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.

Why don't we have dictators?

Maybe the reason that dictatorship never really took off in the Anglo-Saxon world is that our ruling classes don't need to impose a dictatorship - they already have absolute control over the country.

Even Mao-Tse Tung, Stalin and Hitler did not go as far as to make swimming illegal. David Cameron did. (He also passed laws which would see the following activities criminalized: Skateboarding, walking dogs, passing out leaflets, busking, running, cycling, sleeping and sitting down, as well as napping, shouting, climbing trees, and feeding the birds.)

Boating on the boating lake is a serious crime!

 

Comfortably nested and sclerotic, the British ruling class face no external threats and no internal rivals. Unlike Fascists, they don't have to resort to mass murder to preserve the existing order, and unlike Communists, they do not have to purge an existing order themselves. They are the existing order, one which has existed since 1066 and shows no sign of losing power a millennium later. Open warfare, mass genocide, political purges, civil wars? That stuff were all settled centuries ago. We just don't do that anymore.

Literally - our last genocide was over a hundred years ago, and nobody even remembers it. Even the notoriously tenacious IRA have called it a day and quit. (fortunately - I am NOT an apologist for terrorism!)

All our rulers have to deal with these days are a few working class Johnnies, who are for the most part shut up in large cities away from "decent folk" (ie, rich people). If we stray out of our little bantustans a few Bobbies will suffice to herd us back where we belong but otherwise, all's good in the hood for those toffee nosed fuckers.

Remember the Beanfield!

Also, people don't fight for their rights - so they have none. Britain is so depressingly tame; beneath the radical pose, our activists are pussies when it comes right down to it. After all these years, they still don't understand that class conflict takes place in the terrain of everyday life, not the battlefield of the Spectacle. You can have all the riots you like, we'll still have to go to work in the morning, live in overpriced, rabbit-hutch accommodation, play in controlled, contrived corporate nightmares little different to our workplaces.

And we'll be happy. That's their secret. Somehow, for some reason, most people in this country are happy with their lot. The government treats them like shit, but they love it. They enjoy being treated with contempt - unless of course the people dishing it out aren't in power. Then they get pissy - not so much because they feel insulted by how patronizing liberals and socialists can be, but because liberals and socialists are "getting above their station". They're upsetting the "natural order" which my overly-deferential countryfolk worship like a god - constantly and unconsciously.

How fucked up do you have to be to admire these things?

All of which changes our entire problem from a political one to a personal one: How do I exist in such a suffocating society when I'm the only one who actually feels suffocated by it? Drugs suit some people. Others, insanity. Still others play revolutionary, like those role-playing games that are so popular: LARPers, as they say.

But let's deconstruct this problem we have with deferentialness. I think it comes down to the rural mentality. Anglo-Saxons never really urbanized psychologically, even as they were among the first mass urban societies since ancient times. Perhaps it came too early. In Britain they speak with provincial accents even in the middle of big cities, while in the US they do not entirely retain the same rustic mentality, elections there are rigged to ensure their large rural population has enough political power to decide a Presidential election even with three million fewer votes than the "loser". Meanwhile Australia is still actually a predominantly rural society - as is Canada. 

Culturally, Anglo deference shares the same origins: The British peasantry. We have never quite shaken that off. The Russians and French murdered their aristocracy, the German Kaiser abdicated in disgrace, and the other Euro-monarchs have all succumbed to some degree of humility, made some concession to democracy, if not outright Republicanism - but we have always worshipped the royals, the aristocracy, and the rich, and that is our main problem: We have a peasants' worldview.

On the nose. PS: Please don't sue me!

 

Perhaps the greatest irony of modern anti-racism is that, far from considering themselves a master race, the problem with white people is that they are so submissive to those in power that they cannot countenance anyone overthrowing their masters for any reason - and will fight tooth and nail to retain their own chains, let alone those of other people. Of course the bastards are racist - they're even bigoted against themselves!

Until that stops, until we see working class consciousness and working class unity, nothing will ever change. People in Anglo-Saxon societies will continue to be dominated by the same arseholes who have run the show for a thousand years: The rich.

Until then, like the song says: Pray for daylight. Or you could always make it happen!

https://iww.org.uk/

https://www.acorntheunion.org.uk/contact

The City as Theme Park - thoughts on the Yuppie Problem.

If the 20th century gave us the decline of the city and the rise of the suburb, the 21st century showcases the city as a sort of live-in theme park for the rich, in which all you have to do is turn up and pay up, and everything is provided for you.

Let's role play. Pretend you're a "young professional" (ie, yuppie).  You buy your yuppie flat, which costs you enough money that you don't have to live around poor people, and are surrounded by other yuppies. You go shopping in a small supermarket built into the estate or tower block a la JG Ballard. (Well, not exactly...)

You rarely, if ever, rub shoulders with the natives. But that's OK, because just like when Great-Grandfather went to India, these latter-day Indians, the "natives" of the city don't matter - you do.

