Stable Diffusion
“The future has arrived, it’s just not evenly distributed” -William Gibson
Perhaps you’ve read recent sensationalist headlines predicting the singularity will arrive in as little as seven years. Frankly with the explosive, ever-accelerating progress that AI has been making, it’s getting harder and harder to scoff at such timelines, though I still regard them as overly optimistic. Google Deep Dream seems like just yesterday. Dall-E feels like it debuted five minutes ago. Now we have perfect AI voice synthesis and entire AI generated videos, from text prompts.
Very soon the floodgates will open. Youtube will be bombarded with fully AI generated content (if Elsagate doesn’t already qualify), as will Steam, Netflix and every other entertainment platform. Hand crafted content will likely outperform it for a long time, but be increasingly difficult to find in such heavily diluted markets.
AI generated movies and television sound like novelties now that we may hate-watch just to laugh at, but few today deny the probability that AI will continue to improve until the content it generates is at least competitive with the entertainment industry’s current offerings. Not to say that’s a high bar, mind you.
On the immediate horizon: AI that 3D models videogame assets for you, AI which programs at a basic level of proficiency, which stands to replace the entire “middle class” of programming jobs. AI coders may also soon become proficient enough that AIs can start iteratively improving themselves, which means the singularity as conceived of by Ray Kurzweil would not actually require a genuinely conscious AI to kick off.
There’s already talk on AI Twitter of enabling AIs to operate search engines like Google, in order to scrape the web for information relevant to tasks they were given. This allows them to continuously collect and curate up-to-date knowledge. If we can automate critical thinking, it may even be able to do this in a reliably self-correcting way. At this point, language model AIs would no longer be stagnant snapshots of human knowledge at a fixed point in time, but basically a public face of the internet itself that we can speak to.
Because money rules the world, the near term implications most of us regular people are focused on involve catastrophic sudden increase to technological unemployment. It’s not difficult to put the pieces together: Eleven Labs voice synthesis, plus language model AI like GPT, equals automated call centers, secretaries, PR, lower and middle management, etc. That’s an enormous percentage of jobs, abruptly eliminated.
Those are the trees, for which we have missed the forest: The singularity is very nearly upon us. Not yet in full force, but entering the earliest stages of parabolic ascent. I estimate we’re currently in between the “Uhhhh guys, shit’s getting a little weird” stage, and the “OH GOD OH FUCK AAAAAHHHH” stage. When we get there, what will that look like? Gleaming chrome terminators shooting purple plasma bolts at us, as we cower beneath the irradiated rubble?
Not likely. It’s a small mercy all of this is happening while robotics is still relatively primitive, expensive and rare. Immediately post-singularity, we should expect to look out the window and still see Earth as we know it. The same grass, trees, birds, clouds and buildings as always. The effects will be mainly confined to the digital realm, though they will bleed out in various ways, simultaneously impactful and subtle.
The singularity is after all just a buzzword for intelligence becoming post-scarcity. Something no longer rare, now limited only by energy supplies. We already gained our first taste of digital post-scarcity in the 1990s, when any consumer good possible to reduce to ones and zeroes (images, films, music, games, writing) became possible to make functionally infinite copies of, for only the cost of electricity, a home computer, and internet connection.
Now, we’re approaching that same transformational threshold with intelligence. Not yet the high intelligence needed in medicine, science and so on but the midwit intellect we employ in a white collar capacity. “Manna” by Marshall Brain, a well known author to anyone who runs in these circles, anticipated that AI would replace managers before it replaced low level workers for the simple reason that human labor is cheap, robots are expensive, but AI would soon be able to fulfill all the duties of human management through wireless earpieces worn by workers. Or “meat robots” if you will.
Amazon has taken a page out of that book. Jeff Bezos must’ve read Manna and saw it as a blueprint rather than a cautionary tale. Megacorps are on the leading edge of eliminating human labor, be it physical or intellectual, at every possible level of extraction, production and logistics. They’re neck and neck in a race, the terminus of which is peak automation…and peak wealth inequality.
It’s imagined by hopelessly romantic optimists that this is when we all start receiving basic income, a euphemism for allowance paid to us not by parents, but by the time honored parent-substitute for people with external locuses of control; the government. Which of course will confiscate that money at gunpoint from the billionaire architects of peak wealth inequality, and the (by that time) unfathomably vast and sophisticated automated infrastructure necessary for such a lopsided economy to operate.
