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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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All roads lead to no.3 IMO.

As you mentioned, UBI would likely cause class conflict. The capital-owning class already has an advantage since they can buy support from whatever remains of the state apparatus and fund traditional human professional soldiers. They could probably also print out powerful autonomous weapons as well. I think they'd win a war quite quickly.

Implicit UBI is already sort of what they have in many of the Gulf countries. The public sector is very large and there are fairly generous welfare policies, a great deal of work is 'automated' by guest laborers from poorer countries. But why does the govt go to such an effort to make an implicit UBI? They are afraid of being overthrown by the people for being grotesquely corrupt/autocratic/not Islamic enough. Saudi Arabia spent hundreds of billions in extra welfare when the Arab Spring happened, they were scared. If they had an option to crush their citizenry, that would totally change the game. The mere knowledge they could do that would change how they operated. They'd act more heavy-handedly, provide fewer and fewer benefits, substitute bribes with fear.

If the bulk of your population isn't contributing anything to your economy/military but draining resources and demanding protection, it makes sense from the perspective of the state to kill them off or expel them. Then you get whatever chunk of farmland, civilian industry and housing stock back, to be reprocessed into something more useful. That might be military industry, giant supercomputer complexes or giant nuke-proof underground factories/redoubts. If it's more efficient to be without a large population, then over time civilization will move in that direction.

It's also hard to see what the structure of the 'elite' would be like.

I'd imagine it would be an oligarchy where each actor has their own industrial base in a certain part of the country, working together for now so they don't have to be sovereign and totally self-sufficient. The wealth they'd hold would be that they have command codes over many of the robots that do everything. Of course, this would be an unstable equilibrium since each actor has an incentive to remove all threats. Presumably this is all happening in an era of quick technological development, so the first to develop a powerful new weapon/AI would have a major advantage.

Eventually we'd end up with the last man standing, sovereign over the whole world and all the stars he could get his hands on. Maybe he'd have a family, friends or people frozen cryonically. But everyone else is totally dependent on him.