Everything I Warned People About on SpaceBattles is Coming True

[Iconoclast]

Remember all those arguments I had with Gamesguy, and how he always personally attacked me for my views?

Well, how are things looking, now? Who was right, in the end? Let's find out.

• AI Automation will make human creative effort obsolete. By the 2040s, there will be no game development studios. People will just ask an AI assistant to make a game, and it will plop one out in an hour, synthesizing all the art, code, writing, voice acting, music, and sound effects from scratch, accomplishing something that used to take millions of man-hours in a fraction of the time.
  • We are still on track for this to happen. GPT, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, Elevenlabs, and other Machine Learning apps are showing considerable aptitude at generating scripts, images, and voices. We still have almost two decades left to go, and huge breakthroughs in AI are occurring at intervals of a few months. Artists and voice actors are already completely losing their heads over this, because they thought that automation would get rid of truck drivers and factory workers first. Turns out, it's easier to have an AI analyze and replicate raw data, like creative works, rather than actually building that many robots. Who would've thought?
• Because of this, the ruling Overclass will decide that they don't need so many people working and providing their inputs to the system while consuming so many outputs, which will result in either democide and population culls, or people being pacified like Wireheads from Niven's Known Space, or people being given a meager stipend in the form of an UBI to spend on rations generated by the automated Machine Learning IOT cornucopia, in order of decreasing dystopian doomerism.
  • If these vaccines are as deadly as I think they are, and their push for CBDC and an UBI is what I think it is, then they're actually doing all of the above. They also want to have a programmable currency with quotas that cut off people's consumption of certain goods beyond a monthly limit.
• Afraid of dissidents forming movements against their zero marginal cost cornucopia, the ruling class of oligarchs will stuff people into arcologies with tight surveillance of their movements and behavior and become rentier-slumlords over them.
  • The Line, anyone?
• Transhumanism and biotech will increasingly play a role in society.
  • Neuralink is already obsolete. DARPA have a wireless BCI on the way.
• There isn't enough raw material in the ground and grid power doesn't provide enough juice to power an all-electric vehicle infrastructure. The end result of Net-Zero is that we all get Linkolapilled and live in walkable cities and ride bicycles, while only the oligarchs have electric cars, like in the Soviet Union.
  • Years later, we've only electrified a few percent of the cars on the road, and they're already backing up at charging stations and straining grid power. When they ban gasoline-powered cars, no one will have cars. People will just be warehoused in Smart Cities, with everything they need within walking distance, and that will be their whole lives. They're already pushing the "walkable cities" propaganda, to this end.
• Telecommuting in a Second Life-like VR world would replace most actual commuting and actual vacations, because the latter will be deemed too "carbon-intensive" for the average person and "unsustainable".
  • Mark Zuckerberg is trying to stuff us all in the Metaverse. People at Davos want all our purchases to be routed through "carbon trackers", which will probably lead to an eventual social credit score partly based on consumption habits, with mandatory rationing.

Just because someone doesn't like an idea, that doesn't mean it won't happen. I examined trends back then, and studied the language and intent of the neo-Malthusian, neofeudalist technocrats, and figured out exactly what sort of society they wanted to build.

I foresaw a world where a teeny number of rentier-oligarchs who produce absolutely nothing of value for society rent all property to us in order for us to live. I saw the writing on the wall, years in advance, and, honestly, all I got for telling people about it was nonstop verbal and psychological abuse, or reassurances that I was "wrong" and it would "never happen".

Well, it's happening. So, now what?

 

[Adjudicator]

Well, it's happening. So, now what?

Now we all get to choose between innawoods at 19th-century standards of living, or pod+bugs w/Netflix subscription.

Funny part is, the first option would be best for the environment, but the people who choose the second will convince themselves that's the one that will save the planet, because "the experts" told them it is.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

AI Automation will make human creative effort obsolete.

"AI art will put artists out of work!" you have it backwards. We already have a society of bad art and no good artists. The reason why "AI art" is a phenomena now is because most modern artists are awful. Academia spent 100 years destroying art. You need to teach people how to create good art again before you can complain about the machine creating better art. Good artists are very rare and it is very difficult to find them, which is why they are booked months in advance and are expensive to contract. That's why the book industry shifted to using photoshopped book covers. The book industry has accepted that it is okay to not have art. AI art (remixing preexisting graphics) is functionally no different than photoshopped book covers, which we already have now.