Your cultural life is curated - You spend your leisure time at huge, overhyped, corporate cultural events staged in corporate venues for corporate profit. You get your information about these from corporate media. You know nothing about the citys' rich cultural history and traditions, though of course you came here for the "culture" and the "music", you don't really want to want to know about anything that requires you to do any work - you're a consumer, after all, and that's what you do. Consume. They put on the fun, you pay them, and you "have" the fun.

I've long asked myself: How is it that yuppies can both get a massive music festival thrown for them at everyone elses expense, and also get to have all the cool clubs shut down or restricted because they make too much noise?

Because the city is a theme park, and theme parks do not support independent businesses. They are run by corporate, just like modern cities - and this means that very soon, you'll be about as likely to find a traditional pub or club in a big city as you are to find a lemonade stand at Disney World.

At least, it would get that bad if there weren't serious problems with this system.

For a start, the life cycle of the yuppie is such that all the residents of the high-priced high rises and other abominations they've replaced so many city buildings with, will move to the suburbs in around 10 years. They have to do this in order to spawn - you can't bring up a kid in an adult theme park, it's just not desirable, and yuppies always get what they want.

This means that corporates need  to constantly attract new buyers for yuppie flats, there is a continual churn and turn-over. This may be difficult to maintain in a world which is rapidly running short of resources; not many people will be attracted to live in high rises when power cuts become routine, and not many will want to shop at inflexible corporate supermarkets when food rationing is taking place - not when they can, say, buy stuff at a farm shop instead. Or even grow it themselves in a big, look-at-me-I'm-so-sustainable, prepper-survivalist kind of way.

There's also problems with civil disorder - the post-Lockdown riots took place right in the middle of Yuptown, potentially depressing property prices - and at one point, even starting fires outside their buildings!

I predict that now that things are starting to go to shit, the yuppies will run like rats from a sinking ship. They will leave Bristol, Brighton, Manchester, and Liverpool in droves and flee to the countryside and the suburbs as if their lives depended on it, because they do. They'll be Farmer Palmer's problem, not ours.

Some thoughts on the origins of Anglo authoritarianism, or How Sausages Are Made.

Evolutionary psychology is often considered a Right-wing discourse - a reactionary, racist pseudo-science that defends the status quo and allows vast swathes of people to be written off. It could well be misused as such. But scientific truth is true whether it's ideologically convenient for you or not, so I have to ask myself... what if there's something to it?

What follows is the culmination of my own darkest thoughts, and an attempt to answer the classic question: "Why the hell do poor working class people keep voting Tory, why do they support the rich, attack other poor people, and generally assist in their own oppression?"

In no way do I want any of it to be true.

Growing up, I noticed a few things. The white kids were either posh, or thick. If you weren't thick, you were automatically "posh", "middle class", "a keener"...and this was a BAD thing. The black kids didn't have that sort of divide; they were just black. Where we established a pecking order of bullies and bullied, they stuck together - if you were racist, they'd all kick the shit out of you. Fair do's.

Later, at college, I noticed that the computer science and technology department, where all ambitious and intelligent people went, had a disproportionate number of black students, who were far more hard-working and studious than the gang of dole-ites and stoners who made up my own affinity group. This was surprising to me because at the time (the 1990s), black people were being encouraged by the media and popular culture to get involved in crime and were very much stereotyped as criminals.

Have you ever wondered why the English working classes are so stupid? Why white, working class people in particular are so slavish, so devoted to drudgery and back breaking work? Why those who do break the habit of work  are so utterly irresponsible, why when they can't work, they smash up nice flats and go on drugs, why they get pissed up all the time? Why they seem to have no creativity and no culture other than patriotism and vapid celebrity bullshit?

This isn't some eugenicist, far-right twaddle (though I admit it sounds bad). I know I'm a misanthrope, but statistics show that white boys do worse at school and have done for years (even though they get better jobs when they grow up anyway). Why?

Because the industrial revolution was a crime against humanity.

It was bred into them. Literally. Nineteenth century industrialisation was like a breeding programme for stupid people.

In order to get a workforce, ordinary folk were run off of their land in the Enclosures and herded into giant cities. The only way of making a living there was basically to work yourself to death in a factory. These jobs were not only back breakingly hard... they were BORING.

Think of it. Every day, except possibly Sunday, you screw in bolts on an assembly line... or something equally mind numbing. It's noisy, hot, and crowded. If you make a mistake, you either (a) cause an accident, in which case you die, or are crippled and cannot work, or (b) get fired, in which case you die.

This is because chronic unemployment was a killer in those days - instead of going on the dole you had a choice between a life of crime and the Workhouse...

Most crimes were punished by removal from the gene pool - either via the death penalty or transportation to a penal colony.

The Workhouse was essentially a proto-concentration camp (complete with mass graves) in which, among other things, husbands and wives were split up and inmates were NOT allowed to have sex. So for non-criminals, chronic unemployment also resulted in removal from the gene pool... and intelligence strongly implied unemployment, because nobody with half a brain could have possibly lasted in those jobs for longer than a few weeks at most. Certainly not long enough to have children.

