Fall 2021
Dear Friends and Family,
The excerpts for the artificial intelligence portion of this series predominantly come from three books. Interestingly, they report similar to date conclusions, themes for the benefits of AI technology, and predictions for the future. Yet, the three authors have widely diverse backgrounds and experience.
One is a Taiwanese born man who was educated in the U.S. attaining a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from a prodigious school, Carnegie Mellon. He worked for Microsoft, Silicon Graphics, and Apple in the U.S. before becoming President of Google China. Next, he became chairman and CEO of a Chinese investment firm living in Beijing and focusing on the development of next generation Chinese high-tech firms. The second is a man born and educated in India with a short stint at Syracuse University. He became an entrepreneur living in the U.S. and founded and managed several IT companies who operated in some 20 countries. Then in 1995 he started a non-profit Foundation in Princeton, NJ. He has been researching civilizations and their engagement with technology from a historical, social sciences and mind sciences perspective. He also is an Indian American Hindu Activist. The third author is an American woman futurist, who was educated and practiced as a journalist before founding the Future Today Institute, a management consulting firm of which she is CEO.
Only two penned future scenarios – one author authoring two of the three scenarios in this segment. I found three predictions out of the three scenarios rather riveting as the result of the AI-based revolution.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
The excerpts for the artificial intelligence portion of this series predominantly come from three books. Interestingly, they report similar to date conclusions, themes for the benefits of AI technology, and predictions for the future. Yet, the three authors have widely diverse backgrounds and experience.
One is a Taiwanese born man who was educated in the U.S. attaining a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from a prodigious school, Carnegie Mellon. He worked for Microsoft, Silicon Graphics, and Apple in the U.S. before becoming President of Google China. Next, he became chairman and CEO of a Chinese investment firm living in Beijing and focusing on the development of next generation Chinese high-tech firms. The second is a man born and educated in India with a short stint at Syracuse University. He became an entrepreneur living in the U.S. and founded and managed several IT companies who operated in some 20 countries. Then in 1995 he started a non-profit Foundation in Princeton, NJ. He has been researching civilizations and their engagement with technology from a historical, social sciences and mind sciences perspective. He also is an Indian American Hindu Activist. The third author is an American woman futurist, who was educated and practiced as a journalist before founding the Future Today Institute, a management consulting firm of which she is CEO.
Only two penned future scenarios – one author authoring two of the three scenarios in this segment. I found three predictions out of the three scenarios rather riveting as the result of the AI-based revolution.
- All three predict a totalitarian society.
- Two predict China will win the AI race. The third doesn’t comment on the AI race
- Two predict a conscious implementation of depopulation.
Happy Learning,
Harley
BIG TECH & AI – SEGMENT 13
THREE FUTURISTIC SCENARIOS FOR AI -- EXCERPTS
FIRST SCENARIO – PRAGMATIC: By 2023, we’ve acknowledged AI’s problems but along the way decided to make only minor tweaks in the development track of artificial intelligence, a system we see is clearly fractured. We pursue only tweaks because AI’s stakeholders aren’t willing to get unpopular choices and curb our wild expectations in the short-term, even if it means improving our long-term odds of living alongside AI. Worse, we ignore China and its plans for the future.
America has no long-term vision of strategy on AI, and it disavows any economic, educational and national security impacts. US government leaders, on both sides of the aisle, focus on how to stifle China when they should be strategizing on how to establish a coalition made up of the G-MARFIA (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, IBM, Apple) and government. Between 2019 and 2023 we effectively ignore Xi Jinping’s proclamation about the future: China’s comprehensive national AI strategy, his plans to dominate the global economy, and China’s goal to become a singular force driving geopolitical decisions. We fail to connect the dots between the future of AI, its surveillance infrastructure and social credit system, and China’s person-to-person diplomacy in various African, Asian, and European countries.
