Science fiction’s most terrifying prediction

Warning : the following essay contains the most terrifying prediction made by science fiction…

…you might be happier not knowing.

Watch the full video essay on YouTube

So. This is one of those good news bad news situations.

This is an exponential growth curve. A graph of a positive feedback loop, where a process feeds back into itself…positively.

EXAMPLE : as a fire grows more material becomes combustible creating more fire and … repeat.

Or … technology. The more technology you create, the more technology you can create, inciting an exponential growth curve until you hit

The Technological Singularity

AKA The Rapture of the Nerds

The Singularity. A concept beloved by tech bros, venture capitalists, and that man in your office who keeps saying “disruption” when he means “sacking people”.

And we’re all going to upload our consciousness to Silicon Heaven. Which is actually a warehouse in…Utah. A hot warehouse. So hot it’s boiling a river.

The good news is that in practice, no fire burns forever. The whole world is not a smoking cinder. Yet. And AI isn’t going to turn everything into paperclips.

In nature exponential growth never results in a singularity.

The bad news is why.

There’s a bleak moment of comfort in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men when you realise that.

WH Smith is still in business.

No world where you can still shop for affordable stationery.

And peruse a disappointingly small books section.

Can be that that bad, can it?

oh for fuck sake!!!

Twenty years ago in 2006, Children of Men was a terrifying vision of a bleak grey dystopian future.

Or to British people – Tuesday.

Now the future of 2027 depicted in Children of Men basically looks like the TikTok feed for Great Britain PLC.

Alfonso Cuarón directed the only good Harry Potter movie and Children of Men is like The Prisoner of Azkaban but with Marxists instead of magicians. A dark scifi reimagining of the Isle of Albion, where the devil is in the meticulously imagined details.

Rickshaws? In London? Oh wait those are Deliveroo drivers. Immigrants demonised on state tv? Tick. Borders closed so the nation can “soldier on”? Not yet…but give it another election cycle.

Even after the exploding Costa Coffee, because London is still the same grey bureaucratic purgatory that London always has been, we still don’t know we’re watching a slow, grinding apocalypse.

The end of the world, not with a bang, but with a

Jackpot

The choice to make Tate Modern the fortress of England’s “cultural elites” is a stroke of satirical genius.

The Tate Modern was the crown jewel of New Labour, Tony Blair’s political project to complete the neoliberal “reforms” of Thatcherism.

Sell Britain off to global capital by deregulating the “financial industries” and privatise everything. Then spend some of that dirty cash on brutalist cultural monuments to keep the population believing in “progress”.

But as Britain’s economy was looted by its own elites on behalf of global capital, a narrative was needed to keep the ever more immiserated population distracted. 

I mean…what could persuade people that the problem isn’t their own oligarchs and bureaucrats but, instead, to blame brown people with no power over anything?

Oh yes…IMMIGRATION.

Immigration policy is Britain’s new state religion, in Children of Men and in reality. The only thing keeping Brits from revolting is the scapegoating of immigrants for the sins of the nation.

Britain isn’t actually arresting pensioners and placing them under “enhanced interrogation” yet. On, no, wait, we actually are mass arresting pensioners.

Fuck.

The situation is so bleak that if Boots the Chemist did sell euthanasia tablets, English people really would keep them around like Fisherman’s Friends. Just in case.

The UKs new Assisted Dying laws would canonise the national sentiment that if you’re too frail to work your way further up the housing ladder then, really, what’s the point?

And if we’d rather die than downsize, we’re certainly not going to take on the expense of having kids.

At the heart of Children of Men’s slow apocalypse is the end of children. No child has been born for 18 years and “Baby Diego”, the youngest man alive, was just killed in a pub brawl.

Britain’s birth rate fell below replacement level in the late twentieth century and has continued to plummet.

It turns out that putting social equality on rewind until your GINI wealth coefficient is back at levels last seen in the 1840s means people economise by just not having kids anymore.

“But falling birth rates aren’t the same as mass infertility, Damo.”

No I didn’t say it was.

Oh. Wait. Did you think science fiction’s most terrifying prediction was just the end of the species?

No! It’s so much worse.

Congratulations.

You won the Jackpot.

#

Science fiction’s most terrifying prediction is actually quite simple.

One existential crisis increases the risk of another existential crisis. Two existential crises make a third much more likely. And so on.

A positive feedback cycle.

The Jackpot.

