The Poison We Pick
Rather than place the blame on a lack of structure, community or spirituality, I see this as just a natural consequence of a system optimised at every turn for economic output.<p>I&#x27;ve heard a lot about a singularity doomsday scenario where a paperclip-maximising AI realises people are much less useful as paperclip constructors than they are as paperclip ingredients. Surely it can&#x27;t be so hard to see that the productivity-maximising AI that we&#x27;ve cobbled together out of economic rather than electromechanical components is slowly realising it doesn&#x27;t need us anymore either?<p>The truth is the economy soon won&#x27;t have any use for poor whites other than consuming the output of rich whites. The last bastions of unskilled and semi-skilled labour are being automated or sent overseas (to be automated there). I&#x27;m really curious to see what America&#x27;s 3.5 million truck drivers do when they lose their jobs over the next ten years. I guess we&#x27;ll teach them to code?<p>But don&#x27;t feel too sorry for them; the rising tide of productivity caught poor blacks before that, and all the hamster-wheeling busywork of the middle class is up next. Managers and decision-makers will stay above it right up until they realise abstraction cuts both ways. It&#x27;ll just be the quants at the end, tweaking the last few parameters and getting the lights on the way out.<p>I think most of the world at least tries to keep the economic AI from being in charge of everything. It&#x27;s hard because it keeps buying our politicians, but even so there&#x27;s a sense that it should be serving our values, not the other way around. We might work with it, respect it even, but we don&#x27;t trust it.<p>The USA is pretty strange in this sense, because somewhere along the line a huge chunk of the population got convinced that if they just leave everything to the paperclip AI it&#x27;ll take care of them. And, for a time, it will, and the people who work hard to make paperclips get rewarded, and the people who start paperclip factories get rewarded more still. But, inevitably, you&#x27;re not a paperclip, and your value is incidental in this system.<p>Faced with that, then, your only options are to find a system where people have value independent of their productivity, make being valueless palatable, or just go die quietly somewhere. It&#x27;s probably not so surprising that, in the absence of the former option, the latter two are becoming increasingly popular.<p>And, I guess, not so surprising that the paperclip worshippers are particularly unconcerned with mental health and sensible drug policy. Still pretty gross though.