None of the G-MAFIA agrees to a single set of core values that prioritize transparency, inclusivity, and safety. While leadership within the G-MAFIA agrees that there should probably be widely adopted and implemented standards governing AI, there’s just no way to divert resources or time to work on them. Google and Applezon (Apple and Amazon merged) unintentionally harass you into better health. Your wristband and smart glasses deliver constant reminders. Skip a recommended workout, and you can expect to be nagged all day. Take an extra cookie, and it’s noted in your file. The system wasn’t intended to behave this way, but the algorithms were given a purpose, and they were trained to relentlessly optimize the various facets to everyday life.
China’s modern version of communism – socialism mixed with capitalist sensibilities – expands, positioning Xi Jinping to make good on promises of a new world order. Nations that are opposed to China’s autocratic style of governing have no leverage. They have no choice but to work alongside China, on China’s terms. China is practicing a new colonization, successfully colonizing Zambia, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Sudan. China is building infrastructure – and deploying its social credit score system – and extracting critical resources to lock out competitors and to support its rapidly growing middle class. China now dominates advanced tech industries, including robotics, new energies, genomics, and aviation – and every one of those fields leverage and are leveraged by AI.
2049: And Then There Were Five: Now China’s BAT are stronger than ever and still working in lockstep with Beijing. However, America’s six original G-MAFIA members are now only five. Facebook’s business model just wasn’t sustainable over time. Once users dropped off and advertisers stopped spending their money on the platform, Facebook didn’t have a diverse portfolio of revenue streams. By 2035 it was in serious financial trouble. Facebook was sold for parts. Everyone whose data was locked inside the network – which was most of America – is now gravely concerned because it’s our data that was quietly bought by a conglomerate. Rumor has it that the conglomerate was a Chinese shell company. It’s likely that all of us are now a part of China’s social credit system, and that we’re being tracked.
Your home has been turned into a big container for marketing, which is constant and intrusive. You see custom video advertisements anywhere there’s a screen. You are uncomfortable in your own house – the one place you used to feel most at ease and relaxed. We are beginning to see very real declines of Western civilization and our democratic ideals, thanks to China’s colonization, the expansion of its economic zones, and its unscrupulous use of Advanced General Intelligence (AGI). There are fragments of code that don’t quite make sense, and some of the AGI’s that process and route our Personal Data Record (PDRs) are acting glitchy. In our homes and offices, the lights randomly turn off. Our smart glasses stop working intermittently. Our communications satellites veer off course. Though we can’t hear them, we know the shots have been fired, and that China has waged war on America.
2060: Digitally Occupied States of America: China was able to guild and deploy a terrifying system to control most of the population on Earth. If we don’t comply with China’s demands, it cuts off our communications systems. You are the resident in China’s Digitally Occupied States of America. Your transportation, bank, health care system, light switches, and refrigerators are all controlled by China. Humanity is on the brink of a terrifying artificial superintelligence (ASI) that has been developed by a country that does not share our democratic values and ideals.
Source: The Big Nine by Amy Webb (2019)
Second Scenario – Catastrophic: By 2023, we have closed our eyes to artificial intelligence’s developmental track. We missed all the signals we ignored the warning signs and we failed to actively plan for the future. The G-MAFIA are the sole owners of your personal data record, which grows to encompass every aspect of your human existence. Algorithms make decisions for you. We can’t see total corporate control of our PDRs for what it is: America’s version of China’s social credit system. Chinese citizens are learning to live with automated monitoring and consequences of stepping out of line. China’s consolidation of power under Xi Jinping, its various state sponsored initiatives, its rapidly growing economy, and the success of the BAT are an unstoppable force with which to be reckoned. The White House and Congress refuse to acknowledge that China is building a 21st-century empire on the foundation of data, AI infrastructure, geopolitics, and the global economy. It is a grave error in judgment we will all later regret.
