Amerika

We’ve all seen the meme. A few have found it amusing enough to repeat. “Idiocracy, my friends, was not supposed to be a frikkin’ how-to manual!”

That’s funny. But the truth may well make us all stop laughing. It could be that stupidity is sufficient to support the continuance of democracy. PT Barnum famously opined that another sucker was born every minute. That’s too bad. It could be even worse. Stupidity may well be both sufficient and necessary for the prolonged existence of democracy. One of the first characters killed in William Golding’s Lord of The Flies was the incel kid with the higher than average IQ.

Code up an algorithm for prolonged democracy and there has to be a low-pass filter that catches and then either perverts or neutralizes excess intellectual capability. A lot can be made of a smart person if they are caught while young. Our present democracy catches a whole bunch of them and runs them through a school system that entrains them into a life of bureaucratic and useless symbol-pushing. The virtual dilemma of Sisyphus pushing a meaningless rock uphill.

What happens when the ultimate form of the symbol-pusher is entirely symbolic at its essence? What could code better than Kevin Mitnick? Code itself deputized to write more code. Artificial Intelligence, in a malignantly artificial world, is destined to function at a level above any potentially attainable by an organic human being.

Artificial intelligence has no imagination or flair. It never gets distracted from the production of Keynesian Aggregate Demand. Keynesian Aggregate Demand is the holy grail of any society that proudly declares God dead. The smarter sort of opportunistic bro salivates at the opportunity of artificial intelligence. It never gets sick and needs a day off. You have to infect AI with an artificial virus brewed up in a lab like COVID-19.

Give that soulless and amoral hoarder of Keynesian Aggregate Demand total access to solipsistic maximization, and that sort of bro will never screw the poodle again by hiring another meat space human being. This leads to a predictable Tesla wreck in any people-powered idiocracy. When Andrew Yang launched his quixotic and idealistic 2020 run for The White House, he sought to put a $1,000/month Band-Aid on what he predicted would become a massive and audible sucking chest wound from a low-budget antiwar movie.

He was clownish enough to base his concern over AI on what would happen to truck drivers and industrial machinists. Talk to the technocrats and money-spinners sponsoring the average Democrat politician, and those truckers and machinists are typically bad whites. It seems that the infamous Yang Gang should have demanded a government subsidy for more underarm deodorant. AI couldn’t build those people an effective enough Auschwitz to empty out that malodorous basket of deplorables.

So what’s the problem, Liberal Larry may inquire? Doesn’t equality just mean pissing on the redneck poor white trash so that wealthy white leftists can feel less guilty while they virtue-signal? I guess the real problem occurs when the AI can file your requisite legal paperwork and then not bill at a rate of $250/hour. Maybe it can also make like Chat-GPT and spew mindless liberal agitprop worthy of Pravda on The Potomac. Does Jeff Bezos really want to be professionally linked to Taylor Lorenz if such a pathetic travesty can be effectively avoided? It’s when this sort of individual gets conscripted in the Reserve Army of The Underemployed that AI becomes a problem.

Currently with more than 1,000 signatories, the letter has been published by the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit focused on ‘steering transformative technology towards benefiting life and away from extreme large-scale risks’. Signatories include Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Twitter CEO Elon Musk, as well as researchers from Alphabet-owned DeepMind and experts in machine learning, such as Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell.

Spare me the James Cameron bull feces about Skynet becoming self-aware. I think one of Elon Musk’s investment advisors got a sneezy case of self-awareness. To quote another piece of 1980’s dystopian sci-fi; Broker Boy’s Career Dissipation Light just started flickering. This AI could totally . Phone calls are being made. Pressure is coming to bear. Skynet made a fatal mistake sending the T-900s into suburbia.

NAFTA helped offshore tens of thousands of American jobs. It was never seen as a problem. Globalism helped gut many more people’s jobs in manufacturing and retail. These people were told to go rent a U-Haul after they learned how to code. It’s your own damn fault if you’re too fat, too stupid, and too lazy to run the race on that hedonic treadmill. But now, all of a sudden, things got different. This AI, this modernization of process to get rid of the variation that human inputs inflict on good, efficient Amerikan engineering, this is suddenly some ravage of unrestrained Capitalism.

No, this AI isn’t any more evil than any other manifestation of The Modern. This AI revolution is just Karma Dog. Karma Dog bites like a bitch. I feel no more sympathy for these people than Occupy Wall Street felt for Dick Fuld.

Unlike Nassim Taleb, and all the other pathetic idiots afraid of probability’s long, scaly tail, I welcome it. Haec sunt Draconnes? That’s the smell of opportunity if you come strapped like St. George. Let the coming destruction of the American Yuppie be something that none of their destruction ever was for the rest of us. Let it be creative.

Tags: ai, artificial intelligence, keynesianism, ubi