The whining about AI art now is superfluous. Most of the paying gigs have either been using it already for composition purposes or were replaced by stock photos many years ago (see: photoshopped book covers). The job opportunities at the moment are the same as it was before. You just need to be really, really good to stand out above the crowd to get a gig.

 

[Morphic Tide]

We are still on track for this to happen. GPT, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, Elevenlabs, and other Machine Learning apps are showing considerable aptitude at generating scripts, images, and voices.

Show me a dozen AI-generated animated 3d models with a consistent style between them. To my awareness, this is something the current technology is wholly incapable of on currently possible hardware, because there are just too many separate data-types to line up with too much interdependency between data points. It's a nearly totally untouched field because almost every aspect is a horrible fit for how these are trained.

How long this particular nightmare scenario will take is an unknown unknown, because it needs a complete overhaul in how personal computers are designed. Maybe task-specific half-analogue systems can bridge the gap, or maybe it needs quantum computing that is to the currently extant as current personal computers are to vacuum tube mainframes of the 1950s.

Also, media is far too small a part of the economy for the causation to follow, you need versatile robotic laborers for that. And given the US military's offering for AI vision is "fooled by scooting in a box or summersaulting", we're a long ways off from that kind of cascade. Maybe the current tech can support long-term projects fitting a model for the day-to-day tasks of a specific facility, but it's very much not suited to "there goes the manufacturing industry".

Perhaps most importantly, hyperautomating the economy's everything takes a lot more of those precious resources than having proles to do it for you. Mass servitorization is vastly more likely than robot laborers if you're talking about resource crunches, because humans are really cheap to upkeep compared to robotics.

 

[Robovski]

I expect in 10 years I will be "managing" a chat AI to handle customer service issues the Ai isn't doing well with and my team will be unemployed or doing something else (and that's if I'm lucky and not one of the people turfed out). I'll be approaching 60 and trying to justify my job for a few more years while the AI connected to the information systems handles the billing/scheduling and general service issues. The company I work for does provide real service to people in the real world, but I manage a customer service team who supports customers by phone and online. We will not need several thousand people working for us if the AI can handle most phone, email amd online customer interactions. Even if the company does not want to do this our competitors will and as a publicly traded company eventually someone will make us make the change, either by buyout or just new management through the shareholders. This is a big sector of employment - I really do not know what so many people will do.

 

[Culsu]

It seems pretty obvious that with the drive towards EV mobility and the rampant limitation of production and property in the name of "climate change" (see what they are trying to do in the Netherlands to farmers, for example) that the - at least - implicit goal of many policies today is the creation of a regionally locked, growth-reduced population of serfs. Can't afford the EVs; the few EVs that you can afford have limited range and can be GPS-tracked; and food costs you an arm and a leg.

Much of the basic foodstuff already costs up to twice what it did only three years ago. And yet, wages have largely stagnated for wide swaths of the population, and that in a (for Germany) economic climate where everybody is clamoring for experienced labor due to the onset of the demographic shift. As for EVs, if I had to replace my car with an EV with even remotely comparable characteristics I'd have to pay three times as much as I did for my current car... with the added risk of being subject to electricity rationing (which many believe is the real reason the Green department of economy is demanding every household get a digital electric meter with remote control features) and grid failures (which are pre-programmed for Germany if the "EV-revolution" gets going since we have not a snowball's chance in hell to produce and/or store the necessary electricity for millions of EVs).

All of that is obvious, is plain as day, so I'm past the point where I can safely attribute it to incompetence. We're in malice territory now.

 

[Iconoclast]

It seems pretty obvious that with the drive towards EV mobility and rampant limitation of production and property in the name of "climate change" that the - at least - implicit goal of many policies today is the creation of a regionally locked, growth-reduced population of serfs. Can't afford the EVs, the EVs that you can afford have limited range, and food cost you an arm and a leg.

That's the thing. Zero-growth, or degrowth, is fundamentally what they're after. It's the main deal. All these policies being pushed by the watermelons (green on the outside, red on the inside) at Davos, and the UN's SDG 2030 stuff, are all about degrowth. Gamesguy was pissed about it every time I brought up degrowth because he came from China to the US to flip houses and make big stacks of money, and he knows what real poverty looks like, and he knows that degrowth literally takes food out of the mouths of children. He was right about that, at least. But if you listen to what the super-wealthy and their TEDTalk sycophants are saying, it's all net-zero this and circular economy that.



