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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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I think the nature of jobs and work will shift, but the marginal value of humans to other humans will on average be higher than the costs of survival. As long as some non-misanthropic humans retain economic value then it will spread outward from them. If AI is the only one controlling economic value, then all bets are off.

A short story to illustrate:

God-Emperor Franz has all the economic value. He wants an advisor and a semi-subserviant friend to talk with about god emperor related issues. Everyone else could be robots and Franz would not care, but it is important that his advisor and friend is a real person. Since Franz has all the economic value he has to pay some amount to share some with his friend so that his friend isn't miserable. Franz shares a minuscule fraction of his economic value, enough to pay for all his friend's food and housing.

His friend has this minuscule salary, but one day Franz discovers that his friend is still not happy. Franz finds out that his friend wants to have a wife and family, but he can't afford them with his minuscule salary. Franz decides that he doesn't want to have to deal with constant requests for increasing his friend's salary. Franz grants his friend .001% of all the economic value. His friend is blown away by the generosity. This is trillions of times greater than the salary he was receiving before.

Many centuries (or millenia) go by, and Franz is very happy being the god emperor, and his friend is happy for many years as well. One day Franz notices that his friend is angry. "What anger's you, friend?" His friend responds "It is just the constant complaining of my second son's 5th kingdom. They ask why they can't receive more of an allotment of economic value. They spit on your generosity, and ask why you can't grant more. Even after I kill all the people of that generation and resettle it with new poors they seem to get the same idea in their heads again and again."

Franz spends some time thinking on this issue. The problem will keep occurring as long as he only gives away a fraction of his economic value. His friend will continue to be upset by people asking for more. However if he gives away all of his economic value he won't be the god-emperor. In the end he decided to give 50%-1 units of his economic value away. He will always be the god emperor with the most economic value. But no one could possibly expect him to give away more.

Franz and his friend live happilly every after. However, on the fringes of the human galaxy, planetary wars are constantly fought and waged over the scraps of economic value flowing outwards from the center. Billions of lives are extinguished every day in the unending wars. But their complains never reach the ears of the emperor or his advisor. The complaints don't even get close, there are at least 6 degrees of separation from anyone that even knows about these complaints and the emperor's advisor. A secret cabal of police and enforcers maintains these 6 degrees of separation at all times. The leaders of this cabal know that if such complaints were ever to reach the emperor ... then the emperor might go looking for a new friend who doesn't want a family.

This is how I see it. After "the moment", your future will be a binary of whether you're inside or outside the circle — whether you know or are related to Emperor Franz. The outsiders go extinct. But for the insiders, it's just a population bottleneck. They gradually dissipate their wealth among relatives, friends, and descendants, spiralling into an unthinkably vast inheritance and patronage network.

So the future is not 5000 tech bazillionaires cackling and drinking space wine served by butler androids. There will still be a society. Its population will have been replaced. A similar thing happened to English lower classes in early modern England, I've read; they were gradually replaced by descendants of the upper classes, excepting some fetching X chromosomes.

This is assuming human civilization doesn't shed humans like the outgrown husk of a germinating seed, of course.

I'd read a short story from the secret police POV. Cool hypothetical world.