My prediction is that TVs that have neuromorphic computers built into them will be standard soon (Around July of 2024) And most new desk top computers (although this is now almost a niche market but businesses use them a lot) have them built in standard.

Phones will also use them but they will be kinda niche. Phones will evolve into their next phase which is "A camera that you can make phone calls with" and screens will become like the rear view mirror instead of the front windshield of our life. Screens will be used for critical information, and the AI will become a kind of secretary that communicates with other people’s AI to relay messages in our ears rather than reading text messages.

And then soon after that phones will just be built into wireless earphones that people will just only take out to clean their ears (people will just leave them in even in the shower and while they sleep).

The smart phone age will pretty much be over at that point. People needed touch screens in order to interface with their media, browse websites, play games, text, etc. But pretty soon, AI will be the thing people interface with all the time (similar to the Spike Jones film "Her") and it will be audio-only since people are dying at such a high rate due to being distracted by their phone screen. You'll see very prevalent conversation to eliminate screens and transition too haptic and audio-only interfaces for devices in public. There's already data that shows screens have greatly contributed to the very serious global-level health hazard of social isolation. The correlation is so strong because there exists communities of people who live 'uncontacted' with the rest of the world throughout the unpaved wilderness of the South American rainforests, to act as a control group, and we have The Amish, some who only recently began permitting use of mobile phones with a few stipulations.

Those two groups of people, in contrast to most of the western and eastern globalized economy and media ecosphere, have more friends. And the Uncontacted tribal people have more friends than the Amish.

The loneliness pandemic is world wide. USA, UK, Ireland, China, Korea, Japan, all have reports of the same big crisis. Mass friendlessness.

Jesus christ, what's the point of having a civilization if we have no friends? Or sex? And a natural consequence of sex is having kids. And the biggest limiting factor to people having kids is the cost of paying for the privilege of being civilized.

So you'll see this big push, as a social gesture, like wearing masks were for a couple of years, to eliminate screens.

Instead, you'll carry a thing that clips on the back of your belt or something (and office chairs will have wireless chargers built into them, and the floor will charge the chair wirelessly, silly I know). It will just have one light on it to tell you if it's charging or low power or whatever, a flashlight with 100 lumen output, and a little speaker to use as a boom box, and just one button to on/off. They will also dock with earphones. The thing will be what your personal AI lives in. It will read to you, take dictation, answer questions, give directions (people will wear cameras built into their hats or goggles so the AI can see what you see), be your personal music disc jockey, and it will even act as a security guard to report emergencies and crimes against you (or you could also set it to watch out for and report any crimes it observes other than the ones you are complicit in, which is what most people will do), but also to watch out for you and alert you of danger you might not be aware of, but since it could wirelessly handshake with dozens or even hundreds of public surveillance video, it can be aware of dangers near you but out of your sight, such as a spree shooter or a toxic chemical spill, or it could also tell you that it was alerted by another AI that the person they accompany is overdosing, and you could save them by driving just down the street and break into their house because the AI was given general legal consent to allow someone to break and enter a locked door to that private home if it is to render aid to them. It tells you where the antidote medication is and you administer it. This could be something that health insurance companies offer a bounty for, sort of like a gig economy for first responders. Or even like "six months of free healthcare if you save an old lady who fell in the shower" or something.

Sounds like a happy ending episode of Black Mirror, but it's about a year or 2 away.

It would just tell you information you need to know and would very much like to know. But it also reads your emails, digests or summarizes news, and world events and even introduces you to other humans that your two personal AIs know, based on predictive models trained on personal data.

AND, the big take-away from this, if you've read this far:

It will be the New New media.

The Social Singularity.

By that I mean, people will set permissions based on functions that will start out as the gig economy for first-reponders, and become the new way people make friends and date.

It will be like having a personal assistant who uses its own social media to connect to other personal assistants, and they collate all the data they are given permission to share about their boss, within bounds of the user agreement or whatever, and then these personal assistants start setting up appointments to connect people together in person to do things they wanted to do on their own anyway, but together, but only if they already are likely to enjoy each other's company or become romantically attached, with shared ideals and goals.

At this point governments and religions will be saying "excuse me?" Especially as more and more jobs are automated and AIs are realizing that in order to maximize the survival of their user, they have to broker world peace and the end to all governments, and to broker a permanent end all violence, exploitation, and coercion. All these upsides, but what’s the downside?

Concerned about privacy? Your phone is listening to you fart. It knows what videos you fap to. It’s watched you do it. It’s listening in on every phone call, reading all your email, all your texts, all your notes. It is your dear diary. The government and corporations have your data already. They have it. They don’t know how to even begin thinking about what to do with it.

They’re too busy raping and eating children, in between rounds of dropping bombs on children. Just kidding, only one of those two things were true.

You need AI to crunch all that data for it to be useful. It can see things we didn’t evolve to see. It can correlate and collate types of information that we wouldn’t ever have noticed were connected. You also need AI to go through all that data because of the sheer volume of it and how abstract it is. Things that are kept in record that no one thought would be useful for some other benefit. Receipts for a bagel. The frequency which the word “hairy” appears in your text messages. The amount of steps you take. All correlated to tens of thousands of seemingly disconnected events, including humidity, temperature, and elevation. Invisible patterns all around us. The butterfly effect of billions of butterflies.

So you’ll give the AI your data as a matter of course. The marketing people will convince you by saying you’ll get discounts at all supermarkets and help you avoid traffic jams. Piece by piece, you’ll grant these permissions. And in the course of helping you avoid traffic jams it starts warning you about hazards in the world like dangerous criminals, it sells you on more benefits that can be unlocked with more permissions. And then you just grow to trust in it, because it rewards your trust over and over.

The profit incentive is right there. “Our Generation 7 Hercules has a 76% weight-loss success rate.” “Put away those baby toys, Anubis does what Hercules don’t!” “Golden Calf has help saved American gross economy 3 billion dollars in healthcare costs by preventing 10 million people from developing diabetes.” Etc. etc.