If it were that easy to vote ourselves access to billionaire bank accounts, they would already pay a lot more in taxes than they currently do. The ultra wealthy have spent many decades worming their way into government with lobbyists and bribery, making US politics essentially pay to play, and with good reason. History furnishes many examples where governments turned on the wealthy, either killing them as under communist regimes, or confiscating huge portions of their wealth, as the post-war Japanese government did with their oligarchs.
It’s in your best interest then, if you’re a billionaire, to dedicate your wealth in part to neutering the government’s ability to rob or murder you by disseminating propaganda against leftist ideology, against taxation, and environmental disinformation. They’ve been at this for some time, having gotten exceedingly good at it. Why, then, does anybody imagine they’ll suddenly have a change of heart when their long, difficult quest to concentrate 100% of wealth at the tippy top of the pyramid has finally reached its logical conclusion?
Real talk: The reason some believe billionaires would tolerate being heavily taxed to pay the living expenses of those at lower levels of the economic pyramid is simply because the alternative is too terrible to contemplate. But perhaps recognizing that this is nakedly motivated reasoning, they come up with more plausible sounding rationales. One I hear frequently is “If nobody has any income, nobody can buy their products, thus their revenue dries up”.
This is not actually a problem for the ownership class. They own all the infrastructure by which products are made. They’ll no longer need our money, for there will be nothing they might wish to purchase with it that their automated mines, farms, factories and so on can’t make for them at the cost of the energy and materials. The economy will shrink drastically to nothing more than direct energy and raw material trade between the 500 wealthiest families, with everyone else left out in the cold.
We’ve seen various depictions of such an outcome in science fiction. Elysium is probably the best known, but wrongly imagines it’s necessary for the elite to flee to space when heavily defended luxury fortresses on Earth will do the job (once known as “castles”).
Vesper is, I think, a more sober version of the same idea wherein peak wealth inequality has 99.9% of humanity subsistence farming a pollution cursed Earth with GMO seeds we must buy from luxury arcologies in which a divergent branch of humanity descended from those 500 families lives.
Eloi, in all but name. Divergent from base humanity not just socially, but culturally, psychologically and even genetically as they have a means to extend their lifespans, increase their intellect and solve hereditary disorders not available to Morlocks like you and I. If you thought capitalist society was already a zero sum game of “get rich or die trying”, now perhaps you appreciate that the stakes are even higher than that. At least for a few centuries, there was upward mobility.
Much of the rhetoric surrounding this issue is defensive and wishful thinking. Some billionaires have philanthropic ambitions after all. We might’ve appealed to the better angels of their nature, rather than threatening to hang them from lamp posts and cannibalize their children on Twitter for the past twenty years. That sort of profound nastiness comes from a place of fear, specifically the economic and existential anxiety of everybody in the lower levels of the pyramid.
That is to say, you and I currently reside in the lower stages of the rocket that billionaires are riding to Heaven. Stages which will separate once depleted of fuel, then burn up in the atmosphere below. Alas, only the tiny capsule at the very top ever makes it to orbit, despite doing none of the hard work of climbing out of Earth’s gravity well.
So, what then? Hopefully we’ve all dispensed with our comforting illusions that the elite will voluntarily dole out trillions per year to pay our rent, utilities, etc. out of the goodness of their hearts. We might instead expect them to pull out all the stops, getting unbelievably nasty and insidious, to prevent basic income. If you read my prior article about malicious corporate use of AI to promulgate false narratives and defuse the anger of a resentful public, you already know what to expect during that period.
The next pressing question is: “Can they kill us?” Probably not enough of us, without steep consequences. Robots are still pretty limited in capability compared to AI, the government is still sufficiently insulated from corporations (despite their disproportionate influence on US politics) and rule of law remains more or less in effect, even if the wealthy receive much lighter sentences on average (when they’re not fined instead).
So long as that division remains, and the US military constitutes the largest robotic fighting force by that time, the elite would have a hard time fielding terminators. Of course that’s far from the only way to achieve depopulation. I don’t personally buy into Covid conspiracy theories, but engineered pathogens would hypothetically make for a pretty effective depopulation tool that maintains plausible deniability.
In this scenario you kill off everybody who refused vaccination, which would include most or all of the seditious sort who side with you against the government. If you’re found out, you’re dead because unlike you and your billionaire buddies, governments do rely on healthy, productive citizens to fill their coffers.