2029: Digitally Locked In and Out: For the past decade, you’ve been incentivized to buy all manners of smart technologies and AI systems. All appliances now come standard with AI systems. But there’s a catch you didn’t see coming. You lack permission to override what was supposed to be a “helpful” AI. It maybe after midnight and you might have already planned to get a load of laundry done in time to put it in the drier before work the next morning, but the washing machine’s AI doesn’t take your desire to sleep into consideration. It sounds an alarm and pings you without ever stopping to tell you it’s time to put your clothes in the drier. Some households experience AI glitches especially with their kitchen appliances. The cybersecurity experts are gobsmacked to discover all the glitches are actually linked. It is a new kind of “Internet of Things” attack originating in China and enabled by machine learning.
Just as predicted AI and automation begin to obviate jobs – far more jobs that we’d anticipated. The widespread technological unemployment that had long been on the horizon arrived, but not at all how we’d imagined. We were prepared for unemployed truck drivers, factory workers, and laborers, but our projections were wrong. It turns out that building physical robots capable of doing all that physical labor was a far more difficult task than we’d ever imagined, while cognitive tasks were easier to program and replicate. Ironically, it is the knowledge worker who are no longer needed. The nerds programmed themselves out of work.
Our cognitive abilities are assessed before preschool, and our academic achievement and enrichment is tracked throughout our lives. With the American workforce in crisis, students are divided into two categories during their kindergarten entrance exams: vocational or executive. Vocational students are trained for agility across disciplines, while executive students are trained in critical thinking and management. There is no need for the kinds of skills possessed by middle managers, since most middle managers and entry-level knowledge workers are now AIs.
By the end of the 2030s, we realize that AI has developed along parallel trajectories, supporting capitalism in the West and China’s brand of communism through’out Asia, Africa, and Latin America. America and its allies are living under a system of AI totalitarianism. Citizens throughout China and all the countries supported by China’s investments and infrastructures find that they, too, are living under an apparatus of AI-powered punishment and reward.
2049: Biometric Borders and Nanobot Abortions: The AI-systems were built to make our lives easier but have instead emboldened our laziness. They’ve eroded our sense of productivity. We rely on systems to make decisions for us. We resign ourselves to limited choices. You’re in an AI-powered prison of you own making. You constantly get locked out of your own oven, closets, and bathrooms, and you don’t bother fighting back anymore. There is no point.
The advent of commercially available nanobots, which share information with our PDRs have replaced the one-size-fits-most medications and therapies, treating our specific ailments without causing side effects. Nanobots continually monitor and treat us, so the life expectancy for average Americans shot from 76.1 years in 2019 up to 99.7 years today. Similarly, nanobots monitor you as you age, performing a calculation to determine at what point continuation of your life is more painful than death. Once you need home health care and become a drain on the established social safety nets, AGIs intervene. Death is induced comfortably so that neither you nor your family has to decide when it’s time to let go.
Scores of people in America and our strategic ally countries are out of work. Without a broad enough social safety net in place, Western economies are in sharp decline. China’s AI initiative gathers momentum. The social harmony score is now active in more than 100 countries worldwide, and it’s replaced traditional travel papers. Those with high enough social harmony scores are granted unfettered (but monitored of course) access to any of China’s network of connected countries. China has established biometric borders with facial recognition to determine who may come and go. There is now a wall at the southern border of the U.S. It’s made of sensors and was built on Mexican soil by the Chinese to keep us in. Since Americans can’t get access to the social credit score, you are denied entry. If you attempt to cross a biometric border illegally, an AGI emits a sonic attack that cases nausea, concussion, bleeding from your ears, and long-term psychological stress.
2069: Digital Annihilation: China has built a network of more than 150 countries that operate under the guiding principles of the Global One China Policy. In return for their obedience, these countries have network access, the ability to trade, and a stable financial system backed by Beijing. The global population of Earth has surpassed 10 billion. We gave birth too often and too quickly, and we insisted on extending our lifespans past 120 years of age. China has built an artificial superintelligence (ASI), and it has one purpose to exterminate the populations of America and our allies. One China nations need what’s left of Earth’s resources and Beijing has calculated that the only way to survive is to take those resources from us. What you witness is worse than any bomb ever created. Annihilation by AI is slow and unstoppable. It is the end of America. It is the end of America’s allies. It is the end of democracy. The Rengong Zhineng Dynasty ascends. It is brutal, irreversible, and absolute.
