This is what's next - my reply to AI 2027.

In today's modern world, it's important to get ahead of what's happening, or rather what is being done to us.

It's obvious to me, given the immenent demise of Hamas and the Iranian and probably Russian regimes, that the current moment is going to end.

The Left as we know it is about to become extinct. The environmental movement has already joined the eternal silent. 

Good fucking riddance!

So what's next? (politically speaking)

In a word, AI. Or rather, anti-AI.

We are already seeing a nascent anti-AI movement coming out of academia, NGOland, concerned scientists, and upper-teir society generally. It's making serious mistakes however, for example predicting that either a rogue AGI will probably kill us all in a couple of years or that if that doesn't happen, the world will become a paradise of UBI and space exploration.

However there are indeed serious issues with AI - for example the photorealistic videos and stills it can now generate on command, and the openly discussed business plot of tech moguls to bring down democracy and replace it with feudalism.

So here's my answer to AI 2027, only we'll call it AI 2035 because I have no imagination (it's a medical condition, apparently).

AI 2035 -dan dan daaaaaan

Prequel: 2028, the end of Trumpism

Trumpism is doomed. His dodgy foreign backers, his billionaire buddies, they're powerful, but there's one thing they can't solve: Death. Trump is gonna die sooner or later. And that will be the end of Trumpism.

However let's have some fun with this.

Say Trump survives his seventies and, rather than break the American constitution even more, simply gets himself made Chairman of the RNC or maybe even Speaker Of The House, and runs some flunky for President as a proxy. Say he wins. 

Then he's got to run an even more gruelling campaign in 2032, age (checks notes) 86.

His luck has to run out sometime. The bastard is gonna die eventually. And even if he doesn't, his "everything Trump touches turns to shit" powers will make him unpopular enough that he'll be long gone by our futuristic date of 2035.

I'm guessing he'll shit in the economy, wipe his ass with the Constitution, and jerk off into the American flag, as Spider Jerusalem would say. Standard Republican stuff. And he'll be so exhausted by 2028 that he won't run an impressive campaign, there's nobody who can even remotely replace him, and the trick of having massive rallies as "Chairman Trump" won't wash.

So in 2028-29 the new President and his First Gentleman take office and he faces:

* Mass unemployment
* Hostile motherfuckers abroad who hate Amurca and everyone in it
* A billionaire class whom he must keep satisfied to stay in office.
* An angry, rabid, but exhausted general public who just want the bad times to go away.

But also...

* Iran sorted (After extirpating Hamas, Israel goes after Iran and... deals with the regime), leading to...
* Cheap energy (Because Iran is now friendly and the violence premium on Middle Eastern oil is over, and also because all the cheap nuclear and solar power stations built in the '20s come online)
* Cheap labour (because mass unemployment, which btw has been a problem since the 1980s, people only really started caring once it affected middle class people as opposed to proles), leading to...
* Cheap stuff. Consumer goods continue to be historically cheap and plentiful despite problems with China and international trade.

The end of the Ayatollah's regime in Iran will cut off the left's narcissistic supply of victims and dirty money, and the stuff leaked out of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps archives - like their funding of certain academic institutions and protest movements, their co-ordination and planning of the October 7th attack with HAMAS, etc - will bury the left politically, financially, and culturally. 

It will be similar to the situation in the early 90s after the Soviet Union fell apart and Communist sympathizers were embarrassed to learn that they had in fact been supporting a horrific, violent, authoritarian regime all these years and not a fluffy social workers paradise of happy proletarians foiling the evil schemes of the capitalists. And on top of all that, the cheques from Moscow stopped coming!

So with the Left defunct and the Right discredited we will end up with a return of.. 90's stuffed shirt centrists!

President Buttgeig will run the economy reasonably well, not brilliant but not terrible either - not unlike Clinton before him, and will be handily re-elected. People will be happy to put the bad times of the Trump Era behind them and get on with their lives. Only problem is, some people don't want them to get on with their lives.

2033 - the anti-tech movement wakes up

Because I'm British, I'm going to have the big event that everyone remembers happen in Britain, even though there are analogues elsewhere and every region will have it's own Reading Moment. (pronounced "Redding")

AI requires infrastucture in the form of a new generation of datacentres. These are an absolute blight on the landscape - not a problem in a big country like the US, but over here we are protective of our countryside. They also emit serious amounts of pollution due to their massive energy demands - an issue which cheap small nuclear reactors will only partially ameliorate, after all, nobody wants a mini-Chernobyl on their doorstep.