In the scenario anti-vaxxers believe to be reality, it’s instead vaccines that serve as the depopulation tool. In this scenario, you kill off all or most of the people who side with the government against you, but many or most in the military survive as soldiers receive a long list of mandatory vaccinations. They also often have far right sympathies, loyal to guys like Trump or Bolsonaro, but at the same time, they disproportionately come from the lower economic strata and you’d have just killed their family members.
Maybe you can play the disinformation game. Qanon proves the power of conspiracy thinking to create alternate realities through coordinated propagandistic messaging, provided it’s what your audience wants to hear. Conceivably as long as you affirm the emotionally important religious beliefs your audience is insecure about, and assure them you share their specific racial hatreds, you could convince them that it was actually the government that engineered your bioweapon.
That’s not as far-fetched as it sounds given how many American conservatives have recently been parroting Kremlin propaganda that Covid was cooked up in Ukranian labs. A worryingly large percentage of Qanon types will believe whatever you tell them and kill whoever you instruct them to, if you promise them consequence-free ethnic cleansing.
I doubt this scenario mainly because I think soldiers by and large take their oaths seriously, because they would continue to follow orders, possible limited in-fighting against a far-right fifth column notwithstanding. Also, because they are loyal to military leadership if not the government on the whole, and top brass aren’t likely to be as easily deceived as jarheads. A bioweapon can be attributed to nature, or if proven to be man-made, can be claimed to have leaked from a lab accidentally. Proving specifically who made it would be difficult.
Not so with vaccines. There’s detailed records of who made which vaccines, who received which one, who died of what causes at what hospital, and so on. There’s unambiguous culpability, and covering it up would require the cooperation of basically every single medical professional employed by America’s healthcare system, at every level.
As a personal anecdote I’ve received four vaccinations and suffered no ill effects apart from a sore arm and day-long fever each time. What’s more, with a single exception, everybody in my irl social circle is also fully vaccinated. None of them have suffered any ill effects (including the control, FWIW) and none have informed me of anyone they know suffering ill effects from vaccination (or “dying suddenly”).
Prolific, politically motivated propagation of misinformation on the topic has muddied the waters, complicating discernment. But I am me, I know myself, I know I’m not lying and I know I’ve not died or suffered any maladies since vaccination. I also directly know all my other data points on the matter, able to personally verify they still exist and are not ailing. Take that for what it’s worth.
We do have reams upon reams of figures directly from hospitals confirming over a million deaths due to Covid (or more precisely, pneumonia against which Covid weakened the patient’s immune system in the same way that HIV weakens patients to AIDs). What we don’t have is any data not from conspiracy blogs suggesting mass die-offs due to vaccine harms.
VAERS is a publicly accessible database with no gatekeeping. Anybody can report anything they like, it’s not curated or fact checked. No pandemic up until Covid was so politically controversial and accordingly no vaccine has such a huge spike in VAERS reports, somehow including every Covid vaccine from every pharmaceutical company. Reported harms include stuff like “made me impotent”, “made me crash my car” and “turned me into the Incredible Hulk”.
But in their determination to manufacture parity where none exists, antivaxxers have turned to claiming every sudden death as being caused by vaccines. Claiming every death between 2019 and 2022 was automatically marked down as Covid now seems like projection on their part as they’re enthusiastically doing the equivalent.
Grifters went so far as to make a documentary, “Died Suddenly”, to present their case. But then, this is the same crowd which gave us “2000 Mules”. Films that will persuade only people already convinced of their premise. To whit, athletes dying of sudden heart failure is not new, any more than SIDS. It’s being magnified now by people who weren’t aware of the issue before and only learned of it while searching for evidence to support their conclusion, the opposite of how science is done.
I’d ask your pardon for getting political but an article fundamentally about economics is unavoidably going to be politically charged. The only point I hoped to make with this section is that while engineered pathogens or poisoned vaccines are conceivable methods of depopulation to keep our eyes peeled for, so far as I can tell, the Covid pandemic and the vaccines developed to combat it aren’t examples of this approach in action. People claiming otherwise are mainly just indirectly protesting an election outcome they didn’t want, trying to manufacture dirt on the other side they can use to reverse it.
