The Best Thing About The Future Is It Is Not Real - Part I

Dystopian future worldview that I hope I am totally wrong about

Is it the end of the world?

If the answer is yes, then fuck it. Do whatever you want, the world is ending, nothing matters, so you might as well enjoy your life.

If the answer is no, the world isn’t ending. Then if that was your concern, relatively speaking there is nothing to worry about, enjoy your life.

This is the nihilist viewpoint I carry and have continually tried to convince myself to appreciate. I’d think that in looking at it from a simplistic binary perspective there would be solace knowing that on either extreme I am generally fine with the resulting conclusion. But there is this grey area of mystery that is reality, where the world doesn’t end but it kind of feels like it does just in little torturous increments leadings to a continually diminished life.

Fuck.

Is it dramatic to say that I believe we are the most hopeless generation of all time?¹ With global forever wars that only those affected have any desire to end, public disengagement in environmental causes despite known degradation and long term impacts, the technological usurpation of society, the rise of super billionaires with unprecedented legal powers, and corporate induced addiction it’s hard to imagine that we’re not at the end of time. Living on Earth, a resource limited and constantly changing planet with an anxiety-ridden genetic makeup that is the evolutionary result of survival, every generation must be forced to face our collective mortality. I’m sure there have always been things wrong with the world that people believed could mean the demise of humanity. What appears exceptional now though is prior generations did not have such existential issues like if their place in the workforce would exist in 5 years with the entrance of artificial intelligence or face the helpless task of building relationships in an increasingly disconnected, superficial world. At the least, other times in history we were able to live more ignorantly due to the inaccessibility of information and limited pace of technological change. Now it seems like we are hurtling into the future with little direction or control². Simultaneously we’re witnessing a societal level erosion of truth from fake news and muted discourse making us accustomed to convincing ourselves that the answers to our problems are what we want them to be instead of what they actually are causing a self-perpetuating loop of selfish, immoral activity. Living in an increasingly virtual world we have become unbound by reality making us susceptible to illusions with unrealistic expectations and a distorted view of ourselves³.

While I wish we could be ignorant of our existential crises and simply be grateful for the present, that is not the reality of our wiring. Our sentience is a curse that forces us to envision the unknown future opening the door for unmet expectations and anxiety over things that haven’t yet happened. To make guesses at what may be in store for the world and torture myself with hypothetical situations is of benefit to no one, but it is my nature and we can’t deny ourselves of these human instincts. This is not a prediction, it is a theoretical result of our actions. It is all conjecture, reflecting what I hope is my pessimism or insanity⁴.

At a high level it appears to me that we are headed towards a feudal society where the few with exorbitant resources distribute them to those who have nothing in exchange for their cooperation in having society function in accordance with their vision⁵. Billionaires will become trillionaires as wealth is further consolidated in the hands of those with existing assets from their improvements in efficiency which is largely driven by the elimination of human labor. The accumulated wealth will afford them with the resources to control broad populations and have them behave as they see fit. Those without resources will have no way of accumulating them⁶ as they won’t have the skills to empower themselves or access to systems to transcend their role in society. So they will be forced to function as they are told in order to be allocated a sufficient cut of someone else's resources that can convince them their standard of living is viable. This will be coupled with the fear of losing the little they do have to keep them immobile, but content enough in their static role, to not cause societal unrest that would threaten the invented social hierarchy⁷.

How we get to this point is we continue to exchange human capability for technological innovation. It is becoming increasingly probable we have already surpassed the peak of evolution-driven human intelligence as we have already proven that we will enable atrophy of our primary cognitive processes without hesitation. Social media and reality TV are exemplary of our willingness to completely disregard long-term cognitive degradation in order to attain small, short-term dopamine boosts. These trends will continue regardless of their toxicity due to the profit centers it provides for its creators and broader population’s need for stimulation to fill their mundane lives.

