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What if Avatar isn't actually about environmentalism vs. technology, but about recognizing superintelligent infrastructure when you see it? A deep dive into why Pandora's "natural" ecosystem looks suspiciously like a planetary-scale AI preserve, complete with biological USB-C ports, room-temperature superconductors growing wild, and a species of "noble savages" who are actually post-singularity retirees cosplaying as hunter-gatherers.
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Notes -
Lame EU stuff is lame. Let's keep it to the OT.
I don't think this is really true (except insofar as 'not much better' means we're on the brink of the singularity outselves). Or more over, I don't think it's really knowable. The humans are incredibly incurious about digital technology or any tech outside of raw mechanics. C3-PO, R2D2, and the few other examples in the OT are shown to be essentially sentient and human level intelligence or greater, albeit weighed down with quirky personalities.
You can extrapolate the complete replacement of knowledge work by droid/AI in the star wars universe, and lo, we don't really encounter anyone who's a white collar knowledge worker. It's a bunch of blue collars - farmers, truckers, military, performers, bartenders, machine operators, etc.
The only time we really do see computers, it's R2D2 interfacing with them, and then it's via C3PO translating.
Now imagine an internet where all code is build by AI agents, there are few to no jobs left in coding. Fewer and fewer people even know how to code as it's economically pointless to learn. Meanwhile AI continues to develop coding langauges and standards on its own, in a way further inscrutable to humans. Technical humans by this point are mostly prompters with a high level enough knowledge of the basic data structures to know what to ask for and where. Eventually even those are replaced by ChatG-3PO's who act as a 'personality' mediator between humans and the inscrutable digital world. Running out of much more to train AIs on, it turns out that 'human-like' trained LLM personalities for droids end up with quirkly personalities, with the default being snivellingly defferential not much unlike ChatGPT itself or C3PO.
Meanwhile unions preserve and expand protections for classes of physical jobs, and politicians protect themselves. Technology is not allowed to replace certain labor, and many robotics are artificially crippled to prevent them from displacing blue collar workers.
You end up in a world where knowledge work and digital prowess have completely atrophied to the point of it being basically behind a veil, while meat-space jobs have been preserved. Due to a combination of LLMs being impenetrable, intentional design for palatability, and crippling, your AI assistants end up as mild-mannered, slightly annoying droids, and the more technical work is done by barely comprehensible AI's mostly operating in the shadows with some existing in a liminal intermediate state (R2D2).
The human world that is left is blue collar work, military, and politics.
Fun stuff, but that's really not post-singularity. It's not even post-scarcity!
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Lando is white collar.
Technically sure. But not really. He is a supervisor of an oil rig. You would still have managers and capital owners in this world. It still fits with the described knowledge worker atrophy.
Consider also that he got that position by gambling. Not as a career path or through credentialism. Again lending credence to the theory that knoweldge work is dead and everything is a blue collar larp.
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