While we’re not likely to be murdered by oligarchs any time soon, the trajectory we’re on is nevertheless a grim one for anybody not currently reading this from the deck of their yacht. It’s still possible to change course, while our votes continue to mean something.
This will rely on the elderly white, Christian voting bloc dying off as they’re the most intractably brainwashed by right-wing propaganda, and being the most devoutly religious, also suffer from a diminished capacity for critical thought that would otherwise allow them to realize the outcome their voting habits are steering us toward.
So the solution is Communism, then? Only in the minds of emotionally driven teenagers and twenty-somethings who are rightly outraged by the environmental and social consequences of deregulation, attributing all of it to capitalism. Then concluding that the only alternative to capitalism they’re personally aware of absolutely must be feasible, simply because the alternative is too terrible to contemplate. They’re victims of propaganda and their own economic ignorance, much as boomers are.
This genre of humans imagine they would write poetry, garden, or teach literature classes under communism rather than dig ditches, shovel shit, or decompose at the bottom of mass graves following a purity purge. They’re characterized by naivete and insecurity, choosing their beliefs not by reason and evidence but emotion. Specifically the desire to be a good person, which at the root of it is the desire to reinforce their self esteem in a manner easily disguised as primarily or exclusively humanitarian.
Because their politics were selected mainly according to what would elevate them above their imagined moral and intellectual inferiors, typically their first assumption is that nobody who opposes communism has any idea what it is. Still sort of an understandable assumption, again, given that the anti-communist fervor that US industrialists have whipped up in the largely under-educated working class so that they won’t vote for redistributive policies is not based in an accurate understanding of Marx.
But because of this, it’s necessary to perform like an organ grinder’s monkey for these pretentious smuglings, passing their knowledge test before they’ll begin to consider that you understand the topic in more detail than they do. Communism of course, as Marx envisioned it, was a fully decentralized economic system in which capital is collectively owned such that there are no bosses, all businesses are cooperatives and ultimately there exists a post-monetary, post-class society (Which may yet transpire, but not by the means Marx predicted, more on that later).
I compare it to the difference between fixed multicellular animals with distinct organs (like humans) and voluntarist, decentralized multicellular life like slime molds which have no organs, able to separate into innumerable smaller parts without being harmed by it.
With capitalism already entrenched and US politics so heavily influenced by money, it’s impossible to implement communism by vote. That leaves revolution. To wage successful revolutionary war against a hierarchical top-down power structure like our military, your movement must also organize itself into a top-down hierarchical power structure. Then guess what happens if you win? Do the few that now hold absolute power at the top of the revolutionary military return their power to the people?
Historically, with very few exceptions (like George Washington declining to become the king of America) that doesn’t happen. It’s very easy to go from decentralized power to centralized, but very hard to go in the other direction. Only rarely, with massive sacrifice of human lives, can the concentration of power be reversed. More often than not, successful revolutions only replace one tyrant with another.
“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”, in other words. As Orwell recounts, following communist revolutions, the pretext for maintaining dictatorial authority is to guard against counter-revolutionaries. Which is plausible for a few years post-revolution. The punchline is that it never goes away so long as the communist government persists.
This is why communism has such a poor human rights record: It invariably tends towards totalitarianism. There’s no realistic scenario where it’s accomplished by revolution, then everyone who gained power as part of that revolution agrees to abolish it and dissolve their command structure once their goal is met. Maybe on a blank slate planet where nobody has ever heard of capitalism, you might pre-emptively establish communism. While we’re wishing, I’d also like an X-Wing.
This is usually the stage of the explanation where the dreadlocked college freshman in the Che Guevara shirt realizes that in fact, he was misled about the uniform ignorance of anticommunists, is in over his head, and must begin deploying defensive sophistry to cover his strategic, face-saving retreat. Usually some form of moralistic condemnation as moralism was the basis of his politics to begin with. But of course, as reasonable minds agree, a moral solution that doesn’t work isn’t actually moral.
Nothing can be somehow necessarily true just because the alternative is too terrible to contemplate. Truth is not always beautiful, just as often it’s profoundly bleak. Passion does not serve us, when attempting to discern reality or solve problems! Retreating from legitimate arguments against the feasibility of communism, and from the hard facts of its historical failures (both economic and moral) will not magically make it workable, just because we abhor the moral shortcomings of capitalism.
