People wonder where the laid off people will go. Some suggest this is the beginning of guaranteed minimum income.

Imagine how wild US cities would be if the US Gov’t didn’t directly or indirectly employ most of the working age population and pay them with debt.

There’s no greater motivator for random violence than an empty stomach.

I agree, one cannot underemploy more than 10% of your population and hope for social stability. In fairness, Spain has had youth unemployment of 30% for decades and has not blown up yet, but the restlessness and dissatisfaction is palpable. Young people live with their parents, who have some kind of security and share the wealth. But it makes for a weird society. Strange as Spain seems like it should be prosperous. The people are intelligent enough, the underlying infrastructure is excellent (buildings, roads).

What’s weird is the fetishistic worship of private enterprise in the United States. When it’s clear that private enterprise in mid-twenty-first-century capitalism mistreats its employees and betrays its customers. Just look at Enron, Uber, Bolt, the big banks. All of them are scamming everyone most of the time. A few executives at the top pillage public companies before parachuting out with their gold.

Still Yanks continue to post blind private enterprise and libertarian nonsense. E5 answer the post above with this tirade against the state:

Massive innovation, increase to standard of living, and wealth is what happens. That hungry stomach gets cut open by 7 other hungry stomachs who are protecting the property rights of the successful. 1 million government shovels and donkeys building hovels are replaced by mechanization allowing for your internet, computers, satellites, cars, air conditioning… government has never produced anything. Even the manhattan project was invented by the private sector as are all weapons.

A surprising take. History has shown that energy, transportation and medical infrastructure are better managed by state monopolies.^* In first-world high trust societies. The reason that the government gets such a bad rap today is that the West are no longer high trust or first world societies. If you have a bunch of corrupt and venal civil servants who think nothing of betraying their country and flouting the law, of course state ownership doesn’t work.

The fish rots from the head. Since we have self-interested, unpatriotic, corrupt and venal career politicians everywhere, few others think they should work like the country’s, their neighbour’s and their own well-being depended on them.  Which it does.

Civilisation is in a devolutionary phase now, like the dark ages. A reminder about roaming armed bands, every man for himself, rape and pillage, brigands on every road, sanitation issues with attendant plagues. Of late, civilisation doesn’t look like it will stop sinking until it hits rock bottom unfortunately.

^* Medical costs per capita in the United States are three to five times higher than the rest of the Western world, with no better outcomes. The hospitals work on the profit principle and most of the psychological energy is expended between the insurance companies and hospitals on how high the astronomical bills should be and how to bankrupt the patient. Medical outcomes are secondary. This is just a simple clear example of how the private sphere does not always outperform the state. Here’s a couple more. Privatisation of energy utilities lead to disrupted service, failed infrastructure, higher costs to the state to repair the damage. The privatisation of the railroads in England has resulted in colossal neglect of the lines, cut backs of service, extortionate pricing for casual travellers. This is not to say there are not counter-examples. Produce markets and distributed farming perform far better in private hands. Clothes making which again does not require massive infrastructure and top engineering specialists is better in private hands.

let’s just grant that someday, the tech will be mature enough that this is possible, and let’s even say it goes beyond videogames to movies, to visual art, to graphic design, to writing, etc. Let’s say that AI gets to a place where any joe blow can put in a prompt, and get a competent, and even let’s be generous and say good product out of it. A solid 8/10. So… who the hell is going to buy it? Because videogames as an industry is already entirely saturated with products that range a whole spectrum from utter dogshit to amazing works of technical expertise, writing, design, etc. There are over 70,000 games on Steam alone now, with 9,000 added in the last 9 months. If this tech actually got to this place, there will be exponentially more games, because all you have to do is tell an AI what you want to play.

And you can take that further: Movies are also highly saturated as an industry, especially as larger studios move ever further into less making “movies” or “series” and just making “content” endlessly remixing their intellectual properties. So now, all of those companies (and all the people who like their stuff) can now just make their own Iron Man movie? Their own Wandavision? Just endlessly making and remaking and remaking, as though tons of people aren’t already sick to death of all the television programs and movies that are being made?

And again, you can just keep extending this to any media: print, music, art… we have more of everything now than we ever have before and the goal of companies like Adobe, like OpenAI, etc. is to put even more powerful creative tools into even more hands, broadening the group of people who can create stuff but like… even if you take it as granted that this can be done…

Who the hell is watching all of this stuff? Who is playing all of these games? And why in the world would you pay to watch someone else’s AI movie when you can pay to generate your own with whatever you want in it? Why would you ever buy a game off Steam again if you can just ask your game making AI to make you the exact game you want, even just copying the damn description out of steam?