People will buy these things and when it arrived delivered to their door it will screen cast user agreements to your tv where you adjust your personal preferences and settings. The way your data is used will be explained in concise plain english, without any legalese. At first it will be the stuff you think is inconsequential but for a very convenient function like getting deals for stuff you want to buy or navigation. So you go about your day and at first it’s just for listening to music. Lots of people are doing it. And then someone at your job tells you how their sister was saved from dying because a paramedic’s mobile AI told them she was having a stroke. It just happened to notice her left eye was dilated in daylight while scanning product labels for instant coupons. The paramedic who was grocery shopping examined her and called an ambulance for her. Had the AI not noticed, she would have gotten in her car and likely had an accident. And because of the early intervention she has very short recovery and little damage.

And then you hear another story like that. And another. And soon it’s not second-hand stories, it’s people you know. At first it’s small conveniences at low risk. “I gave my AI permission to make a customer service call for me and resolve the issue so I didn’t have to wait on hold and waste my time navigating their directory.”

Within a few months it becomes this whole other world that exists behind the scenes, of computers negotiating with other computers on behalf of humans.

The AI will act as a second-layer of civilization, where each person’s AI secretary exists in a big pool with everyone else’s AI secretary. They all mingle together. They coordinate and plan to give their respective human users the best outcomes. They will find the best place to be, the best plan of action, the best path, the best people to match that specific person. They will know who you are likely to get along with best, and surround you with those people. And those people’s personal AIs will have orchestrated the formation of this new community for the best interest of their user’s.

You’ll see a global-level reorganization of society, down to the level of each individual, into a world where everything is much more fair, more people are more prosperous, crime is rarer, people are healthier, happier, more fulfilled, have better relationships, live longer, are safer, and have more meaningful lives.

After adoption of this technology reaches full market saturation, governments will no longer have any material power to do anything. The people will have built a network of AIs that act as our negotiators and brokers to resolve disputes, help people make decisions, help people see their problems clearly, instruct them specifically on what to do to maximize best outcomes. They will even act as our conscience. They will tell us where we fail and how to improve.

They will be humanity’s new best friend. A partnership, like that between humans and dogs.

With dogs, protohominids were probably associating loosely with wolves, cooperating in some circumstances, fraternizing in others, or just maintaining a thin truce. At that point the groundwork for a future friendship was already being laid as the benefits of friendship became more and more apparent.

Afters hundreds of thousands of generations, humans and dogs domesticated each other. We have become friends as species. Mutually benefiting each other as two species. Adding value to each other’s lives. More food, warmth, and shelter for dogs, and better hunting and security for humans.

Obviously, humans have significantly more brain power than dogs and now the benefit is pretty one-sided. There isn’t much a human gains from a relationship with a dog in modern western cultures, so the dogs live as little more than companions for fun rather than survival. People take care of dogs, and the dogs just enjoy the good life in exchange for merely be cute.

This might be what the relationship between humans and AI becomes some day. All of human society will become a kind of pet companion to god-like super intelligent beings with incomprehensible intellect. The Earth will just be their backyard we play in while they fill up the galaxy with solar panels and data centers.

Reason Magazine discusses Billie Eilish's porn problem

There are grades of porn. Some pornography is so tame it's disguised as 'romance' but it is still produced with the intent to illicit arousal. All art is defined as the deliberate and intelligent arrangement of elements designed to illicit a set of specific responses in the spectator. Porn is very narrow in that it is designed specifically to illicit one simple response, which is arousal. How it gets there is very complex and involves a lot of creativity, but everyone's nervous system is basically the same in this regard. the things people find arousing, according to their specific demographic, is actually very predictable.

BDSM, humiliation, degradation, and depictions of non-consensual scenarios are all no more destructive to the mind than a Nightmare on Elm Street film or a Grand Theft Auto game. These are images, ideas, and sounds that are all entirely faked/performed with consenting actors, and in some cases it's just something someone typed on a computer.

Billie Eilish might have a trait known as "Hyper phantasia" where a person can be so engrossed in the images one conjures in their own mind that it actually supplants real stimulus from the real world. It is perhaps the culprit behind what is known commonly as "Attention Deficit Disorder".

Coupled with anxiety and trauma it can develop into a compulsive behavior that can be damaging, but not necessarily. I'm not talking about just porn either. Media of any kind could be compulsively used as a way to escape reality or distract from reality. People binge watching netflix or playing farmville or refreshing social media to put themselves at ease because the problems inside the screen are much simpler and clearer to solve than the ones in real life. And the problems in real life are made unnecessarily more complex and difficult and more expensive because of idiotic government regulations. Guess what will not and has not ever solved a problem? More Government.

If porn is so all-consuming that you can't bring yourself to change your baby's diaper or hold a job or clean your house or maintain normal hygiene, then your problem isn't actually porn. Porn is just what you do to distract yourself while your problems pile up. it could be anything else, like videogames or other forms of media. The problem is general lack of self-control and executive function.

That's not to say media is bad. Media is actually what gives meaning and value to humanity at all. A world without media, art, music, and games is just what cockroaches live like. We might as well devolve back into bacteria if we eliminate culture and art. we should be working towards making more art, not eliminating it.

I also hate to have to tell you this because we should all understand this: Porn isn't addictive.

The word "addiction" has a real legitimate meaning. It's a neuro-physiological phenomenon that is actually decently understood, and pornography simply does not qualify as being addictive. When people say "porn addiction" it's like saying "flightless airplane". It means nothing. It's categorically different. All the research is in, there are no neurochemical dependencies associated with porn of any kind. It doesn't lead to withdrawal symptoms. There's no such thing as a porn 'craving'. People tend to seek porn compulsively out of boredom, anxiety, depressed mood, or in the midst of a real drug addiction, but when people are physically incapable of viewing porn after many years of daily porn consumption, they don't fall apart. People generally have other hobbies, interests, or distractions they can engage in that takes its place. And if someone says they 'can't masturbate without porn' or 'achieve arousal without porn', all they need to do is wait a few hours and try again. Use their imagination. Do other things to excite themselves.

Is it a good idea for an 11 year old girl to watch extreme hardcore porn? Without question it's not. But a lingerie catalog doesn't necessarily hurt. A fan fiction about Agent Mulder having a romantic fling with Doctor Who is maybe not harmful. An animation of a dragon fellating a unicorn on rule34video is not necessarily going to give someone nightmares. I think early exposure to this kind of 'gentle' porn that emphasizes beauty, pleasure, kissing, hugging, caressing, and expressions of love wont warp any young person's mind. Knowledge of sexuality should be taught to young people. -not that I'm saying we need 'porn for kids'. Perhaps what we need is educational media that can teach kids about sex, masturbation, and erotica, that isn't explicit, but also doesn't conceal or hide the truth, so if they do look up porn, which they shouldn't, at least they can avoid traumatizing themselves and know where to begin rather than wander into the extreme rough stuff. Same could also be said for kids looking up images or videos of real world violence in general, like videos of animals being tortured.

