Header 1

Our future, our universe, and other weighty topics


Thursday, November 5, 2026

Revisiting the Blogs Discussed in My Post "Blogs About the Future, Pessimistic and Optimistic"

My 2013 post " Blogs About the Future, Pessimistic and Optimistic" was one of my best-read posts of that year. Let's take at the current state of most of the blog sites I discussed in that post. 

Next Big Future. The site www.NextBigFuture.com is still running, and seems to be mainly a site giving you the latest press releases from AI companies or other high-tech companies.  The site is now very cluttered up with ads. 

Singularity Hub (www.SingularityHub.com). The site is still running, and also is mainly an echo chamber of the latest press releases from AI companies or other high-tech companies. 

Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence (http://www.kurzweilai.net) The link now takes you to a page that mainly just promotes books by Ray Kuzweil. We have a site with nothing but headlines or titles, and no paragraphs to be read. There's not even any much of any "teaser text" below the headlines or link titles -- maybe a sentence at most. Clicking on the links will mostly take you to skimpy articles in a small hard-to-read font. I may note the irony between Kurzweil's "progress is super-accelerating" claims and the poor design of this site, which seems more like a sign of the Internet getting worse than a sign of the Internet getting better. 

The Automatic Earth (www.theautomaticearth.com).  This link once took you to a fascinating pessimistic blog. The link now just takes you to a site with daily posts entitled "Debt Rattle."  Each post just has about ten links to other articles. I can no longer recommend this site. 

ApocaDocs (www.apocadocs.com). This site was a fine source of pessimistic information when I mentioned it in 2013. The site ran until 2016, but shut down then. 

Our Finite World (https://ourfiniteworld.com/). In 2013 this was a readable blog written by an actuary (Gail Tverberg) who wrote interesting, thoughtful articles about upcoming problems that may be caused by mankind overshooting its supply of resources such as oil. I see that the site is still running, with no change in its format; and the site is still getting frequent long posts by its author.  By now the site (which has been updated since 2007) has got 17 million page views. Although I have a doubt or two about the author's prophetic prowess, I can applaud her for maintaining a deep analysis ad-free blog for all of this long period. 

Collapse of Industrial Civilization (www.collapseofindustrialcivilization.com) In 2013 this was a graphically slick blog taking a pessimistic view of the future. The blog seems to be still running full blast, continuing to post long posts several times a month. A major plus is that you can read 10+ long posts without doing any additional clicking once you reach the site.  And except for some ads in the left margin of the blog, the site is not cluttered up by any ads.  I have not read many of the posts, but I can at least applaud the physical design of a blog like this, which allows a reader to read a huge amount of text while staying on the same page, without the text being interrupted by ads.  This blog site has an excellent blogroll on its left margin, which allows you to discover many other blog sites. 

No comments:

Post a Comment