> But they definitely don't need slaves in the long term. They're wrong and they don't understand the reasons why. There are very few things I am even competent at. One of those happens to be front-running predictions and estimates about the progress and development of the robotics and machine learning industry. Let me put it this way. I've been wrong about tons of subjects. But there are predictions I've made about both the brain and the direction of ML that only just a year ago papers were written about. There are even conjectures in my blackbook that the ML/AI research community havent *yet* considered or done papers on. Conjectures, that like my others, will inevitably turn out correct, as roughly 4/5ths of them have. I'm not blowing smoke, or ego-stroking when I say this, and I'm not typically a braggart. I'm being honest when I write that I've repeatedly predicted developments in research months, and a couple times, years in advance. It's the only claim to fame I get to make. When I say killing the population will halt the advancement of robotics, I mean it. As a general rule, which hasn't been widely explored, population pressure promotes specialization. Thats it. Every major development has been about technology meeting the demands of population pressure. Technology accelerates the ability of population to grow, by opening up new resources, replacing expensive ones, and giving us new capabilities and technology that isnt immediately useful, like microfluidics, but which piles on itself into a subject of its own, until one day, one year, one decade it becomes *commercially essential* to the world economy. We stayed in the 'dark ages', and several dark ages undoubtedly prior to rome and greece, for a long time, because we suffered from two interrelated and co-reinforcing problems: low population and high levels of death lead to low specialization pressure. Low specialization pressure lead to low innovation (and innovation atrophy - when technologies fail to be widely adopted), leading to the inability to accelerate population growth. And again, these are co-reinforcing. It's the "hard problem of bootstrapping". If you examine all of human development, like AI/ML, almost all innovation is really a form of automation or arbitrage between one thing or another. The problem with this scenario is that the dilemma, the two problems, aren't static, they work in tandem, like a *dynamo*, so that if one slows down, the other does, until the constraints and variables that were driving it start to work in *reverse*, and the cost of reversing that reversal becomes higher than the benefits accrued by the remaining economic and technological momentum. This is when you get civilization-level collapses. It happened in rome when they slowed their spread and technological development by importing people to bootstrap that very spread in the short-term, not unlike usury but for demographics instead of money. It killed their birthrate by fracturing their original population. Call it the "curse of the necessity of empire: he who would have an empire, must invariably seal the fate of that very empire." And so rome annexed all sorts of territories, and poisoned itself in doing. The same happens all the time in businesses, with short term thinking. And the same is happening in the u.s., in the west, and all around the globe. It's a failure of imagination. The elite segment of the population, because of the incestuous nature of their absolute isolation from the base population, suffer from a sort of arrogance that in actual fact is going to directly destroy their power structures ability to adapt in the long run. I wrote a while back that the malthusian claptrap looked like a meme-virus spread by some dr. doom type lunatics hellbent on getting the industrial worlds leaders to destroy themselves, and I wrote that because I am right. When population growth finally stalls, there will be 20-50 years before the u.s. implodes catastrophically. I'm not talking about the *current* coming civil war, I'm talking about *implodes* as in, completely falls apart. Zero ability to govern. At all. Feudal europe 50 years after the announcement that one half of rome was shut for business. Maybe one day a foreign power nukes a major city or drops some sort of bioweapon, and we will all think we're going to ww3, and instead, when we look to our leaders, they shrug and unbelievable as it may seem, do nothing. And the headlines will read "washington, frozen in panic, appears to do nothing about the attack on U.S, Americans shocked by the pentagons inaction." Shortly after a new party would take over, whoever is not currently in charge, and to our further shock, they too would appear to do nothing. It seems bizarre. I know. I know. Hell it seems completely unbelievable. And regardless, thats how it would likely go. The government just fails, outright, to respond to some massive, bigger than ten pearl harbors, style of attack. The excuse given by the week after an event like that would be "Times: the ugly truth is america cant afford to go to war." and "Cnn/Foxnews: Is americas military too busy patrolling the streets and handling the chaos to fight another war?" Total absurdity. Thats 20-50 years down the road, but there will have to come an inflection point, *after* the federal government is *unofficially* shown to be toothless *at home*, that it will also be shown *officially* to be toothless. Thats part of the demoralization, the tearing down of the nation. Meanwhile the first part, the *unofficial* dentistry going on right now, where our fangs and teeth, as a nation, are pulled, is happening right now. When this scenario finishes, birthrates will plummet because of oil, price, and food shocks, job loss, and chaos greater than the last depression. Birthrates in europeans anyway. We don't do good during war times. Our reproduction patterns are: war, peace, baby boom. war, peace, baby boom. For other 'minority' populations they dont have this pattern. They have high reproduction patterns even *during* war. But in a real sense, while people like mexicans can work hard, they're pretty shit at maintaining and innovating. They're good at first iteration. Chinese are good at maintaining quality within a somewhat sub-life-threatening level for manufacturing and infrastructure (I'm being generous here). Russians will be wiped off the map because they don't have the allies or fresh water resources or geography to protect them anymore from hypersonic weapons which negate that advantage. And they don't have the birthrate. Thats the problem with slavic europeans. They have a lag time in their reproduction pattern when the cycle changes from war to baby boom. And its why the germanics, and germanic offshoots like the north americans, got ahead of them. The only population that sufficiently balances innovation and birthrate, maintenance, and new development, is germanic europeans. That means north americans (arguably), and western europeans. They're not so much "the best of all worlds" as the "least worst of all". And the advantage of that outweigh the benefit of being the best at any one thing (Germans with their scientific development rate for example). Which is also part of the reason the u.s. got ahead of europe. Demographics are destiny. And all of this was the implication when stalin first wrote that "quantity has a quality all its own." They were trying to change the lag-time switch-over defect (war->baby boom) in slavic euros, by killing tens of millions of kulaks. In the end those in charge either abandoned control or lost a lot of their original control over russia. They didn't succeed. The US is grappling with a similar dilemma, as are the international industrialists and banks. They have too many competing interests that are *also* splinter-group "minorities". This is essentially the macro version of the u.s. problem of "elite overproduction". And they want to switch over to a new mode, that preserves existing powers, grants new ones, and allows them to tightly control reproduction and industrial development in a top-down strategy of forced-industrialization, much like was done in maos china and stalins russia. In short: we are not fucking, or killing, each other to grow fast enough to make them happy. And their strategy, a playbook that failed 50% of the time (failed in russia, succeeded in china), will fail in all western countries. And the result is they'll crater our birthrate. Then specialization and demographics start to work in reverse. The end result is that, because, unlike before, were 90% of the population was skilled farm labor (that is, the demographics had the *capability* of doing things like engineering - before ww1 and ww2 killed all them off)--unlike then, where we dont have that backup, the reversion to a drastically lower standard of living will kill a hundred million+ americans from starvation, conflict, disease, and industrial failures. Thats just u.s. casualties. And as the engine of true civilization progress begins to grind first to a shocking and startling halt, far faster than anyone could even believe, most governments will not be *remotely* capable of dealing with it. The collapse will spread and, if not for the sheer scale of it, we would immediately fall into world war 4. Worse still, many of the easily accessible deposits (and easy deposits, which should be preserved as *civilization insurance* I might add) of all the essential resources and minerals we'd need to rebuild? All of those are exhausted and take **exquisitely** sophisticated science, engineering, manufacturing chains, components, techniques, and specialization to extract, refine, and utilize today. For example, the very first oil rush, look at what they had to do, in a pinch, to get at that oil: dig a glorified hole. Now compare it to all the hydraulic engineering needed just to *place* a well these days. Its a complicated process. If civilization collapsed, into 90% farmers again, it'd be 20-50 years before a regular crew of guys got back out to *any* field and put in a single new oil well. It's too expensive. It's too involved. And the guys who would have done it will be dead, or busy protecting their homestead, or fighting for whatever local militia conscripted them in the regional conflicts that the u.s. is surely going to experience. And hence, technological development comes to a stand still too. And AI/ML being the *answer* to depopulation, is what will ultimately lead global directors to utterly destroy both themselves, and civilization for the three or four centuries it will take to recover. I hope you have enjoyed your daily dose of doomporn.