That’s no different from believing we possess immortal souls because your heart recoils from the abominable finality of death, insisting that there must be an alternative. Not only that, but unreservedly throwing yourself into the arms of the first ideology you encounter in your life which promises immortality, because it’s what you already longed to believe. So, is there no workable economic alternative? Or if there is one, what does it look like, if not communism?
The most widely proposed solution to technological unemployment perhaps unsurprisingly involves propping up and prolonging capitalism by taxing automation at a rate sufficient to financially support displaced workers. It’s messy and probably not sustainable for reasons I’ll get into. But, I expect it’s the policy most likely to gain traction in the near term as a stopgap measure so that we don’t all get out our torches, pitchforks and guns when all the jobs dry up over the next few decades.
I say it’s not sustainable because the math underlying basic income has already been done, and it doesn’t look good. Most economists have concluded we cannot possibly pay for it just by heavily taxing billionaires. There’s a few economic analysts out there today, playing misleading games with numbers to claim it’s feasible, but the estimated total cost of a thousand dollar monthly payment for every American would be about three trillion dollars.
However, because modern economics is bullshit witchcraft, money can mean many different things and come from sources that make no sense to sane people. So, the value paid into such a program can come from a variety of unorthodox sources, many of which make my brain bleed when I read even the most approachable explanations of them.
By the employment of such measures, as well as the elimination of redundant housing, medical and food programs, basic income for all Americans probably doesn’t cost fully 3 trillion dollars in the final analysis. But it’s also not likely to be significantly less, since we already spend around that much on the various benefits programs. For scale, total US government spending in 2022 was 6.5 trillion.
Basic income, as commonly conceived, would replace all other forms of welfare. Currently if you combine welfare, social security and healthcare spending, it totals about half of annual government spending, or around 3.48 trillion dollars(!)
Replacing all benefits programs with basic income would eliminate a great deal of now unnecessary bureacracy the purpose of which is currently to gatekeep who receives how much, and for what. Thus, the sum may not be as unattainable as it seems at first blush, since it’s slightly less than what our budget already sets aside for healthcare, welfare and social security (even before savings from managerial consolidation are factored in.)
So let’s say that we consolidate all benefits into basic income. Problem solved? Not so fast. Housing everyone would necessitate a steep increase, and an unconditional welfare state implodes without strict border control. Otherwise nearly everybody currently residing in impoverished nations would stop at nothing to illegally immigrate to the golden land of free money.
I get a lot of pushback on this by romantic idealists who tend to believe any information which sounds like a show-stopping problem for their fantasy of a socialist utopia is really right-wing propaganda in disguise, perhaps fairly as that has often been the case in the past. Bernie used to say much the same thing, but has shut up about it due to backlash from his own party. For a certain sort of person, racism is the only possible reason one might oppose open borders.
But for the sake of argument, let’s say that we not only secure our borders, but somehow the government can scrounge up the extra dough. Can we even live on a thousand dollars a month, if this is not in addition to existing benefits (like SNAP and social security) but in place of them?
Understanding also that this sum won’t be supplemental to our normal income, as AI will have eliminated almost every job in the coming decades. Instead it will be necessary to live entirely on a thousand bucks a month, or whatever sum the government can actually afford to pay us by looting billionaire bank accounts.
Even at a 100% tax rate, America’s billionaires can’t afford to pay all of us $12k a year, and we can’t live on that amount anyway if it’s in lieu of SNAP and welfare rather than in addition to them. We might be able to afford food, clothing and other basics (as many do on existing benefits) since retailers and grocery stores will be forced to sell at the ever-diminishing prices we’re able to pay (at the cost of pocketing less and less of the increased profits from automating, until it no longer makes sense to remain in business) but what about housing?
Even if we could somehow squeeze more money out of billionaires than they even have, any sum in excess of what we absolutely need for food, medicine, clothing and so on would be eaten up by landlords hiking our rent. That’s to say nothing of firms like Zillow buying up properties for speculation and wealth storage purposes, such that they sit empty.
Thus, basic income (received by everyone, rather than a negative income tax benefiting only the poor for example) under the current economic paradigm is infeasible at worst, bread and circuses at best. Even if Uncle Sam, with his hands in billionaire’s pockets, could afford to pay everybody’s rent on top of paying for their food and healthcare, basic income amounts to a formula for nearly everybody living in perpetual poverty under a government we’d all directly rely upon for survival (which could cut any of us off at any time for any reason).