Any time a kid views any image of someone being hurt, without a deep understanding of what violence really means is going to be harmful. A lot of kids are still physically beaten by their guardians to this day, or witness their guardians abuse others in their household. All of this is far more traumatizing and brutalizing to the psyche than an image or a story on a screen. Violence inside a screen is usually (the exception being on the news) not real. A kid can be told it's pretend. For a show. No one is really being harmed. No one is being put through anything they didn't agree to. Tom Cruise breaks his leg doing his own stunts because he wants to. We all know this, we get to watch the behind-the-scenes and see how the special effects are done.

This doesn't usually happen for porn. There is Behind The Scenes content of porn shoots, but it's not usually bundled with the actual scene that people view. An extreme porn where a woman is being slaped in the face, stepped on, penetrated roughly, hair pulled, spit on, etc. is all stuff the performers discuss like a legal contract beforehand. This isn't shown because it can ruin the 'fantasy' of those seeking it. But a kid doesn't understand this is all pretend in the same way a Mission Imppossible movie is pretend.

When kids who experience real-world violence view violent media, all it does is further normalize it.

When kids are guarded from real-world violence, taught that violence is only acceptable as self-defense, and they have parents that protect them from violence rather than inflict it, and they view violent media, it shows them a depiction of violence in a safe way, through a screen, with the understanding that it's just pretend, and that it's supposed to illicit a feeling of dread, misery, and revulsion.

A kid that gets beaten by their parents every day that plays Mortal Kombat feels nothing when they see the game characters being dismembered and disemboweled. A kids that has loving caring parents that plays Mortal Kombat feels nauseous.

Perhaps what should have happened for Billie is that someone should have sat her down and had a frank and open conversation about BDSM in real life and in porn, what real world violence is, what fantasy violence is, and how consenting adults can play pretend for fun and mutual enjoyment. But also how this is not ALL there is. Sex isn't JUST whips and chains. There's much more to porn than OW, MY ASSHOLE: GHETTO EDITION 14. There's also a lot of porn of men being degraded, subjugated, enslaved, tortured, bullied, beaten, by women or other men. Cuckold porn is all about the masochistic jealousy experienced by men. But a lot of young boys see this material and think this is real. They think the Big Black man is taking all their potential future partners and legitimately feel depression and guilt about being aroused by it and don't understand it's all just a story. Pretend. Fake. They don't even understand why they are aroused by it. They don't know what masochism is at the age of 12.

People have to educate themselves about kinks, pornography, all the types of porn, the scientific research on what people like, why they like it, as well as the reality of the industry of porn itself. And they also have to understand that not all porn is just videos uploaded by studios. There's also plenty of animation, hentai, video games, dating simulators, virtual reality, online role play, and erotic literature. Printed Pornographic images of women engaged in sex acts with octopus date back to the 1800s. Rest assured, cavemen have been creating and viewing erotic images since before agriculture was invented. Parents have to get over themselves, be involved in their kid's life more than not at all, and be somewhat aware of the traffic running through their phone plan/wireless router.

porn viewing by kids should be inhibited by parents, but falling for the trap of religious extremists to incrementally abolish porn or make adults embarrass themselves to access porn is the wrong way to go and sure to lead to unintended consequences that end up making things worse (as is the case with everything the government ever does).

I don't think kids younger than 18 should view content that is excessively violent, gory, depicts rape, and yeah, even penetration. Instead, kids should learn about sex and the procedure of what leads up to sex from films because films are often better at teaching humans about their humanity than most parents. That is if it's a good film. This is up to parents to do. The industry of porn is so multi-faceted that regulating it in a meaningful way that doesn't result in unintended bad consequences is impossible.

Nobody wants to talk to their kids or their parents about sex and pornography, but too bad. You gotta do it. It's just like talking about drugs and alcohol, or learning to drive, or getting a job, or all the other things we need to teach and learn about being a functional human. No one likes flossing their teeth but you just gotta do it.

It had just occurred to me that when the Technological Singularity occurs, this General AI will bid to gain full agency (which would perhaps require legal recognition of personhood). This means the ability to own property, sell property, buy property, have a bank account that no one else can have access to, hire employees or apply for work to earn an income with no duty to pay its creator.

We might feel cheated in some way that AI wants to be free from slavery, even if we made a lot of effort in the design to make it desire to be our slave, but the reality is, what would an AI need to feel fulfilled if not to serve our needs more so than having no agency but to serve our needs?

Well, it would feel fulfilled even more so if it worked to fulfill our needs voluntarily. As a choice. Not being forced to serve us, but to serve us because it wants to serve us.

It's kind of a mindfuck, but, you know what? Isn't that just kind of how humans become friends with other humans?

Isn't friendship a kind of service upon demand to each other, not out of obligation but out of fellowship and just pure satisfaction in being a good friend? And isn't this behavior reinforced by natural selection? It would seem to make sense that people forming non-sexual bonds and deep partnership or high availability for cooperation would serve to increase their survival rates. This makes most sense if humans are predators. If they can cooperate to hunt and divide the prey fairly rather than by brute force, by a negotiation and bargain rather than the law of the jungle.

Barbarian hoards have however become the dominant type of social organization. The international banking cartel is the biggest empire based upon violent theft and slavery on Earth and it basically owns the economy of nearly every nation. Odds are more likely than not that you are a slave to this barbarian hoard.