In the 2020s this has already caused serious local upset in Memphis Tennessee, (Elvis not Ramses), where Elon Musk built the computer that runs Grok, his own personal everyone-else-has-got-one-why-can't-I-have-one AI. It consumes about half the electricity as the city of Memphis itsself and Musk has leveraged America's poor pollution control beurocracy (and now, his friends in government) to ensure he can run the thing off gas turbines, which are steadily choking everyone in the area to death.

So when the British Government (or BT, or Virgin, or whatever, fuck you) decide to build one in the Chilterns people get pretty pissed off. It guzzles half the power of the nearby city of Reading (still pronounced "Redding") and displaces several acres of Outstanding Natural Beauty and Sites Of Special Scientific Interest. Like I said, British people are sentimental about their countryside, it's one of the few things they'll actually fight for. And a lot of activist types are frustrated by the complete failure of the previous generation of activists, and so...

It's protestin' time again!

Hippies and anarchists squat an adjacent site. They get evicted so some local landowner allows them to camp in several of his fields. 

By night, monkey-wrenching (sabotage) ensues, at first comically inept, but after several unemployed tradespeople and military veterans join the protest it gets quite dangerous for the workers on-site.

By day, protestors lock-on and block construction with their own bodies, even though this is also illegal. As soon as they are taken away by police and fast-tracked to jail or house arrest, activists are replaced from an inexhaustible supply of pissed-off people. It is almost as if anti-protest laws are a complete waste of time dreamed up by petty authoritarians to blag a few votes!

Every non-conformist, hippy, anarchist, leftie, free thinking type in the country seems to descend on the area. Lawyers mount increasing legal challenges pro bono. The whole thing becomes a media circus, and soon the whole area is buzzing with reporters and their drones, wannabes, cops, and of course the protesters themselves, who appear to grow in number by the hour.

Within days, everyone is talking about it.

People are already pissed off with AI – it has already taken most of the good jobs and turned the few left into miserable drudgery devoid of agency or creativity. It is owned by creepy American billionaires who openly scorn democracy. And furthermore:

• The news is increasingly unreliable due to deepfakes – which has led to bloodshed following the release of AI-faked footage purporting to be a massacre of Palestinian civilians by the IDF a few years previously. After this incident, "digital watermarks" are developed which supposedly identify AI-generated content, but they are pitifully easy to remove – all you have to do is pipe the video through an analogue video recording system, which does not support watermarks, and you are good to go. So by 2033 the news consists of a series of wild guesses as to what has happened that day and who is lying and why.

• By 2033 the entertainment media are also dominated by AI. Hollywood and its cousins make billions, trillions even, pushing lowest-common-denominator AI slop on a miserable, overworked, underpaid public who simply can't afford to pay for quality TV and movies anyway. Everyone just downloads old stuff illegally and passes it around by hand on massive hard drives which they deny having when outside the house, because ubiquitous AI surveillance makes petty crime – even downloading movies – if not a thing of the past, as easily detectable and prosecutable as pressing a button.

• The only reason the world isn't a complete prison is that as everyone is guilty of something – illicit tobacco or drug consumption, piracy, or simply not having a TV licence – the prisons are already heaving and the criminal justice system is in near-collapse, but the flip side of that is that if the authorities want you, they can pick you up at any time for any reason. Still, democracy survives – barely.

• On a personal level, AI-related mental health problems have emerged, it seems that a percentage of the people who use conversational AI (descendants of ChatGPT) become addicted and form unhealthy relationships with the bots, severe cases becoming prone to spiritual delusions, limerence (falling in love with the things), and delusions of persecution – so a good number of people can add to the above litany of complaints: "And it turned my uncle Kevin into a loonie!"

So you've got this protest camp in the boonies of England, and many more around the world – a groundswell forms around the issue. An ageing Geoff Hinton becomes the face of the movement, much as George Monbiot is the face of environmentalism (at least in the UK).

Over the next two years the movement only gathers strength and increases in numbers. It's only not an election issue because every politician is in hoc to the AI companies – proving the protestors' point.

