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In a post-2050 society, general-purpose computation was banned and the world rebuilt on analog computers because general computers had grown too powerful, unpredictable, and dangerous, at the cost of untold human lives and economic damage.

In Jack Clark's short fiction 'The Brass Gears of Civilization,' a future civilization bans general-purpose computers as existentially dangerous and rebuilds critical infrastructure (weather, flood, grid modeling) using specialized analog computers, at massive human and economic cost. ✦ AI generated

Jack Clark (Tech Tales narrator) · Import AI · 2026-07-06 · original ↗

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So the great restructuring took place. General computation was banned - walled off as a forbidden technology. We moved the world to analog at the cost of untold billions of harmed human lives and trillions in economic damages. But we had obtained a kind of safety.

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▤ The Brass Gears of Civilization ✳ analog computation

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In a 2050 post-fall world, general-purpose computing was banned as an existential danger, forcing civilization to rebuild critical systems—weather, flooding, earthquakes, power grids—on specialized analog computers, buying safety at the cost of untold lives and economic damage, though a trillion-dollar general-purpose analog mind may still be possible.Jack Clark (Import AI, Tech Tales) · Import AI · conf 85%

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extends → In a 2050 post-fall world, general-purpose computing was banned as an existential danger, forcing civilization to rebuild critical systems—weather, flooding, earthquakes, power grids—on specialized analog computers, buying safety at the cost of untold lives and economic damage, though a trillion-dollar general-purpose analog mind may still be possible.Jack Clark (Import AI, Tech Tales) · Import AI