The rich and powerful want to completely revise how consumption works. They want to position themselves as rentiers lording over propertyless serfs. Every goddamn thing will be sold according to the Rug Doctor model. You don't own a computer. You lease a thin client and access a cloud server where everything is monitored and controlled. You don't own a car. You hail a driverless taxi that you subscribe to. And every little thing is tracked with IoT and edge computing. Sensors in your shoe, sensors in your picture frame, sensors in your smoke alarm, sensors in your bathrobe. The middle class will simply cease to exist and everyone will be on the same level playing field except for the Party apparatchiks.

I could've told you this would happen. I said it, straight up, ten years ago. We need to prevent society from backsliding into feudalism and returning to the pre-industrial condition of hereditary aristocracy. Did people think I was joking? Did they hope that things would just continue on the same way indefinitely? Did they really think that we'd just have endless economic growth without the uber-wealthy Malthusians (like Ted Turner whining about how humans "breed like locusts") eventually invoking Limits to Growth, shutting down farms and replacing them with cricket factories, ending imports from China, and telling people to wear the same shirt without washing it for a month? Shit like that?

I saw it. I saw it coming a decade in advance. And you know what grinds my gears? I'll never get an apology from all the people who gave me shit nonstop and called me a habitual doomer for saying it. Now, I realize that I don't want one. The wailing and the gnashing of people's teeth about the prospect of losing their jobs to AI is satisfaction enough for me.

 

[colorles]

That's the thing. Zero-growth, or degrowth, is fundamentally what they're after. It's the main deal. All these policies being pushed by the watermelons (green on the outside, red on the inside) at Davos, and the UN's SDG 2030 stuff, are all about degrowth. Gamesguy was pissed about it every time I brought up degrowth because he came from China to the US to flip houses and make big stacks of money, and he knows what real poverty looks like, and he knows that degrowth literally takes food out of the mouths of children. He was right about that, at least. But if you listen to what the super-wealthy and their TEDTalk sycophants are saying, it's all net-zero this and circular economy that.



The rich and powerful want to completely revise how consumption works. They want to position themselves as rentiers lording over propertyless serfs. Every goddamn thing will be sold according to the Rug Doctor model. You don't own a computer. You lease a thin client and access a cloud server where everything is monitored and controlled. You don't own a car. You hail a driverless taxi that you subscribe to. And every little thing is tracked with IoT and edge computing. Sensors in your shoe, sensors in your picture frame, sensors in your smoke alarm, sensors in your bathrobe. The middle class will simply cease to exist and everyone will be on the same level playing field except for the Party apparatchiks.

I could've told you this would happen. I said it, straight up, ten years ago. We need to prevent society from backsliding into feudalism and returning to the pre-industrial condition of hereditary aristocracy. Did people think I was joking? Did they hope that things would just continue on the same way indefinitely? Did they really think that we'd just have endless economic growth without the uber-wealthy Malthusians (like Ted Turner whining about how humans "breed like locusts") eventually invoking Limits to Growth, shutting down farms and replacing them with cricket factories, ending imports from China, and telling people to wear the same shirt without washing it for a month? Shit like that?

I saw it. I saw it coming a decade in advance. And you know what grinds my gears? I'll never get an apology from all the people who gave me shit nonstop and called me a habitual doomer for saying it. Now, I realize that I don't want one. The wailing and the gnashing of people's teeth about the prospect of losing their jobs to AI is satisfaction enough for me.

Two things:

1) Most people are too busy living their daily lives, trying to survive, to think too deeply about this stuff. Even if the worries may be on the back of their minds, it is alot easier to just tell themselves "everything will be fine" while they drink their morning coffee.

2) Most people will either ignore things happening around them, or be actually happy about it (if it is happening to the "truck drivers" for instance)...until it starts happening to them, the "coders and voice actors" so to speak.

Most people are over worked, under sleep, and get through their day on various forms of stimulants and any free time they have is lent to sedation (the "netflix") as you say. And don't forget: most people, if given the same kind of power the "overlords" of the modern world have, would do the very same things as them.

Most people are depressed, most people are in a constant state of nervous adrenaline, peaks and valleys and hits of stimulants and sedatives - even if their social media profiles suggest otherwise. They don't want the "doomer conspiracy theories"; they want safety. Who provides safety? Big brother of course.

 

[TheRomanSlayer]

You know, I think Deborah Tavares was warning about this for years, about depopulation.

All that aside, the convenience portion of why they’re promoting the whole tracking is how they get the normies hooked on this whole program. And Extinction Rebellion is practically a neo-Malthusian Red Guard that deserves to actually be extinct.

 

[Cherico]

I honestly think this will all lead to a horrific collapse with future generations living much better lives using us as a cautionary tale.


