The End of Work and the Future of Civilization?

sous les pavés, la plage

Paris 68 poster

I find myself having an incessant internal dialogue about recent American history and how we degenerated into crude despotism or neoFascism, with a Christian White Nationalist agenda. As much as I keep looking back, I also try to look forward — to envision some path out of this. I admit it isn’t easy to see one, for various reasons. Perhaps the most powerful one is that so many millions of people are ideologically captured, deeply indoctrinated and hypnotized. However, our social, technological and ecological conditions change rapidly. They will continue to mutate. For the sake of our children and other young people at least, we must maintain the belief that this juggernaut of greed, hatred, and false piety will, also, burn itself out and self-destruct at some point.

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I’ve been wanting to explore, again, the subject of Artificial Intelligence and what lies on the horizon with it. The trajectory of AI is woven into the neoFascist takeover — as we recall from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the mastery of the use of algorithms to shift people’s beliefs on Facebook and other platforms drove our society further toward the malignant Right. I still try to communicate with ideologically captured (probably they feel the same about me) friends on Facebook, trying to fathom how and why they remain Trump supporters. From my side, I feel like an alien mind-virus — shades of the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers — has taken them over and won’t let go.

One problem is that people tend to think in simplistic binaries. Once they have determined that the establishment Democrats were working with Karl Schwab and the World Economic Forum to build a technocratic surveillance society while also sex-trafficking kids as a side hustle, it isn’t easy to get them to see they were hoodwinked into these exaggerated beliefs. They downplay any evidence that the Right is not dissimilar and is perhaps even worse in its agenda and goals. The Neo-spiritual progressive movement has splintered apart with many becoming MAHA adherents — even as DJT, American savior, kills the inspection agencies and deregulates corporations, who will further degrade the quality of our food, water, and air with toxic “forever” chemicals, spreading cancers.

As an aside, last night I learned about DJT’s eating habits which are impressively on brand. Every day, the grifter billionaire guzzles Diet Coke by the gallon, while gorging on fast food from outlets like McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken, plus snacking on Doritos and Fritos. While this is a suicide diet, it also must cause an ongoing decline in mental function. In terms of the country’s executive function, I suspect that JD Vance — Peter Thiel’s protege — is already calling the shots.

They must anticipate DJT will soon croak. On the other hand, DJT possesses a Loki-like, supernatural, inhuman quality. Whether out of spite or curiosity, his dark, inter-dimensional overlords may choose to preserve him in physical form for quite some time.

Getting back to AI, a number of leaders in the field, including Dario Amodei from Anthropic, say we are only a few years away from reaching the threshold — call it Artificial General Intelligence or Artificial Super Intelligence — where the cunningly calculating machines are much better at every kind of thinking than we are. This, Amodei and others argue, basically means that, very soon, all labor — first knowledge work and then all work — will be performed by AI. The obsolescence of all knowledge work is coming at us first. But once AI becomes self-recursively able to improve itself at hyper-speed, it will accelerate the production of autonomous robots to replace humans in every area, from coal mines to assembly lines to massage parlors to bed rooms.

As an another aside, I recently discovered a new App for the (ironically named) Smart Phone, Parallel Live: Fake Live, which gives you the illusion of being a world-famous social media influencer on a social network platform similar to Instagram. All of your devoted followers on the app are not actually human, but responsive AI bots. I’m not even sure what to say about this, except that it exists. As another aside, I found this funeral for obsolete Japanese robot dogs to be strangely compelling:

Now, the AI overlords who say we are about to eliminate all human work are the same AI overlords who just discovered that DeepSeek, an open-source LLM made on the cheap in China, has eaten their lunch, so perhaps we shouldn’t take everything they say at face value. However, it is not hard to see that a vast number of jobs are going to disappear in the next few years. In some industries — such as software, cable news, and customer service—mass lay offs are already happening.

The McKinsey Global Institute's report, "Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained: Workforce Transitions in a Time of Automation," estimates that by 2030, automation could displace between 400 million and 800 million individuals worldwide.