this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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Once the elites have everything they need or want provided by AI and machines, we get death.
I can only imagine 50 years from now, when climate crisis is in full swing, there are no more salaried jobs for people without extreme, cutting edge technological specializations or PhDs, and people are doing shit like menial servant work or acting as delivery drivers for 16 hours a day for the ultra wealthy just not to starve, you'll have some 70 year old zoomer politician that introduces a bill to legalize prostitution in order to open up "new sources of income for struggling Americans" while quietly including a clause that effectively creates death camps for the poor. Conservative Americans will praise the bill on the basis that it'll get rid of "welfare queens" and create more economic opportunities for the people who don't get turned into Soylent Green.
50 years after that, America is littered with the hollowed out ghost towns of long abandoned suburbia. The coasts have been destroyed by flooding from the melted ice caps. Automated workers outnumber Americans 10 to 1. There are around 30 million Americans left in the continental United States. Almost all of them are literal slaves after slavery was re-legalized. Almost everything is owned by a handful of incredibly powerful families. Virtually everyone lives in or around Chicago. Whatever hope people once had for a better future is a long distant dream of a bygone era as the world slowly dies and the people who are left simply persist without ever truly living.
And hilariously, everyone is still paying the Saudis for parking.
There are more of "us" than "them".
There is a danger. The select few of "us" who are "more equal" will become "them".
How do you think slavery sustains itself? A few slaves get to become slave-masters when the old masters die.
I guess it boils down to the age old questions of what is the value of a human life, and who gets to decide what laws we base upon the answer to the first question.
What I meant was that "they" can not just simply erase "us" from existence once we stop providing them enough value, I believe in a revolution of some kind if such practices were to be tried.
Though I do not believe it would be rational nor beneficial for the elites at the first place, I was just pointing out that there is little chance of that happening.
There were more natives in the Americas and Caribbean when the European settlers arrived, too. Only one side had way more advanced military technology and no scruples around genocide and slavery.