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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

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Why would it get dark? Look at Australian Aboriginals. 90% of the pure blooded ones are economically irrelevant and yet they cope.

Sure their coping methods involve gasoline, glue and drinking but I like to think 130+ IQ Anglos are instead going to do something less self-destructive. And you'll probably be able to get some good mileage out of AI usesticking a lot of neuralink into your brain and directly interfacing with the AI through thoughts.

Also AIs are pretty easy to align so lot of people will likely just keep being economically and competitive useful by purchasing their own AGI and using it as an extension of their self.

Why would it get dark

Because the people who control 99 percent of the wealth of the planet (which no longer requires human consumers or employees), and 100 percent of the military resources (which no longer require human soldiers) will decide that they don’t need 7.9 billion useless eaters crapping up their planet.

Are you telling me that Putin and Xi etc trusts American Deep State? Because that's what you're saying, essentially. That the elites trust each other.

I’m not sure it even would be Putin, Xi and the American deep state in charge by then. It’s whoever controls the AIs. That might end up being governments but I don’t think that’s at all guaranteed, especially in the longer term.

It’s saying that, with sufficient mental and physical automation, they don’t need other human beings in order to pursue their rivalry.

Which is why they'd risk getting killed by conspiring with their opposite numbers and plotting a joint worldwide genocide.

No, this does not make sense.

I think you're missing Corvos' point (or I'm missing everything and seeing my own instead): They don't need to conspire. They can just eliminate their own subject humans because they're nothing but a liability at this point. In fact, a lack of conspiracy makes it more likely for this to happen, because it should make the faction that ditches its ballast more competitive!

....this is a level of psychopathy that is frankly unlikely. Psyopping people to be moderately content with living in a pod and eating bugs is far more convenient and less risky than plotting genocide which is how you can get overthrown by your immediate underlings who'd even feel very righteous about it.

Precisely. At a certain ratio of machine:human ability, NOT committing genocide starts being harder than doing it.

I really don’t follow your thought process. To me, there is no risk and no need for conspiracy. All humans not in charge of the robots might as well be air - they have no ability to affect anything at all except to spoil the view.

There would be no need to ‘plot’ under such circumstances. Committing worldwide genocide would be as easy as setting the air conditioner to ‘cool’, or indeed as easy as setting the ‘feed the populace’ machine to ‘off’.

In practice it might be difficult for people to get to this level of dominance, and we should keep it that way of course.

Well, based on what I know of the Canadian indigenous peoples (who the current PC treadmill calls the "First Nations"), there's a lot of crime, misery, and unrest as a result. But hey, people addicted to videogames are less destructive than people addicted to alcohol, so we'll see.

(Also, I really don't expect to see decent neuralink tech by 2030. It's just too damn hard.)

(Also, I really don't expect to see decent neuralink tech by 2030. It's just too damn hard.)

AI researchers and if US becomes progressive about getting value out of the dregs of society, there's like 50,000 heavily tattooed but basically healthy people fit for human testing down at CECOT.