Dude, You Broke the Future!
2nd January 2018
Read it — watch the video if you want, but you’ll be disappointed; Charlie isn’t a very polished public speaker. His talk reads better than it sounds.
Charlie Stross is one of the greatest living science fiction authors (and one of my Recommended Writers — see right). This talk is a very personal look into his view of where we are and where we are going. Although a Fashionable Socialist, as you can tell by the shaved head and chin-beard, Charlie can see around a number of very interesting corners.
January 3rd, 2018 at 06:31
Corporations as primitive AI is an intriguing idea that needs further exploration. His socialist blather really detracted from fully developing his arguments; and only at the very end did he seem to even consider that someone might have a differing perspective and allow for that is his examples of negative gaming scenarios.
I’m always amused by people who bitch about the Koch brothers political contributions but fail to even mention names like George Soros who donated twice as much to Democrats in the 2016 cycle as the Koch brothers gave to Libertarians or Republicans.
January 3rd, 2018 at 12:38
Stross is an example of the modern Briton who has grown up under socialism and can’t imagine it any other way. So the question is not whether we want socialism but rather how to prop it up where it fails, as it inevitably does. He was one of what Scott Adams calls ‘word thinkers’ who mocked Jonah Goldberg’s book LIBERAL FASCISM without bothering to read it, because of course liberals couldn’t be fascists (just as blacks can’t be racist).