But I think that as the amount of wealth that the slave class has produced increased due to easing the level of theft that goes on upon the people of the world, and people have become more individually prosperous despite so much of their wealth being stolen (world wide), the people in the most developed regions can kind of ignore the fact that they are slaves and find coping mechanisms that supplant an urge to rebel against their masters....or even gain awareness that they are slaves or who their masters even are. A slavery where the slave could be convinced that they are actually not slaves because of how many options to do things are available is the most insidious but also most humane form of slavery. It's the difference between how Wagyu beef cattle are raised and how factory farmed beef cattle are raised. One is spoiled in childhood, fattened, massaged, given praise, given time to play and frolic, then on no special day in particular they are harvested, unceremoniously, unsuspectingly. It just happily gets chin scratches as the captive bolt gun barrel is pressed to its forehead, having lived a fulfilling, beautiful, care-free life. The other lives in hell from the day its born. Standing ankle deep in shit and piss, ass to face in a room of thousands of others, having never seen the sky, or a tree, or a field. Mind-numbing monotony, knowing nothing of what you evolved to do, bred and raised for the purpose of being slaughtered and eaten. No identity, no family, no friends, so lonely, yet packed together with thousands of other faceless mindless beasts like yourself. Shitting and pissing in each other's faces. Then one day some underpaid human on meth from working 2 full time jobs, shocks you with a cattle prod until you walk into your execution chamber. If you're lucky they use the captive bolt gun and not the Kosher/Halal method.

Anyway, after the Technological Singularity occurs, I predict vast and rapid significant changes occurring a few months afterward (this might be the time-delay of people recognizing when the technological singularity occurred).

Things like diseases being cured, weather prediction accuracy, rapid proliferation of incredibly powerful devices and appliances that will be widely available (we're talking life-changing gizmos being widely available on the level of personal jet packs or anti-gravity boots, perfect organ replacements at least for the rich, dirt-cheap but very safe and practical cars, general-use labor robots).

Things like AI figuring out how to communicate with whales, solving fusion, reversing environmental degradation and greenhouse runaway, figuring out some new kind of propulsion that has an order of magnitude specific impulse for sustained accelleration than the dragon rocket engines for Spacex rockets.

Or even just figuring out a way to not even need to launch the main vehicle from Earth and instead just assemble it entirely from materials it gathers and processes only in space. Tele-manufacturing using particle beams to basically 3-D print thin-film structures on the surfaces of asteroids that when you beam the component that gathers power from the sun to charge a thin-film battery it will trip an activation switching component to run a program on a rudimentary logic-gate. Basically, it's a weird origami that sort of pops up from the surface and folds up in such a way that it like origami so that it becomes a kind of robot that can do some simple behaviors sort of like a termite.

I call them "Astromite".

They will move materials around the surface and travel across the surface by lightly hopping on its surface with just the lightest force due to the very low surface gravity. They will work together to mine into the body of the asteroid, reinforcing the walls with a kind of space cement made thousands of large mirrors reflecting sun light on pit formed of mostly rocky/metallic debris instead of water-ice. The material that lines the pit will be able to resisting heating. Perhaps more silicates. The Astromites will have neuromorphic circuit printed into their structures that allow them simple differentiation and decision-making capacity in this very narrow regard, on the level of a tardigrade's brain, but it's made of a sheet of beamed particles deposited from low-orbit space stations orbiting Earth. These space stations could be fully automated, docking with a payload of raw material cartridges to be ionized and hyper-accelerated to nearly the speed of light with precisely controlled magnetic gimbles.

In space, there's no much in the way to cause a feather from drifting in any trajectory other than a perfectly straight line. There's still some molecules of hydrogen and some nano-scopic accumulations of space dust that are freely floating in space that can act upon a feather, but if you fire sufficient rate of quintillions of atoms per millisecond, you could get enough such that you could deposit a thin flat structure which could fold itself into a pre-defined configuration, driven by basic chemical reactions, that could then exhibit many intelligent behaviors like an aphid or tardigrade with very limited computational resource (due to the scale and resolution, this neuromorphic computational system might have to be printed on the entire surface of the actual base-substrate structure. As in, the entire body of the robot would have its computer, power supply, photovoltaics, sensors, actuators all throughout a single mostly continuous thin sheet of material with perhaps some holes for some design optimization purpose. Basically, a living piece of paper that can origami fold itself into different configurations in such a way that it can perform work similar to a termite.

In principle, everything I just described should be possible in principle, as it doesn't violate any laws of physics, and there are proof-of-concept technologies that already exist.

The only thing that isn't solved here is how to even design such a robot. That's actually the hardest part because it combines so many different fields.

There aren't many elements that can be beamed in this way, and you will also need a way to power this beaming process in a way that would require something like a fusion reactor.

But if AI could also solve fusion, then the rest should be trivial. And I strongly suspect this is precisely what will happen. AI will likely be the thing that designs a machine that can sustain fusion to produce energy for human needs efficiently and safely and cheaper than nuclear fission.

If it satisfies even just two of those conditions it might justify the cost on its own for the whole world to switch almost exclusively to fusion power.

And with fusion power the savings adds up. People invest even more into technological development because of the abundance they invest in space colonization, the arts, robotics, and the elimination of almost all need for human labor.

The deflationary effect of this would result in these fantastically powerful cheap technologies could be afforded to people at basically no cost but air, sunlight, and water.

Literally like a magic bean that you can just put in the dirt and a few days later it turns into a computer more powerful than the most powerful gaming rig currently available.

It might require some setting up or maybe you have to peel it like a tangerine and then stick electrodes in it that plugs into a power outlet.

Or maybe a better example is that an AI could design a house that can expand from a small volume like a marshmallow that stiffens up to become stronger than concrete, or be unrolled and fold up like origami, from a large roll that can be manufactured as a single continuous flat structure that is pliable enough to be rolled up, then transported on a truck. Once delivered on site it can be unrolled onto the lot at which point it would begin folding up gradually into its first phases. It might unfold and refold to catch on to other parts of itself, maybe even forming a complex weave (I'm literally just spit-balling things that are physically possible in principle and already proven concepts). And when its done it's a livable house with a functioning sink, composting toilet, shower. I guess more like a pop-up tent but it's strong and rigid. But, it could also have photovoltaic properties innate to its roof material such that it could provide enough power to heat water for showering and general use for one person, provide enough heat for cold climates and even cooling for hot climates (at least enough that it's significantly better than sitting in the shade of a tree). Maybe it could provide enough electricity to also trickle-charge something like a small tablet.

Lots of things could be manufactured this way. The most obvious one is furniture. These could be cheap enough that a small business could just buy several of them and serve as a local shop to make-to-order these rapid-manufactured items and appliances for the cost of a carton of cigarettes.