Source: The Big Nine by Amy Webb (2019)
THIRD SCENARIO – HAPPY MORONS AND DEPOPULATION: The world will enter a period in which ordinary humans surrender their agency to the new elite, and there will be exploitation, chaos, conflict, and instability. The superhuman elites will at some point begin to perceive the masses as a parasitic liability once they have been drained of their data and it will become important to regulate their numbers. Eventually, the idea of large-scale depopulation will become a topic of debate. An argument will be put forth that gradually rolling back the world population to the level of 200 years ago would not be a horrible plan. It would be argued that in a less-populated world the inhabitants would be happier and in harmony with each other and with nature. The case will be made that a small population would be able to afford the good life of augmentation with the new technologies.
Whenever society decides to put the brakes on new births, it will take at least 50 years for sufficient numbers of people to die of natural deaths and lower the population dramatically. This means that regardless of how aggressively birth rates are curbed to reduce the population to manageable levels, it will take two generations of “useless” people having to be supported somehow. In other words, the path to AI-based utopia must pass through a dystopian phase lasting 50 years. Maintaining billions of individuals physically and mentally with dignity will be a humanitarian challenge for at least a half a century.
The Crash of Civilization: Once AI has taken control of the social sciences research apparatus, it will create a new grand narrative that will make the obsolescence of human agency and labor seem normal, even desirable. People will accept this shift as a gift: they will no longer have to work or even make choices for themselves. They will gladly become subservient to whatever customized pleasures are doled out to them; machines will run their lives for them, with all their emotional needs and gratification, which will, in turn, make them even more passive and easily controlled. I call such a disruption of society the crash of civilization.
During this period, the human being downgraded will still need to be fed and have their emotional and psychological needs met. I refer to the individuals who will be managed this way as happy morons. They will be neither productive citizens because no jobs will be available for them, nor consumers, because consumers require money to buy the technologies that will keep them happy. Rather, happy morons could turn into a nuisance and social liability, deadbeats who must be tolerated and dealt with in a humanitarian manner. But as voters with legal rights, these people will need to be kept happy, using some means.
Ironically, the new AI-based emotional management technologies will likely be applied to maintain the “useless” people in some form of happy, i.e., docile state. Keeping these billions of surplus people in a virtual of pleasure, delivered by technologies such as Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR & AR), will be an attractive proposition. AI suppliers will tout this as a positive use of technology for the psychological management of people deemed to be parasites. The happy morons will be augmented by technology for binge-watching movies, indulging in artificial sexual gratification, enjoying fantasy vacations, and becoming artificially intoxicated with the help of implants. Letting them escape happily in a decadent, degenerate, and passive state would bypass ethical dilemmas of human rights abuses, and at the same time get the vast majority of human population out of the way for the superhumans to take custody of the world. An entire industry will spring up just for the purpose of enabling large numbers of people to live as happy morons.
The effect will be a new kind of colonization: the conquering of human aesthetics through machines. Large numbers of our youth today are already unconsciously serving as experimental subjects in testing and perfecting the machine learning algorithms for aesthetic management. Ironically, they seem to enjoy the process of surrendering their sovereignty.
Source: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power by Rajiv Malhotra (2021)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
THREE FUTURISTIC SCENARIOS FOR AI -- EXCERPTS
FIRST SCENARIO – PRAGMATIC: By 2023, we’ve acknowledged AI’s problems but along the way decided to make only minor tweaks in the development track of artificial intelligence, a system we see is clearly fractured. We pursue only tweaks because AI’s stakeholders aren’t willing to get unpopular choices and curb our wild expectations in the short-term, even if it means improving our long-term odds of living alongside AI. Worse, we ignore China and its plans for the future.
