No Stupid Questions

Yea definitely a plutocracy.

We are deep in “palace court politics” right now where theres an autocrat wielding all the power and most of the news is about the relationships between the powerful members of the court.

Archduke hegseth is angry at the viceroy of Anthropic and so now their AI model is illegal. Did you hear that court jester musk has had a falling out with the mad king? He sent his messengers far and wide to tell everyone that trump fucked kids.

Our policies are controlled by the ultra wealthy donor class who have completely captured both parties.

I don’t see any clean way out of it, I think there are 3 likely scenarios.

1. AI works well enough to remove the need for our labor and allows the plutocrats to exert control over us. This one is the one they are pulling for and hoping for, theres a reason they keep talking about a “permanent underclass” that’s the future they see for you. A different class of humans, kept around as long as they are useful and ultimately discarded. I don’t think this one will happen mostly because I don’t think the AI we have today is on a path to AGI and as they iterate on this they will find that they can’t actually get rid of us.
2. AI weakens labors power and we continue the multi decade slide further and further into late stage capitalism. A perfect machine tuned to extract as much profit from you paying you the absolute minimum amount possible for your labor and charging you the absolute maximum amount for everything. A supercharged system of algorithmic gig work and personalize dynamic pricing that exists to make sure every ounce of your economic utility is funneled to the plutocrats. Right now, this is the most likely outcome.
3. They try for outcome 1 or 2, the conditions become bad enough that people rebel (either through violence of non violent political action, although they work everyday to close off that second avenue). Humanity realizes that we shouldn’t allow billions to suffer so a couple hundred ghouls can live in absurd wealth and bang kids. I had held out hope for this option, but it doesn’t seem like it’s coming any time soon. People seem to have moved past the Epstein files (or they remember but have accepted nothing will happen) they are ok with being paid unlivable wages and buy now paying later their next meal. Maybe not delighted about the situation, but ok enough not to start hurling Molotov cocktails.

We got here because the the wealthy played the long game. They found willing partners in the boomers to a new set of ideas that maybe the government is bad and shouldn’t restrain big corporations and that corporations are somehow always good. Little by little, bribe by bribe, they bought the regulators and we now live in a world where politicians run on cutting regulation, they run on not doing their jobs, and people cheer.

Society is about balancing power, not allowing too much to collect into one group because they will abuse it. That group can be any group, the government, the church, giant companies. The only metastable configuration we’ve found is when you have a couple of them actively fighting with each other keeping them in check. We are currently living through a period where one of those groups, neoliberals and corporations, have amassed most, if not all, of the power. It is unlikely to last forever, but it will last a while and probably be relatively unpleasant.