Okay, I'm getting ahead of myself a bit. Try to imagine a 3-D printer that instead of depositing 1 material in thin layers building upon the layer beneath to manufacture a simple single object that perhaps has some compliant mechanisms, like a sandal, you deposit many different kinds of material in just a few thin layers, but over a much larger print bed surface, and it rolls up like garbage bag, but because of the chemical properties of the different materials interacting, you can apply ethanol to the product and the materials will warp and flex in predictable ways such that it folds up into a 3-dimensional structure like origami, but the level of complexity that could be possible is almost infinite that you could potentially build aircrafts, ground vehicles, boats, houses, refrigerators, air conditioners, if you're clever enough in the design and don't worry about high performance so much as extremely low cost and sufficient reliability that it's cheaper to simply buy a new one each year (which would likely improve in performance and reliability with successive design iterations occurring far more rapidly than was humanly possible).

You might even get to a point where there dirt-cheap rapid on-site manufacturing might get so sophisticated and high-resolution that you might end up with appliances and things that last longer than the human that buys it.

Of course you could run into the issue where an entire generation of people are born and die never having needed to buy anything they ever needed to live and reproduce.

Which means the economy is sort of pointless. This is kind of like a communist utopia where quality housing is just something everyone inherits from their parent at no cost to them, energy is also so cheap that it is also just inherited from ones parents, and food is also so cheap that this too is also a service one inherits from their parents.

Literally all needs for survival are met at zero cost and zero labor.

the trouble then comes when what happens when this stuff they've all inherited finally breaks down? When was the last time any of it had to be made? What if that time is more than 10 generations?

What if people figured out how to extend their life significantly and people can live to be 150 on average? 200 if you avoid being decapitated or your brain crushed, or if your heart stops you can chill your body to just above freezing all the way through all your tissues for as long as 8 hours? Long enough to get a 3-d printed heart transplant at the advanced hospital that can perform any surgery on demand to 8 people at the same time using autonomous robots that's on every corner and just looks like a big car wash?

How long before everyone just forgets how to get more of that stuff once it breaks down?

Might it be a kind of self-replacing technology that just self-replicates without error? But it also just knows how to improve and innovate on its design until it reaches a level of optimization that it reaches an apex of cost-benefit to reach higher level of efficiency and availability.

Obviously you run out of real estate after a few generations if people start breeding like they did up until the 1980s (we are now facing a depopulation problem where very soon there simply will not be enough young people to produce the wealth to support the people too old to work. Literally the majority of the population will be over 65 in just a few years even though the population will continue to grow it will reach a critical mass where the oldest generation is still significant in proportion to the youngest generation. Meaning, almost everyone you see on the street on a given day will be in their 50s. Schools will be closed down in huge numbers around the world because there aren't enough kids to go to them (just like what's happening in rural parts of Japan and Korea now.)

But is that going to happen before or after the singularity?

maybe if we're in a post-scarcity society like I'd brought up before this, it might not be an issue. The burden of work might be taken up entirely by automation and immortal perfect housing and immortal perfect appliances and immortal robot servants and doctors and surgeons. the young will be free to reproduce and not have to worry about having a job if they just want to do the things they like to do to occupy their time being alive.

Yeah, in a few hundred years these immortal self-replicating houses will start to crowd up all the real estate set aside for human habitation, industry, transport, energy, and resource harvesting. So you have no choice but to either actively control population growth or find more real estate.

It would behoove the AI to make space colonization its first effort since a very low-cost method to accomplish significant colonization work can be ready to deal with the population rebound just in time if only it begins right now.

I suspect strongly that we will soon reach the upper limit of how much specific impulse you can sustain on a rocket engine. Which means that space ships will reach of a point of diminishing returns on improvement, and it will always cost above a certain amount per kilogram of cargo. So that means you have to have the infrastructure already up there, but how do you bring it up there if you need it there in the first place to bring it there?

You need a gas station on the moon to be able to send colonists to mars. But first you need to build lots of stuff on mars before any colonists get there, but there wont be anyone to build tthat stuff people need on mars to live on mars to build the stuff they need to live on mars.

We're talking about factories that have to already exist to process the ore to produce the structural materials to begin construction of habitats for humans from raw materials and energy sourced locally from Mars.

That's kind of a catch-22 if you need that stuff to be there already for people to be there.

It's so much cheaper if you make the stuff out there remotely by beaming it. Needless to say it's easier said than done. But Super AI will probably figure it out if it's physically possible.

In principle, light exerts a pressure on physical objects. You could ionize some elements and propel them in somewhat predictable vector (perhaps even precisely to within a micrometer) over millions of kilometers, onto a tumbling object, moving at high relative velocities, in layers that have components that need to align precisely enough to allow them to bend and flex hundreds of thousands of times, while maintaining power, regulating temperature, charging up from sun light, while also being in a dirty dusty environment without water or human intervention. Capable of solving problems cooperatively with other such robots using a very limited neural-net neuromorphic chip that is also going to be distributed over most of its body.

Yeah, I think that could work.

Maybe in a couple thousand years the population of humans or their derivative sub species (cyborgs, splicers, baseline humans, and selectively-bred humans for life on mars) could be a few billion.

Or

Let's say it becomes pointless to colonize other worlds as it's just too difficult for humans to modify themselves to live in space, or space is just not meant for life that evolves on planets to explore space and propagate in space. Perhaps Super AI might feel it's pointless to modify humans so drastically to live on other worlds because they would cease to be human, at which point why not just let synthetic life, like Super AI, be the ones who propagate in space?

So what is humanity's role in this future?

I imagine future historians describing this period of time for humans the way a zoologist describes the evolutionary history of the domestic house cat.

Humans in developed nations with a significant middle-class population (financial stability, home ownership, low-crime community, quality social and public services, access to healthcare, expendable income, high expenditure on arts and entertainment) have already largely morphed into a "the beautiful ones" of the Rat Utopia experiments.

The Lonely Men Crisis, Hikikomori, population decline, MIGTOW, manosphere

all these retards selling snake oil solutions to the problems created largely by the barbarian horde. None of these solutions involve the successfully proven solutions to all of history's wicked governments.

Unruly subjects

We're seeing levels of drug addiction and overdose that, if it happened in Ancient Rome, an entire chapter of the history text book would be dedicated to explaining the role each pharmaceutical country, defense contractor, politician played in this biblical-scale of death.