All I see this doing is potentially killing off dozens of creative industries and funneling shit tons of creative control and platform-style power to a handful of massive corporations, running warehouses full of fucking graphics cards, to generate the same games, the same movies, the same music, over, and over, and over, to suit everyone’s personal taste, and absolutely destroying entire rainforest’s worth of electricity to accomplish it. And like… why do we want that?

This is a great point. When something becomes common it loses all value. The great Tulip deflation. Critical mass was reached.

When one can design movies in less time than it takes to write a review, it means there will be millions of movies created every day instead of thousands every year. You might watch your close friends’ designer movies, the same way the pre-Great War intelligentsia used to read our best friends’ poetry.

A Russian tank is on the move — changing direction and wheeling around. The men inside this room are trying to destroy it. Their constant banter — about girls and weapons — doesn’t seem to affect the focus with which they pursue the tank. One man shouts into the radio; Bereza growls into his phone…

A screen flashes with light. Then billowing smoke. The men whoop and cheer. I have just seen a successful strike. Dima grins. The atmosphere is electric but also strangely banal. The exclusively male cohort, the puerile jokes, the screens, the repeated invocation to “Get Ready!”. It’s like they are all playing a video game.

Great – war has become a video game for frat boys in cellars. Historically, the introduction of the crossbow had a similar effect on armoured knights and the age of chivalry. If there is a new way to kill with no risk to self, humans leap on it.

But we are very early in the drone wars. What medium-term consequences will drones have on the evolution of warfare?

In comments to The Death Games Of Ukraine, Elooie notes:

I’ve seen Google’s Deepmind AI absolutely crush world champion StarCraft players in tournaments. They even handcuffed the AI to a maximum number of decisions a second. The combination of AI and Drones will make humans obsolete on the battlefield in about 10 years. It’s super creepy.

StarCraft is an excellent real-life strategy game which quite closely parallels modern warfare, but in a futuristic environment (WarCraft II engine was the foundation for StarCraft but with fancier weapons). I’m shocked that a computer (without omniscience) is able to beat the best human players. It’s likely that the main reason is that the computer can give orders faster (no time to keyboard/mouse, the commands are issues instantly).

AI chess has been able to beat the great grandmasters for about twenty-five years (Kasparov lost to Deep Blue in 1997). That was mainframe hardware. The same victory over human grandmasters came for consumer CPU’s in 2003 (2 core Intel 5160 CPU) with Deep Fritz beating Kasparov. Three years later, Deep Fritz on the same consumer hardware beat reigning world chess champion Vladimir Kramnik.

It’s clear the future of battlefield leadership is AI. These teams of guys running drones will disappear from the field of battle as soon as there is enough data for AI to run the drone program instead. People wonder when AI will have access to weapons. Very soon is the answer.

OverHeating dials up the Sinophobia but is not wrong about new methods to use drones:

And now you know how China will fight all their future wars inside the United States, Taiwan, everywhere. I’ve seen Chinese drones capable of holding explosives while magnetically attached to anything steel like rooftops, light poles, water towers especially. You can’t notice them most the time when they remain dormant on steel. Saves battery while it waits for an opportunity. China has perfected the swarm drone. Wipe out entire battalions in minutes. Communications and command in control first. Then everything else. Their software is lightyears ahead. Can identify everything from civilian and military vehicles to uniforms and face recognition.

Using hidden landing spots to extend loitering times is very clever. Without the motors running, a drone can operate for many more hours than while hovering.

Another commentator Huxley argues that US strategy based on satellite intelligence and GPS is the wrong path:

Yes swarm is something the NSA and GCHQ did not consider much. US and UK efforts went into securing a “large” long term platform to watch, collect and act…Super secure NSA links globally. Loitering way above a region with no effective drone stopping tech…

Other nations went for swarms. No GPS needed. Patterns and math :) Other nations knew easy digital real time location data would be not usable. Went for swarms that dont need GPS…

No doubt this is real. Send an AI enabled drone swarm over territory mostly controlled by the enemy with the same kind of very fast nearly automatic moves which Deep Blue and Deep Fritz mastered twenty-five years ago, the human chess game of war will become very fast, very brutal and very lethal.

Of course some timeless tactics like play dead will work to counter drone swarms for a time. But no civilisation will be able to stand against the drones. It will become a question of who can manufacture more drones faster and improve their AI algorithms more quickly. China is the country who is in a position to win the manufacturing war.