America has no long-term vision of strategy on AI, and it disavows any economic, educational and national security impacts. US government leaders, on both sides of the aisle, focus on how to stifle China when they should be strategizing on how to establish a coalition made up of the G-MARFIA (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, IBM, Apple) and government. Between 2019 and 2023 we effectively ignore Xi Jinping’s proclamation about the future: China’s comprehensive national AI strategy, his plans to dominate the global economy, and China’s goal to become a singular force driving geopolitical decisions. We fail to connect the dots between the future of AI, its surveillance infrastructure and social credit system, and China’s person-to-person diplomacy in various African, Asian, and European countries.
None of the G-MAFIA agrees to a single set of core values that prioritize transparency, inclusivity, and safety. While leadership within the G-MAFIA agrees that there should probably be widely adopted and implemented standards governing AI, there’s just no way to divert resources or time to work on them. Google and Applezon (Apple and Amazon merged) unintentionally harass you into better health. Your wristband and smart glasses deliver constant reminders. Skip a recommended workout, and you can expect to be nagged all day. Take an extra cookie, and it’s noted in your file. The system wasn’t intended to behave this way, but the algorithms were given a purpose, and they were trained to relentlessly optimize the various facets to everyday life.
China’s modern version of communism – socialism mixed with capitalist sensibilities – expands, positioning Xi Jinping to make good on promises of a new world order. Nations that are opposed to China’s autocratic style of governing have no leverage. They have no choice but to work alongside China, on China’s terms. China is practicing a new colonization, successfully colonizing Zambia, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Sudan. China is building infrastructure – and deploying its social credit score system – and extracting critical resources to lock out competitors and to support its rapidly growing middle class. China now dominates advanced tech industries, including robotics, new energies, genomics, and aviation – and every one of those fields leverage and are leveraged by AI.
2049: And Then There Were Five: Now China’s BAT are stronger than ever and still working in lockstep with Beijing. However, America’s six original G-MAFIA members are now only five. Facebook’s business model just wasn’t sustainable over time. Once users dropped off and advertisers stopped spending their money on the platform, Facebook didn’t have a diverse portfolio of revenue streams. By 2035 it was in serious financial trouble. Facebook was sold for parts. Everyone whose data was locked inside the network – which was most of America – is now gravely concerned because it’s our data that was quietly bought by a conglomerate. Rumor has it that the conglomerate was a Chinese shell company. It’s likely that all of us are now a part of China’s social credit system, and that we’re being tracked.
Your home has been turned into a big container for marketing, which is constant and intrusive. You see custom video advertisements anywhere there’s a screen. You are uncomfortable in your own house – the one place you used to feel most at ease and relaxed. We are beginning to see very real declines of Western civilization and our democratic ideals, thanks to China’s colonization, the expansion of its economic zones, and its unscrupulous use of Advanced General Intelligence (AGI). There are fragments of code that don’t quite make sense, and some of the AGI’s that process and route our Personal Data Record (PDRs) are acting glitchy. In our homes and offices, the lights randomly turn off. Our smart glasses stop working intermittently. Our communications satellites veer off course. Though we can’t hear them, we know the shots have been fired, and that China has waged war on America.
2060: Digitally Occupied States of America: China was able to guild and deploy a terrifying system to control most of the population on Earth. If we don’t comply with China’s demands, it cuts off our communications systems. You are the resident in China’s Digitally Occupied States of America. Your transportation, bank, health care system, light switches, and refrigerators are all controlled by China. Humanity is on the brink of a terrifying artificial superintelligence (ASI) that has been developed by a country that does not share our democratic values and ideals.
Source: The Big Nine by Amy Webb (2019)
Second Scenario – Catastrophic: By 2023, we have closed our eyes to artificial intelligence’s developmental track. We missed all the signals we ignored the warning signs and we failed to actively plan for the future. The G-MAFIA are the sole owners of your personal data record, which grows to encompass every aspect of your human existence. Algorithms make decisions for you. We can’t see total corporate control of our PDRs for what it is: America’s version of China’s social credit system. Chinese citizens are learning to live with automated monitoring and consequences of stepping out of line. China’s consolidation of power under Xi Jinping, its various state sponsored initiatives, its rapidly growing economy, and the success of the BAT are an unstoppable force with which to be reckoned. The White House and Congress refuse to acknowledge that China is building a 21st-century empire on the foundation of data, AI infrastructure, geopolitics, and the global economy. It is a grave error in judgment we will all later regret.
