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Comment by madengr | Hacker News Reader

Just finished up a hardbound copy of "Asimov on Physics", and was able to find "Asimov on Chemistry" overseas for a good price. Definitely my favorite author, and the Foundation Series are my favorite books. Hard to believe he started those when he was 19; genius.

Anybody think a collapse is happening like in foundation (i.e. falling back from nuclear to primitive fossil fuels)?

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Something very similar is happening to collapse, yes. But it's under weight of complex law. We technologists don't like to think about the law, and usually don't have to since the limitations on our actions are usually intrinsic to the field, but society is law, and law is society. When the law gets too complex for any real human to know, to follow, or to enforce, you get a strange kind of tyranny. You get, for example, business models predicated on millions of petty injustices (bank late fees, parking tickets, pay day loans etc).

I call it "The Tyranny of Complexity". And we, the programmers, have had a big part in creating it, which is why I believe we have a moral obligation to end it. Some simple rules, for example, about how bills must be submitted for a vote, e.g. written in long-hand by the sponsoring congressman, or rescinding an equal or greater amount of law before passing a new one, would help. But computers allow for the asymmetrical enforcement of contracts, strongly favoring the business over the consumer (favoring the highly connected node over the less connected nodes) and we can and should address that, too. Too often we suffer petty abuse in silence, and lack the tools to redress our grievances with our abusers.

Eventually this will yield a true collapse, but it will take a while. Trump might accelerate things, but even not-Trump won't stop it.

The "increasing unnecessary complexity leads to collapse" hypothesis was very adeptly explored in the context of the collapse of many ancient societies by archeologist Joseph A. Tainter in his book Collapse of Complex Societies[1]. Briefly, he argues that most civilizations rely on some sort of wealth producing trick. As they grow they increase societal complexity to maintain that trick. After a while, the complexity produces negative marginal returns, after which the response of the society is to further increase complexity resulting in further negative marginal returns and eventually leading to collapse.

The only civilization that was able to escape these collapse dynamics was the Eastern Roman Empire which underwent a radical simplification of administration in the latter half of the first millennia and thus greatly outlasted the Western Roman Empire, which could not adapt.

[1]. http://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Arc...

Thanks for that. I won't buy from Amazon anymore because of the way they treated me as a seller (they refunded a customer's money after they claimed they didn't recieve the item, after attempting to return the item), but it's certainly available on Alibris http://www.alibris.com/The-Collapse-of-Complex-Societies-Jos.... A note to anyone else wanting this book: it's expensive. $50 for the paperback, $225 for the 1988 hardcover. It must have been a textbook.

My favourite author as well! I've read all of his fiction, but very little of his non-fiction. I love the "extended" Foundation series (including the Empire and Robots sub-series) but my favourite book is The End of Eternity (arguably the first one in the extended series).

I just (like two days ago :) finished reading the Foundation series. Psychohistory loses some of its magic for twenty-first century readers in the face of chaos theory and black swans.

If we are facing a societal collapse, we will have a hard time bootstrapping a reboot because we've consumed most of the easily accessible fossil fuels. We're in a virtuous cycle of high technology and fossil fuels that continue to support access to more fossil fuels.

> black swans

To be fair, he does have a black swan event in the form of the Mule.

>I just (like two days ago :) finished reading the Foundation series. Psychohistory loses some of its magic for twenty-first century readers in the face of chaos theory and black swans.

Chaos theory might be good for the weather (or the stock market and other such micro/fast events) but it might not apply that well to human societies in long term trends (which are not that chaotic and unpredictable, most of history reads like a continuous narrative with cause and effects quite very much at play).

He also predicted the possibility of "black swans" ruining psychohistories predictions and had an agency (let's call it a "second foundation") to influence things and handle those situations.

That said, there were rumors of a Foundation based tv series. I wonder how that's going...

http://www.ign.com/boards/threads/asimovs-foundation-trilogy...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0804484/

The problem if we collapse as a society is we have exhausted all the surface minerals and fossil fuels. If we collapse back to the Neolithic we can never climb back out of the hole. As a species we are one and done.

There are a number of people foreseeing a collapse.

Here is my favorite:

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/

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