The Transition Abyss: The Most Perilous Half-Life of Pain
The greatest danger to human civilization never lies in “the stability of the old era,” nor in “the steady state of the new,” but in the “transition abyss” between them—decades in which the law fails and people lose every bargaining chip they had. Before any post-scarcity welfare system is in place, hundreds of millions of ordinary people will be the first to live through an ice age in which the value of their labor is wiped to zero.
• Productivity surged: British industrial output per worker rose by nearly 50% in just over half a century;
• Wages froze: ordinary British workers’ real wages stagnated or even fell;
• Profits soared as workers were dispossessed: the rate of profit doubled, and capital’s share jumped from 15% to more than 30%.
Amid more than 3,000 Enclosure Acts, landless peasants endured two full generations of misery in sweatshops, until, half a century later, legal unions and the spread of the vote finally let institutions catch up with productivity.
Emerging Intelligence and a Local Squeeze
Standardized white-collar work (programming, translation, entry-level financial analysis) is flattened by algorithms operating in higher dimensions. Society still runs on the old employment laws and safety nets, while the gap between rich and poor widens sharply.
Production Relations Rupture; Compute Fiefdoms Form
The value of labor effectively hits zero, but post-scarcity UBI has not yet arrived. Compute oligarchs monopolize wealth, national tax bases collapse, and regional conflicts break out between jobless drifters and automated security forces.
The Post-Scarcity Oracle Steady State
The old capitalism goes bankrupt. Superintelligence directly coordinates material production and global distribution, survival is fully decoupled from work, and humanity enters one of the steady-state civilizations explored in Act II or Act VI.
The Arms Race in Advanced Lithography, Energy and Compute
Governing High-Dimensional Ghosts with Industrial-Age Law
“The hour before dawn is always the coldest, because the old sun has already sunk below the earth—and the first blaze of the new sun scorches the travelers who carry no umbrella.”