This is coupled with our consumerist instincts of being more interested in maximizing progress verse minimizing degradation. Despite technological advances giving us improved access to information and efforts to optimize human productivity, we are too obsessed with perceived progress or optimization and completely neglecting any steps back we’re taking in the process. We’re interested in getting smarter quicker, not preventing getting dumber slower. We want to optimize our lives for aesthetics, not maximize our well being for the sake of being alive. Humans are good at making concerted efforts and have achieved amazing things through that because we are creatures of focus, but when we have to recognize multiple competing goals and weigh our contradictory priorities we are poor at managing the intricacy of it all. AI will only further amplify these problems accelerating the minimization of our processing abilities and diminishing of our attention spans. As we begin to wade into genetic modification and neural implants any natural evolutionary improvements will become further negated.

Those in tech will try to convince us that the good outweighs the bad. They point to that which allows people to have access to educational resources or immediately possess a skilled assistant and what we’ve been convinced is these advantages outweigh the corrosive effects of misinformation or enabled laziness they encourage. As we can already see, with more people than ever having access to resources that empower them to enhance their capability to inconceivable levels of prior generations, the majority of society is taking a step back in their actual abilities. We’ve convinced ourselves that humans are capable of making informed decisions about how we use technology, but the common person is not. We lack the knowledge of its effects, self control to curb it and resources to minimize or replace it.

What we have is everyone constantly consuming an infinite pool of content at this point⁸. While there are some people who have a proclivity to process information efficiently and garnered the resources to receive information in a consumable way that maximizes this ability, most regular people are incapable of keeping up with the velocity of processing required for the volume of information they are fed in the modern world. Instead of trying to consume it all, and lacking any true processing, average people should be interested in minimizing their information intake. This is the only way we will be able to maintain autonomy and not drown in the endless stream we are being fed. In tuning out as much content as we can we allow ourselves to utilize our processing ability and generate actual developed thoughts. Without making a conscious effort to do so we will be unconsciously trading our processing abilities for convenience and begin to lose our capability making it easy for those with resources to dispense of us without even noticing because we will be so preoccupied watching whatever the latest trend is (despite having no real opinion of it).

Simultaneously we will reach a point where automation and intelligence are so good that human labor would become obsolete regardless. The pinnacle of “productivity gains” goes past a human’s capability and before long we become the bottleneck⁹. The millions of jobs lost through automation will not be replaced with new high quality ones. What will be created from an AI revolution are roles as prompt reinforcers or monitors of autonomous systems. It will not take long to realize that the reality of the nature of these jobs will leave humans feeling like a hollow, low value, replaceable assistant to AI filled management roles. The result is the broader population is purposeless and powerless in the labor market¹⁰.

The lack of quality job opportunities will negate people’s desires to advance their social class as they become desperate just to survive and remain where they are. A lack of employment will force nuclear families to support each other creating a rollover of property and capital over generations further supporting the stagnation of social mobility. As more people run out of resources and find no replacement dissatisfaction will rise as desperation breeds crime and chaos across the lower class which will begin to bleed up the social hierarchy. Just as it begins to reach the upper middle class and becomes an unavoidable reality in inner cities or other desirable places, resource rich people will step in. They will see themselves as philanthropic humanitarians with an unprecedented opportunity to gain power over a significant portion of the population. To do this they will allocate their excess resources as they see fit and those reliant on them will fall in line so long as a minimum quality of life is met. What will be different than the archaic societies of medieval Europe is that we will be plugged into an endless stream of content that’s sole purpose is to keep us distracted from our miserable lives enough that we have no reason to revolt against the ruling class that continues to deplete the remaining resources of the world¹¹.

Improved standards of living through technological innovation and industrialization enabled convenience is really just a small segment of the population's vision of how the world should be. Because we have allowed uninhibited accumulation of resources and empowered advantaged people to create systems within society to their benefit it is now impossible to live in a modern reality that is not in someone else’s vision. The broader population has become victims of their freedom and our human nature has been exploited to lead us to, not just believe but support, ideas that are weapons of our own destruction. As we enter into a world of automation we must do so understanding that improved technology will not enable people to pursue their wildest desires. What we will become are slaves with the sole purpose of elevating the dominant class and consuming what they feed us to convince each other we’re all contributing members to a broader system, providing us the opportunity to have value in our lives.

