Israeli dispute was commonly viewed as yet another cold war proxy battle, the United States and its allies naturally lined up behind Israel against the Soviet-sponsored aggressors. Egyptâs President Anwar Sadat implored the Saudis and other Muslim states to use the âoil weaponâ against Israelâs allies. On October 12, the Saudi-led OPEC demanded of the various Western companies doing business in the Middle East, including Aramco, a 100 percent increase in the posted price of their cartel's oil. The companies stalled for time. On October 16, the Persian Gulf region OPEC members broke off negotiations with the Western oil companies and announced that thereafter they would set prices themselves. On October 17, the Israelis gained the upper hand on the battlefield, thanks in large part to aggressive American resupply efforts, and began to push the Egyptians back across the and the Syrians out of the Golan Heights. [On] the same day, the Arab oil ministers announced an oil embargo on the United States, while increasing prices by 70 percent to western Europe. Overnight, the price of a barrel of oil to these nations rose from $3 to $5.11. On October 19, President Richard M. Nixon announced a military aid package for Israel. The following day, Saudi Arabia retaliated by announcing a total cutoff of oil exports to America."