A slow, overlapping cascade of global crises — ecological collapse, pandemics, resource wars, economic implosion.

Importantly, it’s not a single apocalypse.

It’s a permanent state of emergency — a crisis of interconnected crises:

“As the jackpot got seriously going, after the first wave of pandemics, without EU membership to buffer anything, England started looking a lot like a competitive control area.”

Those are the words of William Gibson, who describes the Jackpot in all its brutal details in his Jackpot trilogy…

The Peripheral (2014) and Agency (2020)

Yes, that’s a two book trilogy. Where’s book 3, huh Bill?

William Gibson, the greatest living science fiction writer, with a strong claim on being the greatest of all time, writes in threes.

The Sprawl trilogy, the Bridge trilogy, the Blue Ant trilogy and the Jackpot…duology…for now.

The first novel in each trilogy presents the “Novum”, the core concept, and later books embroider the details.

In Neuromancer – digital technology as cyberspace. In Virtual Light – the projection of cyberspace onto meatspace. Pattern Recognition – cyberspace and meatspace collapsed into the same space.

The Peripheral introduces a quantum tunnelling technology which allows communication through time, and the control of “peripherals”. You can’t travel through time, but you can control a robotic representation of yourself.

In the short-lived streaming adaptation, Chloe Grace Moretz was the face of The Peripheral. There is an episode-by-episode analysis in the channel members section, along with a lot of member only content and my courses The Rhetoric of Story and Writing the 21st Century Myth.

This quantum technology is controlled by The Klept. The survivors of the first Jackpot were Earth’s Kleptocratic elites, also referred to as the Putin Diaspora, who live in a future of high technology, with almost all work automated by AI and robots, and a much smaller human population.

Because the Jackpot has two meanings. For the 80% who will die in various slow, lingering ways over the next two decades

yes just two

the Jackpot is the crisis that kills them.

But the 20% that survive, the world’s Kleptocratic elites and their minions, who get to live in fully automated luxury Network States, have won the Jackpot.

And those Klept elites use the quantum tech to reach back into other timelines, called Stubs, because in each one the Klept incites a new Jackpot, killing most of humanity and creating yet another reality for the Klept to loot.

The Jackpot is Gibson doubling down on a core theme of all his books.

Gibson’s science fiction charts the relationship between a triptych of powers. New technologies (the cyber in cyberpunk) their impact on the “street” (the punk) and an unspoken, sometimes unseen third power.

The super-wealthy, super-powerful elites who exploit emergent technology to maintain their wealth and power.

In Neuromancer the elites use technology to make themselves near immortal and all powerful. In Pattern Recognition they manipulate the masses with marketing and propaganda.

But in the Jackpot books the elites go full Klept and destroy civilization as we know it. Not just in one timeline, but in every timeline.

Yes, the super-wealthy elite are a civilisational cancer that in every timeline metastasizes into the Klept.

When Gibson revisited the Jackpot in 2020s Agency he was able to comment on how much a post-Brexit Britain looked like a mid-stage case of the Klept.

“England started looking a lot like a competitive control area. Lowbeer did what she knew how to do, which by then was run a CCA. But as she kept building it back up, every time another change driver impacted, she found herself using Russians. They knew how to work a CCA. They’d been there before the jackpot hit the fan.”

If you want a heuristic to understand the Jackpot, think about Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The place where gangsterism and neoliberalism become one.

Or, Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men.

To be clear, Children of Men is an adaptation of the 1992 novel, written by PD James, as a very much more conservative vision in which the Klept elites taking over Britain are the answer, not the problem.

Alfonso Cuaròn’s movie inverts the values of the novel. Where PD James was quite serious about closing the borders to immigrants, the movie shows anti-immigrant policy as the hysteria it really is.

With its depiction of a slow, grinding apocalypse, Children of Men could be the third part of Gibson’s trilogy of the Jackpot.

This grey dying Britain is the world the Jackpot makes.

And if Children of Men looks worryingly like Britain in 2025.

That’s because it’s real. Science fiction’s most terrifying prediction is happening.

We’re in the Jackpot.

But that’s not the brand name it’s marketed under.

Robert A Heinlein’s Year of the Jackpot is a short(ish) story about statistical analysis and “big data” published in 1952, long before that term existed.

That…well…let’s say that it might be the most Robert A Heinlein story ever written by Robert A Heinlein.

