this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2025
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Another cliff we're running towards. It's like we're playing societal collapse bingo with a fully loaded gun.
I think you're playing Bingo wrong.
That's a bit dramatic. Like, if AI was AGI, sure, but it's not so clear anything like that is imminent.
They will try to fire everyone they can pointing to AI, and keep faking growth using the stock market as competition has been dead for a long time.
It's not the "sentient computers killing everyone" that is the problem, it's the psychopaths owning the text generators establishing a fascist regime.
Excellent reply
Eh, we've seen that kind of thing tried before. The dotcom bubble was before my time, and maybe yours, but it happened, a lot of "innovator" livelihoods collapsed because you can't defy economic gravity forever, and in the end the underlying technology found it's appropriate uses in it's own damn time.
Even the fascist regime thing seems to be happening the old-fashioned way, and will probably have an old-fashioned eventual fate.
The dotcom bubble's time still had some US antitrust enforcement, like with Microsoft and its browser dominance. It was an easier time.
I feel this attempt might be more successful.
The problem with the "it'll go away at some point" is that the "at some point" might be much longer than what a few years.
This period feels to me like some "calm before the storm" or a "slow motion car crash". We have AI possibly disrupting a lot of the service economy, while automation is slowly eating away the manual workers jobs, possibly resulting in mass unemployment. People are really fed up with politics and electing more and more nationalistic/extremist politicians because they don't feel represented. The economical crysis and this dissatisfaction is an environment very similar to when hitler got elected. Last time we had millions of people dying and europe being destroyed, what will it take today to remove a dictatorship in the biggest military spender of the world? Who is going to save the US if it slides into dictatorship?
All true. I was really making the fine distinction between "everything is awful forever because AI" and "everything is still awful".
It's not even clear which technologies are driving the backsliding, if any. The early thought was that everyone was radicalising in a social media bubble, but then research showed being in a bubble actually promotes moderation, so that's out. It's also not just economics.
See, the service industry has legit uses of AI. Those won't go away, the same way people were still doing tons on the internet through the 'oughts and eventually internet businesses did become huge. Any discipline where the stakes aren't close to zero or where training on the internet can't help much will be less effected. Non-AI automation and backlash against it has been ongoing since the 1700's, so I'll put that in the situation-normal category.
It's kind of a tangent after all that, but nobody, and it doesn't seem like just "if" at this point. I'm hoping to head off expansionism into my nation and not much else at this point. Maybe rescue a bunch of the good Americans.