Why "finally?" Was thre some petition? Has he been claiming he would for a long time?
Because climate change is a major, global, and increasingly visible threat to our presence on this planet - and Stephenson hadn't made it a theme of any of his books over the last four decades. In the opinion of the article's author, this is significant. Seems reasonable to me.
There are hundreds of other writers that have written science fiction based on this premise.
No, that's not what I meant at all.
More so, cloud computing is present and quite important in this book, even though I don’t think the term was used as such. It’s essentially distributed compute that you rent to run your code, and prices vary based on demand. The climate change theme comes into play here, when all compute is rented to run weather simulations in an effort to fight climate change.
There’s also software that edits facial expressions, for instance to eliminate signs of stress during a video call (we’re not quite there yet, but FaceTime’s Eye Contact feature seems to be a step towards that). This, again, is from ‘94.
I do wonder often how much of the current tech is inspired by [hard] SF. Another example seems to be Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which very likely was inspired by Iain M. Banks “neural lace” from the Culture series.
Edit: typing this on phone, and I edited a few times for corrections and to add more info.
I worked really hard to understand the first chapter’s dense descriptions of ridges, grids and virtual machine elements, all the while thinking how a single picture would have made things far simpler.
When a later chapter started describing a torus in great detail I thought, if I’m going to be working this hard, I’d rather be reading a technical book about a topic I was interested in. So I did, and I remember it was way easier, and more edifying.
Has anyone written an AI yet that can read the article and tell you that before you waste your time?
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/actually-no-remove...
If you comment on the webstore page with the request to add finally I will add the feature this week.
While you're at it you can do the same with questionmark / questions, cause the answer is probably "No.".
HN does use software to (de)prioritize certain titles and URLs.
If you think I'm exaggerating, here is an excerpt:
But a few weeks ago, at dinner, a conversation with my teenage son went awry. I was trying to talk to him about possible college plans, and he wouldn't engage. I pushed. We gotta get started, I explained. Applications. Money. Campus visits.
And he said, “Frankly, I just feel sort of nihilistic about it.”
I followed up. About what?
Well, it turned out—the whole thing, really. College, jobs, the ecosphere, the future. The boomers blasted it all into oblivion while Gen X screwed around on the internet.
Here's where I blew it. Instead of giving him the we're-all-in-this-together-change-the-future speech, I said, “Kiddo, I think there's a chance that when all this shakes out, some people will get to be inside the dome and most people won't, and I'm just hoping you'll get inside the dome before they shut the door.”
Like I said, cultish.
The author was talking to his son, who was feeling unmotivated about going to college because the world was ending soon. The author's reply was the section I quoted.
“Dad, I’m depressed and unmotivated about going to college.”
“Son, the world is ending in the near future in sci-fi fashion and I want to make sure you survive in the dome.”
No matter how bad climate change is, I can assure you, we won’t be living in a dome to escape the hellscape in 20 years. People who believe this are exhibiting cultish behavior.
(It is likely that elevated CO2 levels will harm human cognition, it isn't widely known probably because it's too depressing. There are counterarguments like "oh that happens only above 1000ppm we're far from that" but they're based only on short-term experiments.)
My assurance is reality. Reality isn’t a science fiction novel.
Interestingly you only get these absurd predictions from a very narrow group of people, which lines up quite well with what my original comment said. It’s a religious movement, not an accurate assessment of climate science.
The real effects of climate change will be difficult enough. We don’t need to waste energy on inventing fantastical ones.
https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/continued-CO2-emissions-wil...
Combine this with wetbulb temperatures which force everyone to stay in airconditioned indoors for weeks or months in large part of world (this too is supported by climate science). Fantasies? I hope so but expect the worst.
A single study that predicts brain damage from CO2 “by the end of the century” is pure speculation at this point. The link you shared even says it’s still very unclear what the effect is.
I’ll say it again; the actual science says that climate change is a serious problem. It doesn’t say that we are headed into the apocalypse in the next decade.
The actual paper linked from the article links to some research like: "systematic relationships were found between most of the cognitive function scores and CO2 concentration, including from 550–945 ppm". Thinking that in 20 years we could go over 550ppm outside certainly isn't a fantasy, or?