And if you were just smart enough to escape? You were also out of the gene pool. You either went to America, or (far less often) you became middle class, leaving your old life behind.

Thus, selection pressure changed the English proletariat. It blunted their sensoria, as those sensitive to the clamour and noise of the factory would have been bred out, it diminished their intelligence and shaped their minds as those who couldn't fit into the drudgery of work ended up unemployed, and so forth.

This explains so much of people's everyday behaviour - not only the popularity of extremely loud, atonal music and noisy vehicle engines, but also people's credulity, the way people have total faith in absolutely ridiculous lies, our vapid culture, our emotional attachment to the State... because submissive and stupid people got to be genetically successful, while rebellious and / or intelligent people were not.

And this explains the failure of social democracy over here (and its success on the Continent). In Europe, they didn't have anything like our industrialization.

European industrialization took place piecemeal and evolved over centuries, rather than being imposed over a couple of decades. European ruling classes were not able to brutalize and enslave anything like that number of their own people until the Fascist and Communist regimes of the 20th century, if at all.

This is why the French working class are so radical - they had no Fascism OR Communism. Indeed, they enjoy a great culture and recent history of Resistance to Fascism in place of our authoritarian "Battle of Britain" siege mentality.

So in Europe they do not have a docile, submissive working class. In Europe, if you give someone a free flat, they do not smash it up, or sell it on and join the yuppies - they have solidarity, not individualism. In Europe, if you try and take away peoples' rights, they protest and often successfully put a stop to that sort of malarkey.

Because in Europe, the working classes have not been bred to be slaves.

This is the tragic thing about working class racism. What our ruling classes did to Africans was some truly Nazi-like evil, and what they did to their own people was some Brave New World bullshit as well - It's not a competition!

Nominally free, 19th century Englishmen would have no escape except death or emigration. Nominally free, the smart ones died, were transported, or left for a new life in the Colonies, while the dumb ones bred... and bred... and bred... and bred....
 

The UK population quadrupled over the 19th century, and that of England trebled

And now we're a country awash with dummies, whose only use is as a nominally privileged, docile labour force (akin to the Kulaks of old) and voting bloc for reactionary politicians (we call them the "Gammons" over here).

What do you think the ruling classes are going to do with them, when things get tough? What did they do in the past? Ever hear of World War One? The Trenches? Ypres? Millions of people were murdered by the system in a few short years - that's how these scum solve the population problem, they hurl it into some meat grinder of a war. Or encourage them to catch some disease...

This is an unpleasant theory, I know. I don't like it either. But it explains so much - particularly, it explains the affinity of Anglo culture generally for neoliberal capitalism and the far Right. Because Anglos have been stupefied by a kind of selective breeding that took place during our period of industrialization; Eugenics in reverse.

It bears repeating, and social justice activists must understand this: Anglos have a terrible history not just of enslaving others, but also each other. We are cannibals, and the horrific thing about it is, this strategy has been extraordinarily successful. 330 million Americans, 68 million Brits, 30 million Australians and New Zealanders, 37 million Canadians... that's nearly half a billion people who think they are free, but who are deeply, genetically, unfree. Some Brave New World bullshit indeed...

I always wondered why I was different. It's really lonely being working class, or at least, not middle class, and smart, or at least not stupid. Now I know why - my great grandfather and great grandmother came here from Egypt, whose populations were not subject to the same selection pressures, my grandmother was a second-generation immigrant. My grandfather was Welsh and came to England in the 1930s; not much is known about my mothers' family, but they appear to be somewhat French and lower middle class. My people are the smart Anglos - immigrants who anglicised (Great Grandfather Mahmoud changed his name to Richard and shagged his way through three continents before copping it in Canada), smart but sociopathic and thus easily able to climb the greasy pole... apart from my immediate family, who come from a black-sheep progenitor, and that's how I got here.

It's like the Anthropic Principle in reverse; I'm here to observe this stuff because my ancestors weren't part of it. They weren't part of that horrific extermination of thought and mind that took place in the 19th centurty.


WHAT THIS MEANS FOR LEFTIST PRAXIS

It's no coincidence, then, that the Communist Manifesto was written here - by two Germans.

So - What does this mean for Leftist praxis? Nothing good. It's possible this rigid social system is ripe for revolution, but it's bound to end in Soviet-style tears, because the English proletariat are not the superior ubermensch they think they are - they're the descendants of industrial slaves, who have literally been bred to be stupid and authoritarian. Like the Russians, they will recreate the system all over again.

And that, as they say, is why I drink. That's the reason, if I'm forced to define myself ideologically at all, why I'm some weird combination of social democrat and post-left anarchist.

Sure, it'd be great revenge if Big Daddy Stalin came back from the dead and mashed up the fuckers who screwed up this country so bad that people literally believe in the Flat Earth - but what's the point of a revolution if it's just going to change the face of the man who kills you?