2029: Digitally Locked In and Out: For the past decade, you’ve been incentivized to buy all manners of smart technologies and AI systems. All appliances now come standard with AI systems. But there’s a catch you didn’t see coming. You lack permission to override what was supposed to be a “helpful” AI. It maybe after midnight and you might have already planned to get a load of laundry done in time to put it in the drier before work the next morning, but the washing machine’s AI doesn’t take your desire to sleep into consideration. It sounds an alarm and pings you without ever stopping to tell you it’s time to put your clothes in the drier. Some households experience AI glitches especially with their kitchen appliances. The cybersecurity experts are gobsmacked to discover all the glitches are actually linked. It is a new kind of “Internet of Things” attack originating in China and enabled by machine learning.
Just as predicted AI and automation begin to obviate jobs – far more jobs that we’d anticipated. The widespread technological unemployment that had long been on the horizon arrived, but not at all how we’d imagined. We were prepared for unemployed truck drivers, factory workers, and laborers, but our projections were wrong. It turns out that building physical robots capable of doing all that physical labor was a far more difficult task than we’d ever imagined, while cognitive tasks were easier to program and replicate. Ironically, it is the knowledge worker who are no longer needed. The nerds programmed themselves out of work.
Our cognitive abilities are assessed before preschool, and our academic achievement and enrichment is tracked throughout our lives. With the American workforce in crisis, students are divided into two categories during their kindergarten entrance exams: vocational or executive. Vocational students are trained for agility across disciplines, while executive students are trained in critical thinking and management. There is no need for the kinds of skills possessed by middle managers, since most middle managers and entry-level knowledge workers are now AIs.
By the end of the 2030s, we realize that AI has developed along parallel trajectories, supporting capitalism in the West and China’s brand of communism through’out Asia, Africa, and Latin America. America and its allies are living under a system of AI totalitarianism. Citizens throughout China and all the countries supported by China’s investments and infrastructures find that they, too, are living under an apparatus of AI-powered punishment and reward.
2049: Biometric Borders and Nanobot Abortions: The AI-systems were built to make our lives easier but have instead emboldened our laziness. They’ve eroded our sense of productivity. We rely on systems to make decisions for us. We resign ourselves to limited choices. You’re in an AI-powered prison of you own making. You constantly get locked out of your own oven, closets, and bathrooms, and you don’t bother fighting back anymore. There is no point.
The advent of commercially available nanobots, which share information with our PDRs have replaced the one-size-fits-most medications and therapies, treating our specific ailments without causing side effects. Nanobots continually monitor and treat us, so the life expectancy for average Americans shot from 76.1 years in 2019 up to 99.7 years today. Similarly, nanobots monitor you as you age, performing a calculation to determine at what point continuation of your life is more painful than death. Once you need home health care and become a drain on the established social safety nets, AGIs intervene. Death is induced comfortably so that neither you nor your family has to decide when it’s time to let go.
Scores of people in America and our strategic ally countries are out of work. Without a broad enough social safety net in place, Western economies are in sharp decline. China’s AI initiative gathers momentum. The social harmony score is now active in more than 100 countries worldwide, and it’s replaced traditional travel papers. Those with high enough social harmony scores are granted unfettered (but monitored of course) access to any of China’s network of connected countries. China has established biometric borders with facial recognition to determine who may come and go. There is now a wall at the southern border of the U.S. It’s made of sensors and was built on Mexican soil by the Chinese to keep us in. Since Americans can’t get access to the social credit score, you are denied entry. If you attempt to cross a biometric border illegally, an AGI emits a sonic attack that cases nausea, concussion, bleeding from your ears, and long-term psychological stress.
