On the horizon lies a confluence of catastrophe.
One stream is the wealth-concentrating power of capitalism, leading to existential battles between a small group of oligarchs. They have the proven ability to take over states; no democratic force can stop them. Only revolution can re-set the clock. Then growth will resume, along with the concentration of wealth.
The second stream is climate change. It is irreversible now without causing a major economic disaster. The clear response of the increasingly powerful oligarchs is to burn right through it — to use as much fossil fuel as possible, as fast as possible, before it becomes worthless.
The oligarchs believe that if and when climate change becomes expensive enough, the market will fix it. If it kills off 90% of the people on the planet, they’ll be among the 10% who survive.
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The concentration of wealth can be slowed and even reversed for a time, as it was as a result of the Great Depression and New Deal taxation. But it won’t be stopped. It is as relentless as gravity.
Capital has learned how to capture the state. Representatives will always sacrifice public good for personal gain. If they do not, they are targeted for removal. Officials who refuse to cooperate are set-up, if necessary, and their families and friends are pressured.
AI can manifest any two-dimensional reality one can imagine. The ability to create endless streams of convincing kompromat means that capital has all the tools it needs to compromise power.
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That brings us to the third stream in the confluence of catastrophe: Artificial Intelligence. AI is supposedly the way out of this mess — the super-intelligence that steps in and saves humanity.
The AI will provide us with nearly free electricity using non-polluting fusion reactors or artificial suns. The electricity will fuel carbon capture, incinerate our garbage, and desalinate saltwater. Since it will cost almost nothing to make almost everything, surely standards of living will rise worldwide?
Not a chance!
The same folks who brought you Exxon, Tesla, and Apple are planning to own the free energy machines of the future and charge a fortune to power your dwelling, burn your garbage, and clean your water.
It does not matter whether it’s the United States that first gets the artificial sun, or China or the U.K. or France or Germany or India or Russia or Japan or Australia or Saudi Arabia. Its use will be controlled by oligarchs selected by capital. The fruits of superabundance will not be freely shared.
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AI will be used, as it is now, to fuel wealth concentration by disguising it as growth. The stock market goes up! Productivity goes up! Wages flatline. One hundred percent of the increase is hoarded by oligarchs.
Ray Kurzweil’s famous animation showing the steady increase in global GDP conveniently ignores the fact that most people in “the West” haven’t felt any increase in a generation.
The oligarchs pretend that they are building social capital like the stock market that benefits everyone. The stock market isn’t social; it’s private. It’s theirs. You’re welcome to wet your beak a little if you have anything left at the end of the month to invest.
All the leading indicators prove that the world of the super rich is getting steadily better. Too bad about you.
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In their greed to dominate AI, the oligarchs have released shitty AI that is going to screw up the entire project long before we get to artificial suns.
Soon, teenagers equipped with AI will be able to use drones to deliver weapons of mass destruction. The concentration of capital necessary to build a super yacht will come up against a pissed-off kid with an AI weapon.
Just as Putin’s bombers can be taken out by Ukrainian bots, so any large-scale infrastructure can be decimated with cheap, deadly explosives. War is no longer a matter of defending one’s borders. Today, you must defend every bridge, every building, every person.
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The idea of a representative government is over. The idea that we can hire a group of people to defend us is over. You have to represent yourself, fund yourself, protect yourself, educate yourself.
The old ways no longer work. They relied on the specialization of labor, where everyone is the master of their own piece of the puzzle. But now the other pieces have turned predatory for profit: the banks, the farmers, the manufacturers, the distributors, the retailers, the media, and the government.
The puzzle is broken because they all want to dominate and they don’t care about the individual pieces or even the whole puzzle. They want to win, even if the result looks like shit. That brings us back to the confluence of catastrophe, the Singularity of Shit.
People used to believe in working together, in making things better, in making progress. But it doesn’t work anymore. No matter the effort or time invested, all progress, all growth is siphoned off by hedge funds. We toil for their gain, decade after decade. If we learn, they win. If we improve, they confiscate the benefits.
Soon it will no longer make any sense to learn anything, build anything, save anything, or even try. When that day comes, the AI will probably take us out.
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