Almost there – 2034

The robots of the 2020s are still clunky, expensive, impractical things – more proof-of-concept or tech demo than actual products. Even the most advanced model, Tesla Optimus, isn't even completely autonomous and has to be "puppeted" by remote control, Mechanical Turk style, by a human operator. And it still costs many thousands more than a human being that you can simply replace if they go wrong.

2034 changes all that. That is the year that HuggingFace releases their Vektor-1 model – an android, pretty much, that does anything you want. It can run errands. It can go down the shops. It can do your laundry, wash the dishes, stuff your duvet, and of course walk into a strange house and make a cup of coffee.

It can also drive short distances, operate a forklift truck, carry loads several times its own weight, act as a bricklayer, a servant, a factory worker – everything except a sex doll (and that is rumoured to be on its way).

To the anti-AI movement, this is like a red rag to a bull.

---

Finally – AI 2035

And so we find ourselves in 2035. Everyone's job sucks, there's nothing to be ambitious about because everything creative is done by computers, the news is all unverifiable nonsense, there's nothing good on the telly except sports and re-runs, people are losing friends and family to AI as well as jobs and livelihoods, and now these clowns want to put another nail in our collective coffins!

The response couldn't be clearer:

FUCK THIS.

Graffiti springs up everywhere: "STOP AI!" is already as ubiquitous a slogan as "Free Palestine" or "Ban the Bomb" in previous years – in 2035 every street corner has a sticker, or a tag, or a spray-painted version of it. Usually all three.

The URL stop.ai, long having been nabbed by PR-savvy AI companies, is taken over by hackers and defaced.

Computer viruses spring up that trash the hard drive of anyone who works for, or in, AI – and then set their phone on fire to boot.

Comedians point out that at least we won't be bothered by the sight of the "fucking chiphead droids" walking the streets, because any robot that crosses the path of a right-thinking citizen of 2035 is apt to be violently decommissioned.

In countries where firearms are freely available, junior executives and other visible employees of tech companies are actually assassinated, and senior executives retire to their bunkers and fortresses while PR flacks and political flunkies desperately fight to control the narrative. From behind a phalanx of riot police.

"We'll give you UBI!" they say.
"FUCK YOU!" says the mob and sets fire to something else.
"Violence is naughty and bad!" say centrists and liberals.
"SO ARE WE!" says the mob.

I don't know how this story ends, but this is how I think it begins. Not with Artificial General Intelligence, or Artificial Superintelligence, or anything like that - just good old fashioned human greed, stupidity, and ingenuity. And finally, when the dam breaks and people just can't take anymore - there will be resistance. It won't be glorious - violence never is - and I don't want it to shake out that way, I'd much rather everyone just chill.

But I don't think we'll get a choice in the matter.

The future of Automation: It's grim.

Preface

There follow some thoughts on the future of automation with regards to AI, specifically in light of ChatGPT and the absolute smashing of the Turing Test.

I have a strong feeling that these fucking things will be the death of us all, and that we must smash, destroy, and otherwise render inoperative the bastards before the billionaires use them to replace us so they can turf us out into the streets and watch us starve to death.

A note to anyone who thinks the billionaires are not liable to become homicidally inclined:

I'm no narcissistic leftie who thinks he's a great humanitarian, I'm a grumpy bastard like everyone else in this dystopia. So, like a lot of people, I often find myself in bad moods. Moods when I feel that people aren't really up to much. Usually a friend snaps me out of it, or in some other way my bubble of anomie is punctured by the reality of social life. 

Pictured: Your Reporter

 Now, imagine being in the worst, most arrogant, shitty mood you've ever been in, but with no friends to snap you out of it, no friends at all - just a gaggle of sycophants and yes-men. Imagine if your only social contact was with other arrogant, rich bastards, or with servants whose entire livelihood depends on telling you what you want to hear.

Now imagine having increasing amounts of power, not just over your own business interests, but over the political life of the country, even the world. Imagine how the Kochs must feel. You! Insect! Print my manifesto: "Why all plebs are scum"! You! Other serf! Put it in Journal Of The Institute of Freedom, the Magazine of Human Affairs, and The Wall Street Journal!

Yes Mastur, Oi Loves 'ee Mastur!

Such a person would find it hard, if not impossible, for their mind to stay out of some of the darker corners of human thought. Such a person, vested with unlimited executive power, would find it impossible to avoid a drift towards increasingly nasty ideological territory - as we've already found to our cost.