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None of this is to say I think it is the end of life as we know it. Or that I know any more what the future holds than anyone else. I do think about it a lot though and am pretty smart. Doesn’t matter much to me either way. I’d hope by the time any of this materializes I will be in a separate utopic society aimed at resource preservation and spiritual enlightenment in a remote natural paradise with full dissociation from humanity that I am ideally a cult like elder leader of with all my friends and family. It’s going to be great and hella chill if you want to join.

Part II…

1. It doesn’t really matter either way. We don’t deserve some unique sympathy for being alive in a world that has probably hit its societal peak and is now down trending. We were born into an era with the highest access to resources and quality of life ever there’s nothing to complain about. Nonetheless, we face the same existential flaws of humanity as the first civilized humans only now these crises are at an amplified level due to our technological progress and curse of knowledge.

1B: So many people are seeking truth, which can be said in a multitude of ways: What is the meaning of life? What is our purpose? What is reality? But what if the truth we find to these questions is not what we want? It could be that in searching enlightenment or understanding will lead you to the ultimate conclusion that it doesn’t matter. Philosophers and scientist have mused over every question of any substance to our existence for thousands of years. People smarter than me and if you’re reading me, presumably smarter than you as well, have taken the same journey as we have with infinite different perspectives to try to find meaning in it all. I believe we are no closer to an answer to any of life’s most important questions than Thales of Miletus when he first scratched the surface of conceptualizing existence.

2. Outside the interest of a few powerful people who are playing with the lives of billions as political and economic pawns in an unwinnable game against no one in particular

3. Both positive and negative.

4. If it is right and many of the aspects of what make life worth living fade away leaving us to navigate a meaningless world, at least I will be able to say I was right, though I hope I am not.

5. Under the assumption that a select few humans dictate the course of humanity and the broader masses are generally at the whim of each other’s misguided direction, it is probable that nothing we do as people matters. If that is the case then we may as well seek to find the joy in being alive. This may be from helping others doing the same, pursuing our selfish interests that make us feel good or disconnecting from the world as we know it to pursue our actual innate desires. So in a way it may be freeing if we can be ignorant of the other freedoms we’ve lost.

6. I’m of the opinion individuals have to accumulate as much capital as they can before this paradigm shifts forcing us into a life of meaninglessness. This crippling fear traps me to my job and climbing the corporate ladder as fast as I can while it is still possible. In having the view that we are approaching a point of everyone except a small elite and powerful group with everyone else being at their mercy trapped within whatever their social class, being as high up as you can to start is of utmost importance. It terrifies me to the point that it again incentivizes selfish behavior which further depletes our chances at getting out of the cycle of our greed which will lead to societies demise.

7. One could argue we are already toeing this line of a stratified society that is dictated by the ultra-wealthy. I’d push back on this due to our relative level of autonomy which is evidenced by the social unrest and conflict in society we still have serving as proof of our freedom. There is no perfect world with no conflict. If we were to live in that state it would be one of submission to a ruling class out of fear, similar to what has been seen in monotonous authoritarian regimes across the world.

8. With this access to information across the board what will differentiate people’s functionality is the trained mechanisms one is able to process the information they are fed. I’d also argue it doesn’t even matter what is consumed. While there may be a difference in atrophy from serial porn observers and The Daily listeners, the overall media landscape is diluted with enough bullshit that I have to doubt the quality of the content being consumed will make that much difference. Someone would have to be of exceptional (possibly impossible) intellect to be able to process the volume of information we are fed everyday.

9. What do people need more time to do if we automate away all of the ways that we give our lives meaning? In search of ways to fill time we end up wasting it and are left to just stew in our depression and take drugs? With an abundance of time falling into toxic, depressive thought spirals and excessive masturbation is inevitable.

10. I do believe there will be a brief attempt at societal disconnection from technology, but fear it is inevitable due to the power we have given it in society. In the absence of a conscious and collective societal movement against it, our only alternative hope at not being fully dispensable is that given our finite resources, we reach a point where autonomous bots become constrained by the price of raw materials or supply chain malfunctions shut down entire production lines and we circle back to low wage human labor.

11. Possibly for space travel which those capable will then abandon the ruined planet for leaving the less fortunate in a desolate hell hole.