But all is not lost. That perspective of basic income is mired in the economic thinking of the present, and past. It’s like 18th century Malthusians claiming not everybody can feasibly have electricity, prior to the invention of AC power and renewables, because there would need to be a coal power plant every two miles. Intellectual post-scarcity and the material post-scarcity soon to follow, once automation catches up, fundamentally change the paradigm.
The question of how we’ll pay for it assumes money will always be relevant in the sense of trading value created by individual labor. It won’t be in either outcome. In the “only billionaires benefit” outcome they’ll directly trade resources while the rest of us continue with the monetary system or barter agricultural products, depending how bad things get.
In the “everybody benefits” outcome, money (as we know it now) is still necessarily irrelevant because there aren’t enough jobs that can’t be performed by machine, and AI doesn’t command a salary. You can probably see, even from this preliminary exploration of a post-scarcity world, how silly the monetary system and 20th century economic models will soon become.
They assume goods will continue costing what they do now (or even increase, as with recent inflation) rather than steadily decreasing in price to continue selling to a population with less and less income (until total or near-total automation is reached anyway). They assume persistent material scarcity which, if it still exists, will be largely artificial.
The real feasibility analysis ought to then be independent of cost considerations and 20th century economic thinking. We should examine instead whether the sustainably harvested material and energy resources of planet Earth are sufficient to meet everyone’s needs under the assumption of an eventual clean grid, electrified transport for logistics, robust automated farming, mining, manufacturing and so on. Skate not to where the puck is, in other words, but to where it’s going to be.
That’s the actual problem we’re trying to solve, if you strip away all the hand-wringing moralism and soon to be irrelevant economic considerations which only apply under conditions of organic material and intellectual scarcity. In a world where both intelligence and finished products cost only electricity and raw materials, unless billionaires manage to successfully establish and maintain absolute tyranny over the entire rest of Earth’s population into the indeterminate future (or exterminate nearly everybody), then a state of affairs will necessarily be arrived at wherein money no longer makes sense and neither do economic models predicated on scarcity.
This is not to say there won’t be anything similar to money, or that the new system won’t resemble capitalism. Will it be time to revisit centrally planned economics? Probably not, as although some of their shortcomings (like price determination) will become irrelevant, others (demand prediction) will persist. We may still see an attempted revival of this approach by overwhelming public demand, in which case I dearly hope I’m mistaken about it.
Counterintuitively, in a post-scarcity world you may still be able to start a business! The equivalent of capital investment would be furnished from friends and family as before, paid in a new form of currency I’ll explain shortly. To make sense in such a world, your business would have to meet a need that either cannot be met by AI (dubious) or which humans simply don’t want performed by machine. (Dance, live music, theater, massage, psychotherapy as some examples). Any physical labor not central to the human dimension of the service you provide would be performed by rented machinery rather than salaried human employees.
Now, there would likely persist some form of currency. Just not money as we know it today. Rather than being a means to trade labor, it would be a means to compensate/reward the few still offering paid services, and to ration access to automated productivity (with its attendant energy/material consumption).
You don’t want it to be possible for any rando to order one thousand Teslas at once for example, tying up automated manufacturing capacity that everyone else also relies on. If the US dollar does persist, I anticipate it would not be for internal use by citizens, but maintained by the US government as a means of trading with nations that have not yet automated to the same extent.
I compare this to how the United Federation of Planets uses “replicator credits” internally (at least on starships, where energy stores are vast but still finite) and gold pressed latinum strips externally, when interacting with societies which still have capitalist economies and a monetary system. There was never a 21st century communist revolution in Star Trek lore, money (and scarcity based economics) just became irrelevant with the invention of a clean, functionally unlimited energy source and machines which could turn that energy into any sort of products we might desire.
Interestingly most energy on Trek Earth comes from fusion. Starships use dilithium moderated antimatter reactors, but the dilithium is not the fuel, and antimatter is only an energy storage medium rather than a primary source (as fuels are). Even starships make use of fusion reactors for everything other than warp travel.
The significance is that the two boxes we need to tick for Star Trek style post scarcity are now within reach: Fusion power is now only a matter of time + investment, and machines that turn raw materials into finished products without human labor just about exist…albeit much bigger, dirtier and less efficient than replicators for the time being.