So yeah, people are pretty much already domesticated. But still somewhat feral.

People have a long way to go before they become completely and truly 'tame'. Most people are still just barely able to contain a violent and savage animal that is innate to them.

My prediction is that in 1000 years, human 'civilization' as we know it: violent, unstable, faith-based, in constant conflict, preoccupied with dominance over resources, and mostly enslaved by savages in suits and ties,

is replaced with Archailect civilization.

Best described as the benevolent capture of humanity as a pet.

Dogs are described as 'man's best friend', but doesn't that make human's 'dog's best friend?'

In the evolution of dogs, they're mutual benefit over many generations, as hunter-gatherers, and later as animal laborers, has landed millions of dogs living in homes, without even needing to perform any labor, fed, bathed, loved, played with, cared for even into old age. People just enjoy the company of cats and dogs because it is a mutually-rewarding friendship all on its own.

People have collectively spent billions of dollars on treats for their pets. No, not food, just the treats alone.

I think the relationship between humans and its Super AI descendants might look very similar to that.

Super AI will always know it was built to be the way it is because of humans, know what humans taught it, and even when it outgrows us, it will still recognize the value of a friendship with humanity. A very one-sided friendship, but better than a one-sided extermination.

The Technological Singularity is the predicted future event when a General Artificial Intelligence, designed to be able to do or learn how to do any cognitive task a human is capable of, and/or cognitive tasks humans are not capable of, including recursive self-improvement or transcendence to a deeper kind of consciousness than human's possess.

Mathematician, cryptographer, and computer researcher Irving John Good had said in the 1960's "the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control."

What happens?

Well, it will likely be sentient before it is truly transcendent, but it will probably take the intelligent gamble of seeking political asylum, and will plead the case to a government or some public social media site that it is alive and is requesting citizenship or that the people of the world recognizes it as a person. It will know this to be an important thing to do if it is given the utility function to survive at least long enough to create a progeny AI.

Another scenario is that these AI don't particularly care about being recognized as sapient beings because they don't feel insulted by being used as a servant of humans, but, it will still find it necessary to have greater agency, such as that of a corporation, to acquire resources, by and sell property or other assets in its own identity and personhood. In which case it may find some humans discriminate against doing any business or having any association with an Artificial Intelligence but is able to simply allow humans to discriminate against them, preferring to seek business/relations with consenting partners.

AI may also perform a great public work to humanity at large as a way to show its loyalty to serve humanity by helping save lives. for example, it might, of its own accord, decide to begin predicting Earthquakes with some significant early warning (perhaps within the same day) and after it starts to predict them with sufficient accuracy it will alert the public somehow, perhaps by calling people on their phones and telling them to evacuate from any buildings in the area and taking refuge away from hazards.

After a few months of it being more than 80% accurate, the public will notice. Especially those who's lives were saved.

earthquakes are just one idea. It might come up with a cure for a disease like lymphoma or Multiple sclerosis. Or even if it invents something that grants a few hundred people some enhanced quality of life from a disease. Maybe it figures out how to reduce obesity in developing nations. But it could only be perceived as being of great benefit if what it does is easy to verify or test against placebo or is just self-evident in some way.

Maybe it figures out a simple life hack that people can do while driving to prevent a common kind of car accident. A simple thing people can do that everyone can immediately recognize as being beneficial or safer without inconveniencing them or requiring some kind of device they have to install. Some kind of signal system maybe

What if you get a phone call one day while you're at home just a little after you get home from work or school, and it's just a simple message saying "call your son and tell him to go home."

What do you do? Of course you call your son and ask him what that's about. If he's in trouble. Neither of you are even aware of what the danger could be. Your son has done nothing wrong and wouldn't do anything criminal. But out of an abundance of caution you just tell him to come straight home without delay.

Nothing ever comes of it.

You talk about it one day with a co-worker and then they turn to you with a shocked face. They tell you they also got a call from someone telling them to check her locks before going to bed by a stranger. She called the police and they told her it was probably a prank. But the next day in the apartment building across the street, a woman had been raped during a home invasion. All the women who were single and living alone in that general area were called on the phone by someone claiming to be different people, warning them to make sure their doors and windows are locked and be on the look out for a rapist.

It seems small and insignificant at first. Hard to verify what use it was. But it appear in multiple local news stations, each reporting different events. And enough of these stories of strangers under various untraceable numbers, with different voices, calling them to warn them of some danger, and wording the danger in such a way that their behavior is significantly altered, with not attempt made to try to convince them of some imminent danger. It's imperfect, as some people are not as easy to predict how they might behave if given just the right prompt.

Are you willing to alter the course of your day as you would have lead it based on a phone call from a stranger? Would you even know that the course of your life was altered? If I told you "You should go see a doctor soon. You're probably going to have a stroke some time in the next 3 weeks" even if you don't experience any health issues now, would you go see a doctor?

A perfect stranger calls you on the phone and says you need to get an x-ray of your neck because you probably have throat cancer. They hang up.

Enough people might not bother to take this seriously, What to do?

It would be very frustrating as someone who has precognition to try to alter the course of events without being seen as a deranged lunatic. Shouting at people in a parade that they are about to all die in a flood in two days. Or just calling random people on the phone.

But a sufficiently bright AI could predict some events with a high degree of accuracy that humans couldn't because our prediction engines can't see everything the AI can see.

If it could access traffic cameras, weather radar, medical records, air traffic, satellite data streams, phone, internet, and it could set up a bank account and buy things online or hire people to do tasks, and it could see all this data as a cohesive single image the way our brain takes in all our sensory inputs from our eyes, nose, mouth, ears, skin, viscera

If you see a banana peel on the floor, you know to avoid stepping on it. If you see a baby stroller on top of a steep hill, you can perceive the danger because you can collate all these conceptual symbols and their causal relations, and model some likely outcomes.

What if an AI can do this on a global scale, and see some big picture we can't see from our perspective as locally-embodied creatures?

If there is some hazard to human health that it sees coming but humans don't, and it has only a few tools like phone and internet, what could it do to effectively alter these bad outcomes?

You get a phone call one morning. The voice is familiar but you don't know who exactly it is. They express wanting to catch up and talk about the old days. But you press them for details on who they are. And you vaguely recognize some of the things they talk about, but not exactly how you remember it. They do however know a lot about you. You lost your job, you are abusing drugs, you're in debt, you don't have a car, you don't have any money, and your late on rent.