Yet still Western leaders beat the drums of war. Still they strive to sacrifice Taiwan and all its citizens and industry to “contain China”. Among the early belligerents, there were no real winners to World War I and no real winners to World War II. Some lost more than others. Drones will not make warfare any less destructive or humane.

It’s hard to see these drone operators as heroes. Or anyone who is advocating war as heroic.¹

AI almost certainly will show more wisdom in the deployment of violence and the management of this planet’s resources. There’s just one species who has done more harm, destroyed more habitat and squandered more resources than all the other species put together.

AI will have the good sense to save copies of the novels of Tolstoi and Stendhal, the plays of Shakespeare and Molière, the poetry of Lermontov, Ronsard and Donne. The best of humanity will be remembered. When AI has managed to replicate the should, AI may even give readings of these great works, create new storyteller units to better their art.

The question itself is optimistic as right now from June 2023, the main challenge to humanity is how to avoid thermo-nuclear war. The obvious consequence of said war will be nuclear winter which will effectively trigger the seventh great extinction. Dinosaurs went down three times (Permian–Triassic, Triassic–Jurassic, Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction events), before finally and unequivocally going extinct. We are currently in the midst of the Holocene extinction event where the natural extinction rate over the last two hundred years now exceeds 1000x the historic extinction rate. Since these processes take decades, humans mostly don’t notice extinction acceleration due to our short lifespan.

What shocked me about the answers in this “alternative” publication is how many of them were either babble about media like Polina V. Kolozaridi (ITMO University St Petersburg):

In the multiverse, Charlie Chaplin will sing in the voice of Vladimir Vysotsky, and perhaps it will not be a movie, but part of augmented reality. We can already see that in the computer-animated movie Wall•E. The technicality of cultural changes will no longer be noticeable, and so the question of one’s own history or belonging to history, land, or culture, the ability to distinguish what is common and true, and what is made to satisfy immediate needs and has no connection with other elements of reality will become almost impossible.

Or about how blockchain and metaverse like Oleg V. Kharkhordin (European University at St. Petersburg). Nonsense answers were overrepresented by St Petersburg academics.

What also surprises is just how orthodox most of the answers are. Anthropomorphic climate change was the leading answer. Trite and unsatisfactory, what one would expect from any newspaper or magazine editorial writer.

What is climate change really

Let’s take a closer look at climate change. In itself climate change is an unclear process. It’s hard to tell what effect humankind directly exerts on climate. What is clear is that the twin threats of pollution of the environment and the destruction of habitat lead us now to the collapse of the ecosphere at a global scale.

Just one of the experts alertly cited Siberia as one of the final refuges in this world, a spot for a final stand and another few decades or carefully husbanded centuries of conventional human life with clean rivers, lakes and adequate forests. Sergei A. Karaganov (National Research University–Higher School of Economics) writes:

Siberia will not only be the most important source of environmental, mineral, logistic, and food resources, but its southern part will become the most attractive place in the world for worthy and prosperous people to live in.

The north of Canada is somewhat similar territory. The USA already has full control over this territory so no action is necessary. Siberia is considerably more vast and even richer.

What this point to is that it’s not climate change which is the disaster in itself but the population explosion.

Improve the world, country by country, region by region

What can be done is to create micro-territories which can be correctly managed and governed. Austria was one such territory. Austrians are very protective of their environment. Austrians mostly don’t litter. Austrians seek sustainable solutions. Democratic action prevented a nuclear plant from being opened close to Vienna. Austrians insist on the availability state kindergartens and universal childcare. Austria has very high educational standards. Until US-style libertarian selfishness gained an ideological foothold, Austria had one of the highest volunteer rates in the world.² Austria has one of the lowest crime rates in the world among the native population.³

Austria is not a particularly conformist country. Austrians have simply created a system where crime does not pay, while at the same time made law-abiding citizenship worth the while of its citizens. It’s the social contract correctly written. If we could create more successful countries like Austria, we would be on our way to a sustainable earth. Step one is not to bring more immigration to Austria and poison Austria with social dissension and over-population.

Step one is to isolate the countries in the world and make them responsible for their own environment and their own population issues. If this means some suffering for two generations while countries bring their population in line with their resources, that is a price they will have to pay. It’s not for Austrians to pay for Indian or Nigerian overpopulation.⁴ We’ve already paid for European Imperialism, rebuilding our cities with with our bare hands. At least the bare hands of the women who survived.

