Remember all those arguments I had with Gamesguy, and how he always personally attacked me for my views?
Well, how are things looking, now? Who was right, in the end? Let's find out.
I foresaw a world where a teeny number of rentier-oligarchs who produce absolutely nothing of value for society rent all property to us in order for us to live. I saw the writing on the wall, years in advance, and, honestly, all I got for telling people about it was nonstop verbal and psychological abuse, or reassurances that I was "wrong" and it would "never happen".
Well, it's happening. So, now what?
Well, how are things looking, now? Who was right, in the end? Let's find out.
- AI Automation will make human creative effort obsolete. By the 2040s, there will be no game development studios. People will just ask an AI assistant to make a game, and it will plop one out in an hour, synthesizing all the art, code, writing, voice acting, music, and sound effects from scratch, accomplishing something that used to take millions of man-hours in a fraction of the time.
- We are still on track for this to happen. GPT, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, Elevenlabs, and other Machine Learning apps are showing considerable aptitude at generating scripts, images, and voices. We still have almost two decades left to go, and huge breakthroughs in AI are occurring at intervals of a few months. Artists and voice actors are already completely losing their heads over this, because they thought that automation would get rid of truck drivers and factory workers first. Turns out, it's easier to have an AI analyze and replicate raw data, like creative works, rather than actually building that many robots. Who would've thought?
- Because of this, the ruling Overclass will decide that they don't need so many people working and providing their inputs to the system while consuming so many outputs, which will result in either democide and population culls, or people being pacified like Wireheads from Niven's Known Space, or people being given a meager stipend in the form of an UBI to spend on rations generated by the automated Machine Learning IOT cornucopia, in order of decreasing dystopian doomerism.
- If these vaccines are as deadly as I think they are, and their push for CBDC and an UBI is what I think it is, then they're actually doing all of the above. They also want to have a programmable currency with quotas that cut off people's consumption of certain goods beyond a monthly limit.
- Afraid of dissidents forming movements against their zero marginal cost cornucopia, the ruling class of oligarchs will stuff people into arcologies with tight surveillance of their movements and behavior and become rentier-slumlords over them.
- The Line, anyone?
- Transhumanism and biotech will increasingly play a role in society.
- Neuralink is already obsolete. DARPA have a wireless BCI on the way.
- There isn't enough raw material in the ground and grid power doesn't provide enough juice to power an all-electric vehicle infrastructure. The end result of Net-Zero is that we all get Linkolapilled and live in walkable cities and ride bicycles, while only the oligarchs have electric cars, like in the Soviet Union.
- Years later, we've only electrified a few percent of the cars on the road, and they're already backing up at charging stations and straining grid power. When they ban gasoline-powered cars, no one will have cars. People will just be warehoused in Smart Cities, with everything they need within walking distance, and that will be their whole lives. They're already pushing the "walkable cities" propaganda, to this end.
- Telecommuting in a Second Life-like VR world would replace most actual commuting and actual vacations, because the latter will be deemed too "carbon-intensive" for the average person and "unsustainable".
- Mark Zuckerberg is trying to stuff us all in the Metaverse. People at Davos want all our purchases to be routed through "carbon trackers", which will probably lead to an eventual social credit score partly based on consumption habits, with mandatory rationing.
I foresaw a world where a teeny number of rentier-oligarchs who produce absolutely nothing of value for society rent all property to us in order for us to live. I saw the writing on the wall, years in advance, and, honestly, all I got for telling people about it was nonstop verbal and psychological abuse, or reassurances that I was "wrong" and it would "never happen".
Well, it's happening. So, now what?
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