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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15437 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

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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.

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