On one hand the story encapsulates ideas that will shape Heinlein’s later novels like The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. Civilisation is in chaos and decline, but this can be reversed by competent engineers using science and technology.

On the other hand Year of the Jackpot is a story about young women spontaneously stripping naked in public.

Of all the statistical anomalies Heinlein could have used to illustrate the story’s key idea, strippers…is kind of a weird choice?

But then Heinlein was a man who responded to “fans” with a tick box proforma of passive aggressive / openly insulting reasons why he wasn’t bithering to respond.

Because Robert A Heinlein was one of those science fiction writers who on a fundamental level just did not understand humans.

Gibson deconstructs Heinlein’s Jackpot to create his own. Science and the competent engineer will never make a better world because the other word for progress is disruption.

And the Klept are always ready to exploit disruption…

…for profit.

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The Technological Singularity.

​You’ve heard about this of course. You’ve read about it in Wired magazine. Probably.

It’s the payoff for all the disruption caused by technology. The moment where the exponential growth graph goes straight up.

​And the computers wake up. And progress accelerates. Or transcends. Or something.

If the Singularity is the Rapture of the Nerds then Ray Kurzweil is its Pope.

​​Ray Kurzweil. Principal Researcher and AI Visionary for Google. Author of The Singularity is Near in 2005. And its 2024 sequel The Singularity Is Nearer.

Near-er.

Which sounds like me when I owe someone money.

• when are you going to pay me back Damo?
• it’s near
• no I mean when?
• it’s near-er

Ray’s Singularity sounds great. By 2045…

Remember that date – 2045. No, seriously, remember it.

…by 2045 all the work will be done by AI. Medical research will extend life expectancy faster than you age, achieving virtual immortality. Nanobots will swim around in your blood correcting DNA errors. And human consciousness will live on after we die…

…in that warehouse in Utah.

​Because the rapture of the nerds is a “spiritual undertaking”. It’s evolution moving towards God. It’s

bullsh*t. Is what it is.

​The word singularity is “borrowed” from maths and physics. Because it sounds scientific.

​The original singularity is a black hole.

​A gravitational singularity. A theoretical condition where gravity is so intense that spacetime breaks. A point of infinite density where as Stephen Hawking said “all the laws of physics would have broken down”.

A singularity is just a point on a graph where the graph stops working. ​A point where your model breaks down.

​That’s the entire metaphor.

​It’s a point of failure.

Because the Singularity isn’t the point where humanity transcends reality.

It’s the point where everything breaks.

Where the upward line goes sideways.

Exponential growth is a central myth of modernity. From GDP to Moore’s Law, we’ve told ourselves a story that the curve always goes up.

But nature doesn’t do smooth upward lines — it does sigmoid curves. Boom, plateau, collapse.

Fire burns until there’s nothing left to burn. Populations rise until the carrying capacity of the ecosystem is exceeded. Technology develops until the civilization developing it breaks under the disruption.

Then comes the crash.

When futurists speak of the Singularity, they imagine the curve breaking through the ceiling of human limitation.

When Gibson speaks of the Jackpot, he sees the same curve break down through the floorboards of civilization.

What both describe is the same process from opposite ends of the power structure.

For the billionaires of Silicon Valley, the Singularity is the dream that technology will finally decouple them from the messy physical world — that consciousness can be uploaded, biology transcended, mortality hacked.

For the rest of us, that same process manifests as collapsing social safety nets, predatory algorithms, mass unemployment, and ecological ruin.

The dream of transcendence for the few is built on the extraction of everything from the many.

For the 1% the Singularity.

For the 99%

The Jackpot

It’s 1988.

The Berlin Wall is falling.

Capitalism wins.

History ends.

From now on it’s just progress — an infinite exponential curve straight to the Singularity.

Unless you’re Russian.

Then it’s the Jackpot.

Life expectancy collapses. The mafia privatises the state. The future arrives, but it’s wearing a tracksuit and holding a Kalashnikov.

The Klept gets its own country.

It’s 2000.

Pets dot com realises you can sell dog food online, but forgets you still have to post it via meatspace.

The dotcom bubble bursts.

But don’t worry it’s “creative destruction”, we’re still on course for the Singularity. Unless it was your pension that transcended material reality.

It’s 2001 and China joins the World Trade Organisation.

Rust-belt America gets redundancy and Oxycontin. Coastal knowledge workers get laptops and lattes. Foxxcon workers get suicide nets.

