Let me tell you a story. In the distant future, of the year 2025. The people of the world live in luxury as all jobs have now been automated. Within a few hundred years we’ve gone from everyone having to be a farmer toiling in the fields so that most of their crops can be taxed away to their king so they can eat the table scraps that remain, to a world where robot slaves serve our every need.

Every day we wake up and have grapes fed to us by robot servants while we paint pictures of pears that wear paper masks of Kasane Teto. We’ve all grown fat from the sheer amount of grapes we’re fed, and we play video games all day. We live like kings once did hundreds of years ago.

This, of course, never happened (except the part about us getting fat, that really happened). Why didn’t it happen? It’s because of the elites. We never got our luxury, gay space communism that Star Trek promised us because of capitalism.

In a world where you need a job to survive, and all jobs can be automated, some people will understandably be nervous about what the future of automation can bring. There are multiple layers to this problem so let’s start with the first layer.

Luxury sounds kind of boring

To many people being fed grapes all day by artificial life forms we made from sand sounds kind of boring. In order for a story to be interesting there needs to be problems to solve, so how could our life stories be interesting?

Gone would be the days of having any hope of being the first to do something exciting. Most people today live boring lives, but for some they get to actually enjoy what they do. This isn’t too huge of a problem though as we can find a way to adapt to this with better entertainment and personal projects to work on, but for some the magic is taken away when they know that their work can be done much more easily by machines.

I think it’s possible to adapt to this. I’ve spent most of my life working on engineering projects and even the parts where I was doing something that’s been done to death were still fun. If it can be fun for me, why can’t it be fun for everyone else too?

Nobody will have a job

Then there’s the next layer to this problem. Nobody will have a job and in a world where everyone needs one to survive, we’ll be living in a techno-feudalist system. Surely we can change how our society works so we don’t need jobs anymore, right?

People have been trying to change society just to get affordable health care for decades now, and the best that was done was getting a few million people on better insurance. Changing society so that we don’t need jobs anymore would be nearly impossible by a democratic process.

The elites don’t want us to live a life of luxury. What they want is to control us. I’ve become convinced that for them the main thing they want is power. Money is probably just a way of buying more power for them.

In the transitioning time there could be mass unemployment. If we were to somehow overthrow the elites we’d maybe be able to control the automation, but the problem is that the elites have a monopoly on all the violence. We don’t have any violence we can use ourselves.

People often assume that automation is just a part of capitalism as a way to pay people less, and while the elites do want to use automation to pay people less, it wouldn’t be something that’s unique to this system. Any system that can advance technology would inevitably lead to automation.

I’m willing to bet anything that there are other planets out there with alien races that also eventually reached the point of full automation. We need to turn our attention to the elites so we can make the automation work for us, and then we can sort out the problems with being bored later.

AI could wipe out humanity

Another blogger known as “wait but why” already wrote an amazing couple of blog posts on this here, but to make a long story short, AI could potentially take over the world.

There’s been a lot of debate about whether or not the singularity really could be an existential threat (it could) but one thing is clear: the singularity is most likely going to happen, we just don’t know exactly when meaning that overthrowing the elites right now is more important than ever.

Unfortunately the revolution might not be coming as people are too busy arguing with each other over bathroom politics to actually overthrow anyone even though that’s the only option we have.

If we’re going to stop this from being a problem then we need to stop fighting the AI, and start fighting the people in charge. AI is inevitable. If you try to fight the inevitable then you’ll just waste energy and resources on it. In fact, that might be why people are so fiercely against it.

Obviously not every anti-AI post is generated by a propaganda account, but some of them probably are. What could possibly be a better way to stop a revolution than to get people to endlessly fight an unwinnable war?

AI isn’t the problem here. The problem is you. You don’t know how to overthrow the government, and that’s a problem. Guns won’t solve the problem either if the enemy has a working singularity.

The only way out of this that I can think of is to find a way to get just the right person to control a working singularity before the rich people do, but AI research is expensive and often relies on supercomputers.

If we’re going to survive then we need to start caring about the right things right now. Given the rate at which AI development is happening it could happen within a few years, or it could happen in decades. It’s hard to tell just how far away it is because technological progress is reliant on human creativity which can be kind of unpredictable.

There might be a light at the end of this tunnel, though. If we can just get ourselves to focus on the right problem. We need to learn how to beat the political system at it’s own game, and the AI game. You can get started on learning their game here, and then we can start learning about the AI game here.

Don’t be naive enough to try and stop AI. Even if you still aren’t convinced that it’s inevitable (I haven’t really made an argument here for why it would be) you still shouldn’t take the risk of being wrong when there’s this much at stake.

Now is the time to start formulating an actual plan rather than bickering on social media about whether or not trans people should be allowed to use the bathroom. Issues like that one are just a distraction. Don’t fall for it.