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 leav