On Declinism v. Acceleration, &c.

Another Xah Lee comment of note:

lol. but the thing with tech is, it's not pausable. If you pause, for ethic or other reasons, others will do it. Then, u will follow or perish. That's what technology is. (AI, robotics, genetics, bio, nano, gigagun, clones, chimera, borg, all's coming.)

In general this is a good point.  Many non-Western countries, for example, were forced to modernize in the 20th century simply because if they did not, they would have been easy prey to the Western powers which were much more advanced.  As, indeed, they mostly had been in the century before.  Pausing a technology in mid-development is not really possible; it behaves a lot more like a force of nature than anyone would like to admit.  There's an impetus of millions of man hours behind it and a lot of cultural power moving it forward.  It's hard to fight that, even if someone wanted to, and the fact is most go along with trends.  So, logically, we probably can't hope for much more than acceleration.

But, and this is important, I do not believe the above technologies will come to pass in our timeline unless something radically different comes along.  It's a simple problem of energy throughput in the end.  The petrochemical and coal industries are going to be in decline by midcentury at the latest, and "green energy" is a fraud/grift that has no potential to maintain civilization at the current level.  Even nuclear has proven to be mostly a nothingburger, and in any case, the development of nuclear energy has fallen way behind.  The biggest innovators today are the Chinese, thanks to treacherous US politicians selling our publicly-funded tech to them for decades.  I have my doubts whether they can scale it up, but certainly no Western countries are going to be doing that kind of thing soon.

The energy scarcity problem has been known by members of the powers that be for a very long time.  But Americans have a very hard time imagining a future that doesn't have infinite progress of technics.  I believe the decline of Spenglerian thought has less to do with his "politically incorrect" stances (since he was a philosemite and hated Hitler, that never made much sense to me) and much more to do with the fact that decline as a theme is incompatible with American optimism or the "cult of progress".  Be that as it may, energy throughput is an absolute requirement for maintaining industrial civilization.  To this date, no good replacement for petrochemicals and coal have been found that would scale.  And contrary to the opinions of some people that these things are "infinite", they are actually tracked pretty carefully by the industries that extract them, and they have a pretty good idea how much is left and where it is.  And the tl;dr is that, apart from Venezuela/Guyana there aren't any supergiant-sized oil fields left that we know of.  America right now is the largest producer of petrochemicals in the world, thanks to the massive investment in unconventional extraction since the late 2000s.  But that isn't going to last.

Without energy you don't have any development of technics; as a matter of fact, you will have trouble even keeping the lights on, the water running, the roads maintained, and the population fed.  This may seem far out now, but in about 2-3 decades you will see this start to bite even in first world countries.  That's leaving to one side the other problem, which is that technical innovation has slowed way down in Western countries.  I don't have time to go in depth on this question but some people have done a good job with it, such as Scott Locklin.  We are still very far from something like AGI, say much less things like nanotechnology, clones, cyborgs and so on which are to this day fictitious.  Things like LLMs and image generation have been interesting, but they represent relatively small and trifling concerns, and they will probably be used more for evil than good (deep fakes).  Also, let's be real here, Silicon Valley is not going to be doing any more innovating.  They have been wholly captured by the leftist mental illness and moral panics of the past decade, and in the same period they invented nothing of value.  I will not say there won't be innovations in the future, but they won't come from that place.

We are at a turning point in history, and it's only visionaries who can imagine the future at this point, because the vast majority of humans can't conceive of a world that looks radically different than their past lived experience.  So I am sure almost nobody will agree with me on this, and also that a lot of zombies are going to be wiped out with all the changes that are sure to come, and come suddenly.  The early stages of it already look to be shaping up quite nicely.  I don't imagine there will be human extinction or anything that drastic, but I do think the rest of the century is going to be filled with hardships and that the Western countries may enter what proves to be a terminal phase of decline.