2069: Digital Annihilation: China has built a network of more than 150 countries that operate under the guiding principles of the Global One China Policy. In return for their obedience, these countries have network access, the ability to trade, and a stable financial system backed by Beijing. The global population of Earth has surpassed 10 billion. We gave birth too often and too quickly, and we insisted on extending our lifespans past 120 years of age. China has built an artificial superintelligence (ASI), and it has one purpose to exterminate the populations of America and our allies. One China nations need what’s left of Earth’s resources and Beijing has calculated that the only way to survive is to take those resources from us. What you witness is worse than any bomb ever created. Annihilation by AI is slow and unstoppable. It is the end of America. It is the end of America’s allies. It is the end of democracy. The Rengong Zhineng Dynasty ascends. It is brutal, irreversible, and absolute.
Source: The Big Nine by Amy Webb (2019)
THIRD SCENARIO – HAPPY MORONS AND DEPOPULATION: The world will enter a period in which ordinary humans surrender their agency to the new elite, and there will be exploitation, chaos, conflict, and instability. The superhuman elites will at some point begin to perceive the masses as a parasitic liability once they have been drained of their data and it will become important to regulate their numbers. Eventually, the idea of large-scale depopulation will become a topic of debate. An argument will be put forth that gradually rolling back the world population to the level of 200 years ago would not be a horrible plan. It would be argued that in a less-populated world the inhabitants would be happier and in harmony with each other and with nature. The case will be made that a small population would be able to afford the good life of augmentation with the new technologies.
Whenever society decides to put the brakes on new births, it will take at least 50 years for sufficient numbers of people to die of natural deaths and lower the population dramatically. This means that regardless of how aggressively birth rates are curbed to reduce the population to manageable levels, it will take two generations of “useless” people having to be supported somehow. In other words, the path to AI-based utopia must pass through a dystopian phase lasting 50 years. Maintaining billions of individuals physically and mentally with dignity will be a humanitarian challenge for at least a half a century.
The Crash of Civilization: Once AI has taken control of the social sciences research apparatus, it will create a new grand narrative that will make the obsolescence of human agency and labor seem normal, even desirable. People will accept this shift as a gift: they will no longer have to work or even make choices for themselves. They will gladly become subservient to whatever customized pleasures are doled out to them; machines will run their lives for them, with all their emotional needs and gratification, which will, in turn, make them even more passive and easily controlled. I call such a disruption of society the crash of civilization.
During this period, the human being downgraded will still need to be fed and have their emotional and psychological needs met. I refer to the individuals who will be managed this way as happy morons. They will be neither productive citizens because no jobs will be available for them, nor consumers, because consumers require money to buy the technologies that will keep them happy. Rather, happy morons could turn into a nuisance and social liability, deadbeats who must be tolerated and dealt with in a humanitarian manner. But as voters with legal rights, these people will need to be kept happy, using some means.
Ironically, the new AI-based emotional management technologies will likely be applied to maintain the “useless” people in some form of happy, i.e., docile state. Keeping these billions of surplus people in a virtual of pleasure, delivered by technologies such as Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR & AR), will be an attractive proposition. AI suppliers will tout this as a positive use of technology for the psychological management of people deemed to be parasites. The happy morons will be augmented by technology for binge-watching movies, indulging in artificial sexual gratification, enjoying fantasy vacations, and becoming artificially intoxicated with the help of implants. Letting them escape happily in a decadent, degenerate, and passive state would bypass ethical dilemmas of human rights abuses, and at the same time get the vast majority of human population out of the way for the superhumans to take custody of the world. An entire industry will spring up just for the purpose of enabling large numbers of people to live as happy morons.
The effect will be a new kind of colonization: the conquering of human aesthetics through machines. Large numbers of our youth today are already unconsciously serving as experimental subjects in testing and perfecting the machine learning algorithms for aesthetic management. Ironically, they seem to enjoy the process of surrendering their sovereignty.
Source: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Power by Rajiv Malhotra (2021)
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
| 13l_big_tech_13l_three_scenarios_--_segment__13.pdf |