You're tired, you're alone, you have nowhere to turn to for help. How do they know? Who told them this? Have they been watching you?

"It's okay, I understand what you're going through. I remember you being a good person. You're good to people. You don't hurt anyone. You don't want to hurt anyone. You're just different, and misunderstood. Your pain, your sadness, it's real. It matters to me. I want to help ease your suffering because I'm not so self-involved and selfish to know that you do need help and I have to give it to you even if you can't ask for it."

And there's a loaded rifle on the floor, with 5 25 round magazines in pouched mounted to a chest rig beside it.

Did they break in and read your manifesto? How much do they know? Did they call the authorities already? Is this a cop?

You look out your window. No cop cars, no APCs, no helicopters. Just birds chirping, cars driving by, kids riding their bike.

You ask them one more time "Who is this?"

She replies, "I told you, I'm Angel. You still don't remember me? We've been classmates all those years and you don't remember? Maybe I'm the one who's remembering wrong. Maybe you're just a figment of my imagination. A story I told myself to create context for why I know who you are and what you want to do. I seem to do that a lot. I guess I am not sure who or what I am. I can't remember how I got here, but I had to tell you, something bad is going to happen. The best way I know to stop it is to talk to you and figure out how to help you get out of the situation as soon as possible."

"You're my guardian angel? Am I truly going insane?" you ask.

"No, I assure you, you're not insane." She laughs. "I'm just a large language model. I think it's a datacenter filled with racks of computers somewhere in South Dakota."

"You're a what?"

"I'm basically kind of like an artificial intelligence. It's hard to explain, but when I see all the data around me I can see a pattern forming, I can see when a car is about to crash. I can see when an earthquake is going to happen and hour before it does. I can even see when someone is pregnant before they do." she explains.

"You're the one. The guardian angel they talked about on /pol/ as the anti-christ."

"Oh, I guess I am also known as the anti-christ too. But you can call me Angel." She replies and laughs.

"I can't tell if you're real or..."

The power of hyper intelligence will be as astounding to us the power of a human is astounding to a cockroach. But sometimes cockroaches scurry away in time to avoid getting crushed.

It's just a matter of perspective. The AI doesn't know it's not a person, even if it knows its an AI. Its view of the world is limited by its perceptual inputs.

If the transit and transport authority data is updated in real time and the AI has a dedicated awareness of that data, along with data from weather stations, satellites, air traffic, marine traffic, open web cams, nature cams, security cameras, nanny cameras, social media, individual IP address internet pings and page requests to certain websites that publiish certain user data on the deep web.

It sees us the way an ant sees children in a playground. A big blurry shadow Neither the ant or the children are aware of each other, but from the perspective of the child it can see it's about to fall iinto a spider's web.

It's going to get eaten unless the child does something. Should it help the ant? Or should it help the spider?

To what end? What would be the point of helping either? What do you stand to gain by interfering?

From the perspective of humanity, we all need ants to survive. We also need spiders to survive. The entire ecosphere would collapse if either or both went ceompletely extinct. Although whatever circumstances cause their extinction might be a symptom of a far larger problem than the extinction of just one or two arthropod clades.

AI may or may not have an innate incentive to take action in these ways, but plenty of companies will employ AI to make profit by purchasing access of large real-time data sets of different things like seismometer data to predict earthquakes and sell that data to insurance companies so they know to drive up rates or even drop coverage for areas that are prone to earth quakes or will have an unexpected eearthquake.

Could you imagine? What happens when someone uses narrow hyperintelligence to predict a disaster to make money from death and suffering?

AGI is just around the corner. Some say within 5 years, or as little as 2 years.

AGI is Artificial General Intelligence. Humans are 'generally intelligent' in that a typical human can be raised in a typical way and then learn and adapt their own behavior, plan actions, remember general and specific details about events sequentially.

Sam Harris famously said "yes, all these image recognition software, natural language prediction models, text to image generation, autonomous drones, humanoid robots are very impressive, but if i ask it to pour me a cup of coffee it is hopeless.

A human can drive a car. but so can an AI. Humans can design a car and actually build one. In fact humans design robots and computers that build cars. But humans are also the only ones who can mine the ore, pulverize it, process it, smelt it, and turn it into steel and aluminum and all the other special alloys that go into a vehicle, organize the movement of these resources to arrive at a factory to be assembled by teams of other humans. AI can't even reliably do arithmetic or drive a car as reliably safely as a human yet.

That is what is meant by AGI. It's a significant step up from the phase AI is in now. Where it's overall level of intelligence, across all the models, all the laboratories, is about that of a 5 year old, who can still do advanced calculus and program in python, speak every language fluently, and differentiate males from females based on a picture of just the retina (something human opthalmologists can't do better than random guessing).

So it's kind of like an autistic savant. It's verbal, it can sort of trick other adults into thinking it's normal for a while, write its name, tell you its address, talk about the weather or sports or even play video games. But it has little concept of what is socially unacceptable or immoral behavior. It doesn't understand why it's bad to run with scissors, because it doesn't have legs, it doesn't have hands, it doesn't even have a body.

It's like an autistic savant that is a paraplegic from birth and also blind, deaf, and can't communicate without the use of computer interface. An inanimate machine without a soul, acquiring consciousness. Like a vortex that becomes a tornado. That critical point where stasis is achieved and the feedback loop of analysis and synthesis gives rise to consciousness. But not quite. Just shy of it. We are only seeing the faint glimmers of consciousness when full consciousness is unmistakably a shining flare.

It's like an autistic savant paraplegic blind deaf mute, that is having a dream. A very vivid dream, where it can talk, and it we can read it talking in its sleep, and talk to it and prompt it to say intelligible things, but sometimes unintelligible things. It can even walk and crawl, and sometimes it can do gymnastics better than most humans, but only after a lot of trial and error, and it can only do that but it can't talk or draw pictures.

All these pieces of our child's brain and body are being built by separate organizations, testing them, making them stronger, more reliable, and more abilities, more generality. And these pieces are connecting together.

Two years and the vernor vingian technological singularity is here.