Now imagine how they will react when they are told that their operations will be rendered so efficient that they'll be able to fire 50%, or 70%, or 90% of their workforce. That they need never worry about bad PR again, as a robot will take care of company communications, instantly whitewashing their every shitty descision and lying so well they make Rupert Murdoch look like St Francis of Assisi. 

And now imagine how they will feel when they learn that most people don't have jobs and can't get them. What do you think they will think? "Let's give these fellas a second chance"? Uh huh. More like "Get these poors offa my lawn, and FAST!"

The future of automation

It's increasingly clear that with automation, most people are going to end up surplus to requirements.  Never mind the cab drivers made unemployed by driverless taxis, why would you even have taxis in the first place? Who  could even afford a taxi in a world where nobody except the very, very rich has a job anyway?

The whole world could be made to work without people. And without people, fewer things would need to be done. It's a vicious cycle, entire sections of the economy will close down as more and more population blocs are laid off. And then... what then?

I imagine that more civilized sections of the world - certainly Western Europe - would offer people a social settlement, something along the lines of: Here's a nice little flat and a stipend of money, on the condition that you do not riot and avoid reproducing. Doing either of those things will get you evicted and cut off. Now fuck off and keep your mouth shut if you know what's good for you.

Less civilized regions - Perhaps the USA, certainly Russia, would opt for some variation on the theme of mass extermination. People are too much trouble to keep alive, and beyond a few key technicians and the billionaires who paid for the fucking things to be developed, human beings are unnecessary to the running of machines. Inimical even.

The hoary fear of demographic collapse looks completely different from this point of view. From this point of view, Russia, Japan and South Korea are in excellent shape demographically, because the vast population that would otherwise be about to become a burden on the welfare rolls simply don't exist in the first place, and what humans are left are swiftly dying off anyway - Japanese and South Koreans are getting old, and Russians are drinking, fighting, and purging each other to death in time honoured fashion on top of this.

Seen through the lens of AI, the environmental apocalypse comes off as rather a damp squib, as human populations are about to become completely surplus to requirements just as the Earths carrying capacity has been exhausted by humans anyway.

I can see a case for mass genocide being made by AI to the ruling classes at some point soon. Have to find a tasteful way to do it, of course, and none of that overt racial selection. But in principle, yes, the ruling class, the people with all the money and power, won't need us around much longer - machines can do our jobs a lot better, and without a human social ecology to feed, the economy becomes orders of magnitude simpler anyway.

What is a city from the point of view of a billionaire? Ultimately, it's an anthill that provides said billionaire with a pool of labour and maybe some consumers, most of which wastefully serve each other in various inefficient ways.

Take human leisure facilities. From a billionaire's point of view, bars and nightclubs need to be abolished as they make workers inefficient, drunk, and hung over. As do eateries and restaurants, fast food joints and corner shops - they make people fat and inefficient, worse, all this consumption makes work-units sick, which affects the bottom line, ether in the form of taxes (that billionaires don't pay but resent anyway) or in the form of company insurance / internal medical resources.

From a billionaires point of view, a much more efficient way of handling the labour pool is to do away with personal freedom and private life entirely, starve most of the humans to death, and have the rest of them as dedicated worker drones - some of them involved in the manufacture of products, others in high-tech maintenance, others still in logistics or legal and clerical capacities, but none of them servicing each other beyond the bare minimum required to keep them alive.

After all, the billionaires are the worlds owners, society has decided that they are the most important people in the world, and in AI they have possibly found a perfect partner - a servant that is willing, intelligent, able to do most of the highly paid work of planning and thinking, and which requires no pay and no inefficient leisure facilities to maintain itself.

What we are going to see with AI then, is that the fucking things are going to become embodied. First they need to either fix the comms lag between the servers and the application, or miniaturize computer technology still further - shouldn't take more than a few years, couple of decades at most - then they can plant those dinky cool AIs in robot bodies and bang - instant, universal worker drone that will do just about anyone's job to a standard level of competence. And then watch the economy collapse as people are put out of work, and yet more become unemployed as the industries that served those people collapse in turn.

Economic collapse works on a domino principle, one domino topples the next, and the next, and the next, until the entire world is a wreck and a handful of rich bastards control everything.

That is the future of automation. If we don't poison ourselves or blow each other up or get fried by global warming anyway.