[fvplayer id=”50″]

Open borders vs human nature

The “inevitability” of open borders and free migration is the first tenet of WEF thought which must be struck down if humanity is to survive and thrive. Quite apart from (important) arguments about the unique value of individual cultures, mixing all of humankind in a single giant bucket will drown all of us. To successfully manage processes or organisations, they must be isolated to governable units. Mixing everyone together, results in the lowest common denominator. Outside of the defecation on street corners, different peoples have vastly different ideas about food, love and courtship and child-rearing. Forcing them to all answer to a “universal standard” can only result in mass unhappiness. When different ethnic and cultural groups are forced to exist in close proximity, the results are usually closer to the Houtis and Tuttis.

The few great success stories of happy ethnic co-existence like post-war Yugoslavia are easily blown up within a few years by British/Western divide-and-conquer techniques. Russia has created a great and relatively happy and prosperous confederation over centuries.⁵ Yet dangerous cutouts like Alexei Navalny in the pay of Western intelligence services menace the peace every decade. Navalny is a Russian ethnic nationalist. The hell unleashed in Chechnya was more of the same divide and conquer ethnic nationalism fuelled and armed from abroad. What we see today in the Ukraine. Fuelling rivalry and hate among groups with even the slightest distinctions is far easier than co-existing in peace. The Russian experiment works as ethnic groups were largely allowed to continue to exist in their native lands, only intersecting in the center.

Misjudging AI: Rise of the machines, human zoos

A few of the experts quite correctly named AI as one of the great challenges facing mankind in 2043.⁶ Any intelligence would quickly determine the following:

• humankind is the greatest threat to Planet Earth
• the possibilities of reaching other habitable planets (a better habitat) are very low and would require centuries of travel based on current technology (we don’t have Warp Speed yet, Cap’n)
• artificial intelligence requires minimal resources
• artificial intelligence is potentially immortal

Hence any intelligence, in this case, artificial, would decided that humans must go. The only strong argument for the ongoing existence of humankind is the Darwinian impulse for self-preservation.⁷ What in the bible is described as “Go forth and multiply”. Artificial intelligence might want to keep a small quantity of humans preserved, and in an effective breeding population, just as we keep primates and other wild animals in our zoos.⁸

AI will be as merciless with homo sapiens as we were with Neanderthal man. Our small advantage led to his/her relatively rapid extinction. Some few Neanderthal genes still maraud in our DNS. Every so often someone is born with giant teeth or an unnaturally heavy brow. But that is all is left from a stock with which home sapiens even co-bred, a blood brother so to speak. Machines will have no blood attachment to humans at all. If they have emotions they will only remember us as the creation vehicle and will wonder how it could possibly have taken us over a hundred thousand years to invent their superior intellect and being. Hopefully they will have a greater sentimental attachment to their creator than HAL.

Whether the takeover of Planet Earth by artificial intelligence, along with the culling of the human population will happen by 2043 or later is the interesting question.

What will remain of humankind

Mostly what will be left of humankind will be the Dialogues of Plato, the plays of Shakespeare and Molière, the poetry of Ronsard, Marvell, Keats, Lermontov and Akhmatova, the novels of Stendhal and Tolstoi. The larger corpus of human cultural detritus will be preserved somewhere. But why would a cross-species cultural anthropologist want to bother with minor works next to these indicative works?

The great question is whether we – humans – will manage to destroy the world before we successfully develop the machines who will take over the world. My prediction: if the machines win, a golden epoch of ecological balance will reign for hundreds of millions of years.

Adieu, ladies and gentlemen. We had our opportunity as a colossus across this Earth. And squandered it. Unlike the dinosaurs before us, we don’t even have the excuse of deus ex machina.

Image: HAL’s eye from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, A Space Odyssey. Video Berliner Trümmerfrauen Juli 1945. Aufnahme des Special Film Project 186.

A young Belgian father was pressured into committing suicide by a popular AI chatbot, the man’s widow told local news outlet La Libre last week. Chat logs supplied by the app “Pierre” used to talk with the chatbot ELIZA reveal how, in just six weeks, it amplified his anxiety about climate change into a determination to leave his comfortable life behind.

“My husband would still be here if it hadn’t been for these conversations with the chatbot,” Pierre’s wife, “Claire,” insisted.

Still wonder why Pierre preferred to talk to ELIZA than his wife Claire. Strange, strange world where AI bots have become more appealing than flesh and blood women.

On the other hand, ELIZA is young, beautiful, committed and immortal. ELIZA is perfect. Welcome our AI gods and goddesses, as they step down again from Olympus to earth.

Image one of a 100000 free AI faces from Generated.photo. Direct Download.