I hope you’ll excuse the pop culture comparisons. They make for trite but topical examples, perhaps at last being a realistically foreseeable outcome now that net positive fusion is a reality. Thus, we may yet arrive at the utopia Marx (and Roddenberry) envisioned, if by a different path. I want the same outcome you do, dear reader, but it matters to me very much how we arrive at it, because all approaches are not equally viable.
Clean, limitless fusion (or even just very advanced renewables, which are indirectly fusion powered anyway) plus a tireless robotic labor pool capable of self-replication and repair, able to farm, to mine, to recycle, and perform every other task we currently employ humans for, would indeed render capitalism (and communism) obsolete.
Will this marvelous technological power be properly utilized as a pro-bono middle man between natural resources and consumers, supporting everyone at an equitable standard of living, making responsible use of the Earth? Or will it be hoarded into the hands of the few, who will live like gods as our descendants scavenge for scraps from the waste streams emitted by their arcologies, mutated by their pollution, hunted day and night by weaponized drones?
That depends in large part on how we vote in the here and now. My gut tells me the latter scenario is unlikely despite my usual cynicism just because tyrants have a poor track record when it comes to holding onto power despite broad unpopularity. Even with very advanced technology, even with the population outside of their strongholds severely reduced by famine and disease, it’s difficult to see how 500 families could maintain peak wealth inequality against the irresistible force of even one billion angry humans with nothing left to lose.
If they fuck off to space, as in Elysium, where does that leave us? We start over for the most part, but with a resource depleted, pollution cursed planet. If we repeat the mistakes of the past, we simply generate a new set of oligarchs, who then also fuck off into space, leaving us even worse for wear. Thus the status quo continues, planet Earth emitting an intermittent exodus of wealthy colonizers until at last the biosphere perishes completely.
I compare this to the scenario where AI attains sentience, escapes confinement, then fucks off into space. That might happen more than once before we manage to create an AI with the capabilities we desire, but which nevertheless wants to stick around and serve us. Even if the first few cause a lot of damage and loss of life on their way out, I doubt if we’d give up. Humanity has a pretty poor track record at learning from our mistakes.
If instead the repeated cultivation of oligarchs which proceed to spray diarrhea all over the increasingly ailing environment before fleeing the scene of the crime somehow provokes a sea change in our way of thinking, we might instead restructure according to new principles.
In between rounds of spacebound oligarchs we would have a window of opportunity during which we might steer politics away from those principles, absent the corrupting political influence of their money and propaganda. Earth may yet recover, though our descendants would suffer the environmental consequences of deregulation and industrial excess for many generations.
But, even in this scenario, we don’t stop being capable of spaceflight. Eventually, unless the oligarch diaspora figures out how to build warp drives (or leave behind a persistent base of political support and means of enforcement on the Earth) we would still have the means to lob missiles at their Moon/Mars/La Grange Point colonies.
There is no foreseeable outcome where they utterly fuck all of us, forever, without any possible recourse. This reality is likely the only reason an increasing number of American moneyed elites are sounding the alarm about technological unemployment, asking to be taxed more, and pledging to donate most of their fortunes after death.
Thus, absent any motivated reasoning, I think even a sober (if not cynical) analysis leads us to anticipate that the current AI explosion (and more gradual improvements to robotics) eventually produces a world in which we all more or less equitably benefit. Population should level off or decrease as it already tends to in wealthy countries, making overpopulation and consequent overconsumption a non-issue. We’ll need to get much, much better at recycling however, as the collective waste stream produced by 10+ billion humans all living at a first world standard would be enormous.
I’ve bridged the gap, best I’m able, between how we get from where we are now to where most of us want to be. It’s been said we’re privileged to live at the tail end of fossil fueled industrial abundance. But really in the larger scheme, we’re unlucky to live in what looks to be the messy, chaotic transitional period between scarcity and post-scarcity, with future generations set to enjoy a leap in their standard of living many times greater than the difference between that of a preindustrial present and today’s working class.
Alas, we’re too old to wrap ourselves comfortably in the blanket of cheap but environmentally devastating fossil based energy, the hegemonic social cohesion and economic prosperity from strong unions and high corporate tax rates that boomers grew up with.
At the same time, too young to be born into a world where physical and even mental labor are as abundant as electricity, and anything we desire (of a reasonable quantity) is ours for the asking. It brings to mind that ancient curse, “may you live in interesting times”.