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.

A Spectacular stock market? Or, Guy Debord finally gets his day in the sun!

The Economist published a fascinating editorial that, fortunately, I believe disproves itsself. The thesis of which is that the Situationists were right and political economy is now completely spectacular. 

The thesis, written in an offhand way in an article about overvalued markets, goes like this: On top of the already notorious spectacular politics, we have a spectacular stock market which provides only the illusion of a free market, but whose real purpose is to provide bread-and-circuses style entertainment and a way for ordinary people to feel as if they are participating and can even "beat the system" - as seen in movements such as /r/WallStreetBets.

Such a theory has consequences: It follows from this that in reality, the economy is completely divided up between the big corporations and politicians, effectively it is a planned economy, though not a socialist one. This not only isn't theoretical, it isn't even a secret - the economy is openly manipulated by governments and corporations - as we all know, the real conspiracies take place in plain sight.

Spectacular stock markets, therefore, are basically a safety valve, one which replaces Leftist activism and even improves on it by preventing people from thinking outside of the system and potentially making participants rich. 

Spectacular Leftism (as opposed to actual organizing, such as trade union activism) had a very real problem, in that, by definition, it must not only not promise to make most participants wealthy, it actively promises to make participants poor. 

 I used to hang around with crusties myself because I actually was poor, rather than a wannabe, and I can tell you from brutal experience that "activism" of this sort promises a penitents' life of cold water, abandoned buildings, and regular beatings while stockmarket "activism" (or just participation) promises to buy you a house, put your kids through college, pay for your granny's operation, etc, etc, etc.

So anyway: It's all a lie, the stock market is bread and circuses, they've done an end run around us, and blah, blah, blah. It's got legs, I guess.

However, if this were entirely true, it would not be in the editorial page of The Economist. People may conspire in plain sight these days, but they  do not like to admit certain things even to themselves, such as "our profession is a complete fucking joke and we are all being taken for fools by even more powerful elitists than ourselves."

Situationism / Debordism is all very well and good, but like a lot of left wing philosophy it has the potential of turning into a weapon of the system, a weapon against change. It has a self defeating core that says "Hey guys you're all actually in the Matrix, nothing you do can actually change anything, it's all the Spectacle, don't even bother" - that's a counsel of despair, and anyone who promotes despair is not your friend.

I mean, it was in The Economist!

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.

Neoliberals just don't get it.

or which country has the best economy? Britain Vs. Japan

Here's an article that should be called "Mass unemployment and industrial stagnation are A Good Thing 'cos then we'd have slightly better TVs, or something." Have a shufti:

https://origin-www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-01-20/japan-must-let-zombie-companies-die


It basically argues that the Japanese are stupid, evil and bad because they subsidize some of the biggest companies in the world. What they should do is embrace neoliberal solutions, let everyone go bust and embrace "creative destruction" (an insane slogan that had to have been dreamed up by an economist on the really bad drugs).

This company is Bad and Wrong and A Failure.

Now, imagine that you are a high-ranking government official of a medium-sized, advanced, industrial country. What would you rather have? The possibility of slightly better TVs together with the certainty of mass unemployment, industrial stagnation and social unrest, or the dreaded "OMG zombie companies" and *gasp* public debt! ...together with... high employment, cheap goods, and world-class corporations?

Put it this way: Would you rather be Japan, which has one set of things, or Britain, which has the other - and all of the problems that each of those lead to?

The UK has followed a strict neoliberal prescription since the late 1970s: Tight budgets, slashed social spending, no industrial subsidies, regular bonfires of regulations, freewheeling enterpenerurial capitalism, broken trade unions, corporations can do what they like, the City can do what it likes, and blah, blah, blah, yadda yadda yadda.

Sucessful British factory enjoying fruits of happy times boomtown neoliberal economics 

Japan followed a neo-Keynsian policy since the 1990s when the bubble economy burst and it became obvious to even the most stupid person that capitalism sometimes needs a helping hand and a little cash to grease the wheels, especially when times are hard and orders are thin.

Failing Japanese factory, enduring failed policies that don't work because reasons

Japan makes consumer goods, solar panels, industrial equipment, robots, computers, and cute cartoons. It's an industrial and cultural behemoth. Sure, it has a lot of public sector debt. But this can be managed and kicked down the road, and that debt buys you something: Social stability (which the Japanese prize). After 2011's triple-horror real life disaster movie of an earthquake, tsunami and raging nuclear meltdown all at once, the country bounced back and is still basically functional. It has its problems, but so does every society. The worst? Japanese people work too hard and they live a long time! IT'S CHAOS I TELLS YA!

The UK makes: Crap TV shows, some of the best comics nobody's ever heard of... er... the Raspberry Pi! Er... oh yeah, weapons! We make lots of guns, tanks and bombs... er... um.. ah... I'm sure there's more but that's about it.

Exports are good, though!

And it shows. We have millions on the breadline and hundreds of thousands on actual breadlines living on food handouts. Also mass homelessness- nobody quite knows how many Britons live on the street, but slumped, emaciated figures sleeping rough are a common sight here, as are small but growing shanty towns consisting of tents routinely handed out by charities to the homeless - because there is such a housing shortage, at least anywhere near where the jobs are, that people can't afford to live anywhere.

There is a lot of luxury housing, but that's because housing is considered a luxury.

 As a result of all this human misery and industrial mega-fail there is such social instability that cities periodically erupt into mass rioting - the last time, 2011 - the same year as the tsunami in Japan- involved every city in England and lasted five days.

That creative destruction, working its, er...

traditional neoliberal economic, er... magic. Yes.

Our relationship with our neighbours is poor and deteriorating as public anger is whipped up into a frenzy and channelled into an orgy of xenophobic scapegoating by the newspapers, which all seem to be owned by the same handful of rich, right wing men.

The government seems to actively despise the people while using said scapegoating to leverage even more power; meanwhile Scotland and Northern Ireland are openly talking about secession - raising the possibility of actual Soviet-style national dissolution to go with our Soviet-style stagnation and poverty. Creative destruction indeed!

We don't even make better TVs. In fact, I have no idea when we last made a TV. I know we used to make computers, back in the '80s... you can probably see them in one of our many museums. But perhaps I'm being unfair: I mean, we do have the Rasbperry Pi...

British computer

 Japanese computer

Oh, and about that debt everyone goes on about? We also have massive debt, but it's all either off the books (thanks, PFI and bailouts!) or private - which means that when people can't pay anymore because they need to buy food or pay bills, we're going to get another crash.

So yeah, "Zombie companies" and government bailouts, while indeed lossy and imperfect, are better than the alternative.

It's better to be Japan than Britain. Neoliberals just don't get it.