A small complaint about the current state the world

Reading a blog post recently released by Matt Shumer, Something Big is Happening, has confirmed fears I have personally been carrying for many years now. This growth in AI has been torrential in changing jobs, work, development of hard sciences (Physics, Chemistry and its associates, computer engineering, etc.) with the shift of requiring less work. This is not the first time that “less work”, or efficiency has been the incentive, we have been in some form pushing for it for the entirety of humanity, and hopefully it will not end up being the last, but AI is, especially in the worlds current state, and what has been leading to this state for over 50 years, intending on destroying our society more than society has already been harmed.

Efficiency, I would like to believe, must have a limit. There is a point where we need to start asking questions to people who either didn’t take an ethics class, or did and ignored the entire class’s premise to push into a paycheck. If “Dario Amodei, who is probably the most safety-focused CEO in the AI industry, has publicly predicted that AI will eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years.”, what is the next step? We live in a world where people in the United States, a country built on violence in an era of data being the weapon of the world, is putting all its eggs into a basket where we lose out on so much. If this is correct and we lose so many workers to AI over the next five, ten, fifteen years, when will the riots start? Will there be enough to riot? Will the data-centered weaponry of the world stop dissent in a way indestructible to the remaining 95% of humanity?

If AI is being used to be a “a general substitute for cognitive work.”, what is left for us to do? In the next 50 years, if the objective is to apply AI into everything, instead of a generative intelligence machine, a general intelligence machine, what will we send people to school for? They will achieve everything past 10 with a machine that does their thinking for them, as it seems we are pushing a new way to consumer-ize thought to the people. What happens when we give people a tool that doesn’t allow them to think? Are they even thought of in the equation?

I personally believe that 1 in every 100 people working on these projects, models, and systems have less empathy than that of ants to other ants, and unfortunately that puts me in the territory of easily providing an ad hominem to this real pile of queries, but I do mean it. I fear that this machine is another step towards creating in some forms an ethno-state, removing “Unessentials” from the equation of human living, for they have nothing to provide. Do the people getting rid of jobs intend on these people having a chance at life? Or are they expected to crawl along the floor of cooks in fast food locations, physical trades, and manual labor they deem AI “not effective” for.

If this were to be the case, is there going to be attempts to keep humanity afloat? Universal basic incomes, human decency, and only a few people truly needing to “work” on a day-by-day basis? This isn’t machinery making 40 less jobs at the factory because we have a press to mold nails instead of a human pushing a lever, this is presenting “who must we teach to even understand the grasps of humanity, and who can we treat like the opium pickers of House of the Scorpion?”.

If the world is built on money, and money is power, then money is also allegiance when you speak to people outside of your true group of friends, bonds built on trust only work if both parties reciprocate, and too many roman emperors died because the praetorian guard let people in to murder them because they weren’t paid enough. If the main purpose of humans in a society based on currency in its current state is blue collar work from here on out, from baristas to convenience store workers to your construction workers are essential to the remaining parts of human work, why are they put on the lowest pay grade? Do you want the person who hands you your coffee every morning to be paid minimum wage? In a society of luxuries is that not an essential job?

This seems as though we are entering a Neo-Serfdom that has been permeating in American ideology since the suburban booms of the 60’s and onward, now showing in broken homes with no way to repair them, built for efficiency of growth and not longevity of the person, while people are paid paltry sums to barely tend to their homes, in a time with the least trust ever feasibly able to be put in the top 5% of the planets wealth. We need something to shift the scales, something to pivot what is occurring, and to help ourselves and develop what little we can to build local community into something, anything, to save ourselves. It won’t, but hopefully it can do something.

I would claim that in this new era, data is a weapon, and it is collected by everyone everywhere, and sold at the highest bidder. I would claim that unbeknownst to most, the threat that data as a weapon of war can cause is stronger than the mightiest of missiles ever used in combat across the planet, and is as silent as the cables that send it. A silent weapon, a tool of the powerful, that is invisible to the average person, who might not even have the literacy in the technology they use to see that they are in a state of constant danger. Will there ever be treaties like our past nuclear ones, to put a stop to the hellish use of data against each other? Or is the world moving so fast that the people in power couldn’t even fathom it as a weapon to begin with.