I don’t believe that will ever come to pass. That future relies on the creation of a real AI and not just fancy text predictors. That real AI would also have to be actually sustainable which LLMs are not.

Not only has there been no progress on real AI, it wouldn’t be able to ruin society even if we did manage to make it. The rich and powerful are not impervious. They will inevitably make too many people too poor and then be overrun and torn to shreds. It’s happened countless times before and if we’ve learned anything from Ukraine and the Middle East this past decade, it’s impossible to bomb a large group of people into submission.

Have you heard of the “permanent underclass”? It’s a concept that silicon valley people have become obsessed with. Silicon Valley tech workers are doing hard drugs and taking untested peptides so that they can work harder and longer all in the pursuit of escaping the permanent underclass they believe AI will create. These people believe that when AI takes all the jobs, everyone who isn’t already rich will become part of some permanently unemployable poverty class.

It’s madness, but you already have to be unwell and have no concern for humanity in order to work at these giga tech firms in the first place.

You could be right. I know delivery better than postage pricing. Seeing $2.95 on a label wouldn’t trigger any red flags to me.

$2.95 shipping is plenty for a bubble mailer with a game case in it. Additionally, there’s tons of fraudulent packages right now and the instruction from management is to just deliver it even if you catch it.

I can’t believe it’s been a day and no one has said Kenshi yet.

Kenshi is an open world rpg where you control one or more characters in an enormous wasteland. It’s super complicated with a ton of systems and that game really hates you. When you start your first save, you’d be lucky if you only get captured and enslaved instead of killed. Your character is a regular person in the world, not the powerful main character (the real main character is Beep) and you’ll constantly feel it.

I grew pretty devout episcopal. I was an acolyte for all the masses and participated in all the other community activities my church ran.

I never really believed in God. I’ve just always been that way with stuff like that. Never believed in Santa or any other magical figures. That said, I’ve always agreed with the core idea of the religion to love everyone and I always envied the comfort people who believe in a God must feel. So I kinda went and tried hard to like cargo cult my way into belief to know what it was like.

My parents kinda started going nuts at some point and we stopped going to stuff. My church was too far to walk or bike to, so I stopped going. Nothing much happened after that. There was girl who lived in the rectory that I went to school with. I later learned she had a crush on me which kinda explained why she was always trying to get me to come back when we talked.

Trackmania and old anime

While you’re right, I’m personally of the mind that they’re at more risk than that. Yeah some people will still be rich and powerful when the cards start falling, but I think things are gonna breakdown too fast for them to manage. If too many “regular folk” become too poor too quickly, things will get violent. It hasn’t happened yet because neoliberalism thrives in a state of managed decline.

I think the decline will accelerate dramatically as soon as something big enough happens to break private equity. PE is in a very precarious state from everything I’ve been reading, relying and vast amounts of debt in order to maintain itself. When that breaks, it’s going to do serious damage to the economy as regular folk experience it very quickly. At which point the rich and powerful are going to have to both sacrifice and coordinate to stop the bleeding which I don’t think they’re capable of. Instead they’re expecting this collapse and literally building bunkers.

I’m no expert, but I’d say everything looks pretty bad. AI bubble, housing crisis, climate change, Iran. I’m pretty sure as soon as any big money player blinks, things are gonna crumble fast.

I feel like shapeshifting would be an awful superpower if I got to choose. Why would I choose a superpower to cancel my insecurities? Your appearance is a huge part of who you are. How you look is a reflection of the life you lived and the work you put in to look a certain way. Magically being able to look perfect won’t make you secure, it’ll just make you come up with new things to be insecure about. Insecurity isn’t about looks, it’s about strength of character.