What cannot continue forever, won't.
We are gaining efficiency (sometimes), at the cost of increased minimum scale of production, and complexity. Both of which increase fragility, in Taleb's sense of the word.
At scale, my country can no longer fuel itself, nor fertilise crops, nor make semiconductors.
One day we will offend China enough to trigger sanctions, and that day will come. I worry about that day, not robot utopia...
China can't afford sanctions. They are an export economy and their own population is dying out. They have to export Even More Even Harder, or they collapse.
That's the minimum scale of production I was talking about.
Human leaders are social primates, just more coked-up and psychopathic than most.
When growth slows and their underling's social climbs stall, they will play chicken with the War Train to bluff a larger share of the loot.
I think this is well underway already...
I agree that it can't go on forever, we are just disagreeing about whether humans or machines are the last ones standing. Humans can't seem to find a reason for their own existence, anymore, so they're capitulating.
Anomie and ennui are here, but they're far from evenly distributed.
Other than that, 100% agree.
machines don't have a reason without humans so there's also that
biggest fallacy of the singularity narrative is that robots can be customers, i can trace that error of logic through dozens of things... like smart contracts, one of the ideas behind that had to do with robots buying stuff from robots
absolutely none of that has ever happened or will happen. the robot is just here to make the human more productive. the end.