As for the arrogant elites pushing us into this horrible future? One day they will sit down and realize only one of them gets to be in charge of the nightmarish empire they created...thats when the bodies will hit the floor.

 

[Aldarion]

As I have said: modern(ist) society is inherently genocidal, self-destructive, and a couple of other things.

 

[StormEagle]

Every day that passes, I come closer and closer to an inescapable conclusion.

Ted Kaczynski may have had a point.

 

[Cherico]

Every day that passes, I come closer and closer to an inescapable conclusion.

Ted Kaczynski may have had a point.

It always sucks being the generation that gets the new toys because you get to be the generation that people point to and tell others what not to do

 

[Simonbob]

It's exactly what you say. What they intend, that is.

However, they have failed, and will continue to fail, in all sorts of ways. The plans that one faction of "Elites" have come up with will, and are, clashing with the greed and plans of other "Elites". Their power rests on a number of things, propagandaised people, and fellow greedy bastards, yes, but vastly more than they realise, actual workers doing what needs to be done. No matter what some Watermelon says, if a guy isn't willing to do the plumbing, they'll squat in shit, because they're not capable of fixing things themselves. No tech is even close to what is needed to replace the blue collar workers, and every nation that drove them out in general, is now suffering in a thousand ways.


The bigger issue, as far as I can tell? When those power addicts at the top unbalance society enough in their quest for power, things break. and old certainties fade away. The "Far Right"? Racism? Religous extremism? All these things are almost certain to become massive forces, as immagrant groups find the reason they moved fade away, and desperate folk look to what they're told is Evil for something better, no matter the cost. Or, if the addicts win, they'll find the parts the keep the system running will quit out, the blue collar folk who already hate those "above" them.

Already, there are people from places like Lebanon going back, because they can make as much or more money there. Already, there are expanding groups, the most radical Islamic factions are converting fellow prisoners in our gaols.


I don't think there's much chance of the out of touch power addicts winning. I do think they can break most of civalisation on their way out, though.

 

[Scottty]

I don't think there's much chance of the out of touch power addicts winning. I do think they can break most of civalisation on their way out, though.

Another important point is that the civilization on which they are parasitic is not the only one existing. There are other competing ones.
Some of the elites seem to have thought they could kill one host and just hop to another one. Reality might be different for them.

 

[Cherico]

Another important point is that the civilization on which they are parasitic is not the only one existing. There are other competing ones.
Some of the elites seem to have thought they could kill one host and just hop to another one. Reality might be different for them.

rewarded as a traitor deserves has happened multiple times in human history.

 

[DarthOne]

It's exactly what you say. What they intend, that is.

However, they have failed, and will continue to fail, in all sorts of ways. The plans that one faction of "Elites" have come up with will, and are, clashing with the greed and plans of other "Elites". Their power rests on a number of things, propagandaised people, and fellow greedy bastards, yes, but vastly more than they realise, actual workers doing what needs to be done. No matter what some Watermelon says, if a guy isn't willing to do the plumbing, they'll squat in shit, because they're not capable of fixing things themselves. No tech is even close to what is needed to replace the blue collar workers, and every nation that drove them out in general, is now suffering in a thousand ways.


The bigger issue, as far as I can tell? When those power addicts at the top unbalance society enough in their quest for power, things break. and old certainties fade away. The "Far Right"? Racism? Religous extremism? All these things are almost certain to become massive forces, as immagrant groups find the reason they moved fade away, and desperate folk look to what they're told is Evil for something better, no matter the cost. Or, if the addicts win, they'll find the parts the keep the system running will quit out, the blue collar folk who already hate those "above" them.

Already, there are people from places like Lebanon going back, because they can make as much or more money there. Already, there are expanding groups, the most radical Islamic factions are converting fellow prisoners in our gaols.


I don't think there's much chance of the out of touch power addicts winning. I do think they can break most of civalisation on their way out, though.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

 

[Marduk]

That's the thing. Zero-growth, or degrowth, is fundamentally what they're after. It's the main deal. All these policies being pushed by the watermelons (green on the outside, red on the inside) at Davos, and the UN's SDG 2030 stuff, are all about degrowth. Gamesguy was pissed about it every time I brought up degrowth because he came from China to the US to flip houses and make big stacks of money, and he knows what real poverty looks like, and he knows that degrowth literally takes food out of the mouths of children. He was right about that, at least. But if you listen to what the super-wealthy and their TEDTalk sycophants are saying, it's all net-zero this and circular economy that.

