The four horsemen of the crapocalypse

Are birth rates, AI brain organoids, drone warfare, and social media race war.

Allow me to explain.

There are four basic vectors pulling on the human race at the same time, and each of these is instantiated by a technology. The technology acts as the material force pushing humanity in a direction, and the material outcome is the realization of that force.

Birth rates

People will say that something as complicated as low birth rates has a multitude of causes. I find this to be lazy thinking. If you follow a strict process of elimination where you consider each cause as the full explanation for the problem and then reject that explanation if there is a single convincing exception to the rule, then you rule out everything except the actual cause.

For example, if you say that low birth rates are caused by social media access and smartphones, you have to contend with the fact that there are countries where birth rates started to crash before the introduction of that technology. That rules out smartphones as the definitive cause (but not an aggravating one).

If you say that it’s caused by urbanization, again, you run into exceptions with countries that have lower birth rates in the rural areas than the cities.

If you say it’s women’s education, you run into the exception with countries that have low levels of women’s education and also have low birth rates (thanks to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation).

The one thing you never find an exception to is economic calculus: people have children on the farm because the children help out with the farm. Back in 2018 I suggested making children a financial asset for urbanites by giving parents a percentage of their income.

AI / Brain Organoids / Neuralink

This might seem like different technologies, but I consider them linked and practically identical in their material function. Using AI is becoming a kind of cyborg who outsources critical thinking to a machine. Brain organoids are a machine using human wetware for computation. Neuralink is literally installing a brain-computer interface. It all represents the synthesis or incorporation of machine elements into biology and vice versa. It’s all basically the same.

We all know the results: AI-induced psychosis and potential overthrow of the human race by machines. I don’t have a solution to this one so far.

Drone Warfare / Assassination Markets / DAOs

I’ve talked about how drones will remake warfare and democratize it. I suggested the creation of the Distributed Assassination Republic, basically just cutting to the chase and building a system that holds this power accountable to democracy while being immune to assassination.

Social Media and Race War

Do you want to stop it? Should we stop it? Social media is obviously driving whole populations insane. You know that feeling you have about women making excuses for Lindsay Clancy murdering her children? That’s the feeling liberals had when you voted for Trump. That’s the feeling everyone’s going to have about everyone eventually. It does not matter if these are equivalents; you will always feel that they’re not equivalent, and social media will drive you insane. The question is not whether every partner you meet for marriage will be brain-rotted, but whether or not they are brain-rotted in a way that is compatible with your brain rot. I suggest the creation of some sort of app, and when you match with somebody on a dating site, little bits of their algorithm are shown to you in your algorithm. This allows you to adjust to their brain rot and see how far outside your comfort zone you can get before it becomes too uncomfortable. If we are going to have social media making people insane with filter bubbles, then we need technologies that let people see each other’s filter bubbles and gradually expose each other to the other person’s filter bubble; we need a kind of exposure therapy for social media.

I suggest passing a law that turns social media off 2 days a week. You could still text your friends, make phone calls, leave voice messages, but the parasocial apps would all be disabled on, say, Wednesday and Friday night. You know, force everyone to get a life. I was watching Mama’s House the other day because I wanted to remind myself what it was like when everyone just lived in the real world all the time.

There is a benefit to seeing everyone’s most disgusting thoughts. It is making the culture incredibly based, but that benefit will still happen even if people are only exposed to it 5 out of 7 days. We are at sufficient levels of based that we can dial back the strength, live in the real world more, and not give up any of the benefits. And the games that have been made online need to be expressed more offline such that they answer the real physical culture.