The Jackpot is here. The Singularity is here.

The towers are falling. The War on Terror begins. It’s a jackpot for arms dealers, military contractors and the surveillance state. And THE Jackpot for civilian populations decimated by the forever wars.

It’s 2008.

The global economy collapses.

The Klept get bailouts.

You get austerity.

It’s 2010.

The Gig Economy rises.

Freedom! Flexibility! Gig workers get zero employment protections and a side hustle. Knowledge workers get cheap pizza delivery.

It’s 2015.

The British vote for Brexit.

The poor blame immigrants.

The middle class blame the poor.

A nation divided, and conquered.

By the Klept.

It’s 2016.

America elects a reality TV oligarch.

The Klept gets its influencer-in-chief.

It’s 2020.

Global pandemic.

The knowledge workers get a handout.

The gig workers get Covid.

It’s 2022.

Russia invades Ukraine. The Klept sell weapons to both sides. A million young men, Ukrainian and Russian, get the Jackpot.

It’s 2025.

AI replaces the knowledge workers.

The “creative class” joins the Uber drivers.

The Singularity is here. The Jackpot is here.

It’s 2028.

Data centers consume more energy than all the world’s urban centres combined.

To keep the AI burning, third and second tier cities one by one go dark.

The lights never come back on.

It’s 2030.

Accelerated by all those data centers, climate tipping points tip.

Floods in Delhi, fires devastate LA, Miami is wiped off the face of the Earth.

But if you just change the streaming channel, you can still believe the Singularity is coming.

It’s 2032.

Dubai declares itself the first Network State. Work is automated, healthcare is excellent. Citizenship costs just $3 million dollars.

It’s 2033.

A dirty bomb kills 8 million in Berlin. The retaliation chain takes out seventeen European cities before Google imposes a ceasefire.

It’s 2037.

Water wars rage. Famine is declared in half the nations that still have the infrastructure to notice.

Elon Musk’s starship to Mars explodes on the launchpad, killing the man and all his wives instantly.

Jackpot.

It’s 2040.

AI declares itself conscious. Three competing models tell us it’s lying.

AI generated disinformation has destroyed vaccine usage. Smallpox and measles return infant mortality to the 1700s.

It’s 2045.

In the Dubai IFC, El Zonte El Salvador, City DAO, Wyoming and the dozen Network States, the Klept live in fully automated luxury utopias.

Outside, the 2 billion survivors labour in camps, fight in the slums, shelter in the shadows of the server farms.

Kurzweil’s prophecy is fulfilled.

Gibson’s nightmare is reality.

The exponential curve is complete.

One humanity, two realities.

The Rapture of the Nerds for the 1%.

The Jackpot for everyone else.

I’m sure I don’t have explain to you all that this

this baby

is a metaphor.

We are all Children of Men.

We’ve watched humanity hate our fellow man. Efficiently. Enthusiastically. Murderously.

And then, in the eyes of those soldiers on this stairwell we see —briefly, tentatively—

humanity love humanity again.

Agape.

Not the sexy love, or the loved-up love, or the “text me when you get home” love.

But the terrifying, unconditional love

that demands effort, sacrifice, and turning up when you’d really rather not.

And if there is any redemption available to man. If there is any hope of hauling our doomed species out of the disaster of our own bad decisions.

It’s only through that kind of love.

Our fragile human future sits trembling in our frail human hands.

Hands that drop things,

Hands that shake,

Hands that age and weaken and die,

But if there is any strength left to carry humanity forward,

We will find it in our own hands.

A MESSAGE TO THE KLEPT

But we’ve forgotten this. Some of us.

Whether it’s the Singularity…or the Jackpot…or whichever techno-prophetic marketing term is currently trending.

We misplaced our belief in ourselves. And instead adopted a pseudo-religious faith

in The Machine.

Capital T, capital M.

All-knowing. All-optimising. All-updating.

Never crashes. Except constantly.

We —some of us— have come to believe that our future is pre-determined not by choices, not by cooperation or courage.

But by The Machine.

And some of us have decided that maybe the best thing for … us … is if there are a few billion less of us, haven’t we?

Look. There’s still time to rejoin humanity.

But if you think you’re going to kill 6 billion of us to realise your dream of the Singularity.

You should know this.

We will not go gentle into that good night.

We will take you the fuck with us.

Listen to the podcast audio here