The biggest weakness of that is that outside of the minds of a minority of green nutjobs this ideology has no saving graces at all. Most of elites probably play along for the massive grift opportunities. But in the grand scheme of things, tell that to China and India, and tell them to ban gasoline and diesel vehicles. IDGAF about the guilty consciences of green nutjobs, they can drown theirs in booze and drugs for all i care, and i'm sure there is no shortage of people with similar stance to mine on this. This is also why even the politicians who do support this crap aren't bold enough to ban gasoline vehicle within *their* term, just make silly laws to ban them in 2030 or something, knowing well that taking flak for, delaying or striking down this stuff will be someone else's problem.

 

[Iconoclast]

The biggest weakness of that is that outside of the minds of a minority of green nutjobs this ideology has no saving graces at all. Most of elites probably play along for the massive grift opportunities. But in the grand scheme of things, tell that to China and India, and tell them to ban gasoline and diesel vehicles. IDGAF about the guilty consciences of green nutjobs, they can drown theirs in booze and drugs for all i care, and i'm sure there is no shortage of people with similar stance to mine on this. This is also why even the politicians who do support this crap aren't bold enough to ban gasoline vehicle within *their* term, just make silly laws to ban them in 2030 or something, knowing well that taking flak for, delaying or striking down this stuff will be someone else's problem.

The thing is, it isn't just a grift for these people. I think there are honestly a lot of true-believers behind this. It's an entire complex that's cranking this stuff out. The IPCC are like "We need to stop all fossil fuel usage right now, now, now!", and George Monbiot is like "Everyone is going to starve if we don't put a stop to livestock farming and start eating bugs!", and Jeremy Rifkin is like "Here's a bunch of gadgets that will make capitalism obsolete, but only if we don't run out of food first!"

There's a massive body of scientists, ethicists, anthropologists, climatologists, and philosophers who are pushing the Malthusian narrative, tugging the ears of the Elites, telling them how we're all going to die unless they push a bunch of insane eco-friendly policies through that create more problems than they fix. The ruling class, for their part, fearing the end of the consumerism and GDP growth gravy train, are going all-in on rentierism and trying to buy up everything at fire sale prices so they can rent it back to ordinary people.

You want to see how screwed up these people are? Watch these back to back:






That's the same person, ten years later.

These two-faced bloodsuckers think it's okay to prey on ordinary people, and they do it with a smile and vociferous reassurance that it's for the greater good. Enough is enough. We've suffered enough pay cuts, enough pointless stagnation, enough of overinflated costs of necessities and overinflated housing prices. Our way of life is being crumpled up and thrown in the garbage by self-serving oligarchs and internationalists who we never elected and never permitted to do any of this.

 

[Marduk]

The thing is, it isn't just a grift for these people. I think there are honestly a lot of true-believers behind this. It's an entire complex that's cranking this stuff out. The IPCC are like "We need to stop all fossil fuel usage right now, now, now!", and George Monbiot is like "Everyone is going to starve if we don't put a stop to livestock farming and start eating bugs!", and Jeremy Rifkin is like "Here's a bunch of gadgets that will make capitalism obsolete, but only if we don't run out of food first!"

That's the thing. They can push it as far as they want, but the eternal tug of war between opposition, grifters and true believers is unavoidable, and the true believers are the stupidest of the bunch.

There's a massive body of scientists, ethicists, anthropologists, climatologists, and philosophers who are pushing the Malthusian narrative, tugging the ears of the Elites, telling them how we're all going to die unless they push a bunch of insane eco-friendly policies through that create more problems than they fix. The ruling class, for their part, fearing the end of the consumerism and GDP growth gravy train, are going all-in on rentierism and trying to buy up everything at fire sale prices so they can rent it back to ordinary people.

The elites are in one way or another darwinistic group. Those who fall for stupid shit too easily *will* lose money and power, one way or another. Many try to make lemonade out of the huge crop of stupid lemons, but in the end economies have to work, money has to be made, and being CCP's colony of crazy environmentalists (because the CCP itself values industry as much as ever) is below the ambitions of at least some of them.

You want to see how screwed up these people are? Watch these back to back:






That's the same person, ten years later.

These two-faced bloodsuckers think it's okay to prey on ordinary people, and they do it with a smile and vociferous reassurance that it's for the greater good.

Oh i know. But these are politicians, not the people who do this shit with own money. They can grift easily and waste other people's money at not a loss, but a gain, but they are always potentially only one election away from being unceremoniously replaced.