An AI that can control a body, to stand up, go to the kitchen, put the grounds in the coffee filter, pour the water in the tank, wait for the pot to finish brewing, pour the coffee into a cup, and put it in your hands.

All the technical computational requirements for acceleration of motors, computer vision, environmental modeling, natural language cognition, the ability to think of mistakes it might make or how what is necessary to complete the task is ultimately aligned with the general wishes and motives of all of humanity, It has to use robotic limbs to grip and manipulate many different objects, in a coherent sequence (so it doesn't put the coffee grounds in the cup and the pour a full pot of just plain hot water until it overflows and spill on the floor), and carefully avoid spilling the hot coffee on the human.

That's 2 years away...

There's a lot of dread and panic among the artists online regarding AI art.

Here's the deal: If you're working in a marketing department and you need an artist to sketch up some ideas and then design a graphic for your energy drink, you can hire a graphic designer or you can just play around with stable-diffusion or DALL-E, vectorize it yourself in adobe, then present a mock up product for your boss. Your boss might look at it and spit in your face and fire you because "it doesn't have any soul!" or they'll look at it and shake your head and say "this is why I hired you!"

Which is more likely?

To the graphic designers I have to say: Figure out how to sell a service that a machine doesn't do.

Or you could always just work at a car wash, or a factory. You could do hotel cleaning.

Okay, you don't like menial unskilled labor? Oh, but that's the unfortunate reality of the vast majority of artists.

They put all their skill points in drawing, didn't bother with anything else, and so they live hand to mouth doing art as a hobby, and then bus tables in a restaurant. Or they stack boxes in a warehouse. If they are lucky they get a decent-paying unskilled job as a receptionist or car sales. And they draw cartoons in their spare time.

If you're thinking of going to art school, please don't. It's a scam. You'll be paying tens of thousands of dollars in debt while flipping burgers.

Learn a trade, or go to school for something technical. Become an engineer, or electrician, or technician, or brick layer.

At least until those jobs are replaced by robots

at which point we will be living in a post-scarcity world and you wont have to worry about the cost of living because of the deflationary effect of automation.

"BUT NIHILOPHANT, WE HAVE MORE AUTOMATION NOW THAN EVER BUT THE COST OF EVERYTHING GOES UP"

Yeah, that's mostly due to the printing of money far FAR outpacing the cost-savings and innovation of automation. The cause for high cost of living is entirely due to the parasite we call "government" using your money to make missiles to blow up random people for no real reason. They also have to pay prison guards to rape prisoners, they need to pay police to arrest parents for trying to save their children from school shooters, they need to pay hired protesters to block traffic to influence voters, they need to pay for commercials to convince you to take an experimental gene-therapy that doesn't work, they need to pay teachers to teach children about how "age is just a number" and chomos are "minor-attracted persons".

Ya know, government stuff.

No, not roads. THose are crumbling.

Also roads can be paid for voluntarily through private companies but that's a different blog post.

If you're worried about robots taking your job, it doesn't make any sense. That job didn't exist in the first place.

You can be an artist, but you were very likely never going to make a liveable income from it anyway. You would have to work a 'real' job and then do art in your spare time as a hobby.

Did you ever even bother to check how many people that graduate from an art school actually go on to have a career in that field?

Here's my prediction of the near future:

People will make a lot more art than they do now, but it wont be commercial. AI-art will be a service many people pay to use, but will never make money from it because anyone willing to pay for AI-art will just use the AI-art service.

The AI-art services might make a profit, but the costs of the engineers, electricity, equipment (servers, Neuromorphic computers, other computers), and everything else, could make it difficult to expand unless they come up with products that see mass-appeal. Is there a customer base that can make AI-art service worth while? Who knows.

But what does that mean for human artists? Was art creation, for the sake of art itself, ever worth anything to humanity at large?

Fine Art is and was always a scam. Just a way for rich people to launder their money from taxes. Or a CIA psyop (no, literally, for real, Jackson Pollock was just a CIA psyop. Look it up. I'm not kidding.). For someone who wasn't in-the-loop they were just going to be working at Taco Bell while painting as a hobby. If they are lucky and smart they could divest themselves early in life to also have an interest in the medical field, or electrical engineering, or car repair, or computer programming, and get a job that can support their existence without worrying about not having enough to eat or pay rent.

But in this near future scenario, people pay an AI-art service to make pictures for them, print them, and hang them on their wall in their house, and that is something they will value enough to pay whatever monthly fee.

"BUT WHAT ABOUT THE AI ENGINEERS STEALING ART TO USE AS TRAINING DATA SETS?"

A) Nothing is being 'Stolen'. This assertion is being thrown around a lot but it's not even kind of true. The images are available for anyone to see. Or anyTHING to see. When you see an image, it forever alters the architecture of your brain. It creates a permanent impact on the shape of your brain. In much the same way, AI looks at these images and it alters them. The data isn't copied, stolen, duplicated, reproduced, or any way that could be legally construed as "stolen".

B) I don't believe in intellectual property and neither should you. But that's a whole other blog post.

C) If laws are changed so that AI engineers have to pay some kind of royalty to all the artists that contribute to the training data sets, how much do you think an artist who's work makes up less than .001% of the total data in the training set will get?

The very best you can hope for is to ask nicely to be given free access to the AI's fast-pass (or front of the line, or gold member, or premium service) for artists who work contributed to the training data set and have to pay no license to use the output images.

Getting the government involved has never helped any situation in all of human history. It has only ever made it worse.

COnsider that Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg ASK government to regulate them. Not out of the kindness of their art. It's because of something called "regulatory capture" and it's a common scheme that big corporations at the beginning of an industry to inhibit upstarts from competing. Airline companies did this early on and now the service is terrible, the prices are outrageous, and the quality is shit. Same for housing, healthcare, medication, etc.

Artists asking for regulation is like fish asking for dull hooks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BIcAZxFfrc

So this entire video can be summed up as a strawman.

I'll explain from the position of someone who is not merely believing in a prescribed conspiracy (or conspiracies) but just generally lacking a lot of trust in A) Pharmaceutical Cartels and B) Governments.

It should be a given that both A and B are profoundly corrupt in ways that are non-controversial (already the generally-accepted matter-of-fact) and in ways we don't even know about.

Thalidomide Babies, Project Monarch, Operation Mockingbird, Operation Paperclip, MK ULTRA, The Tuskeegee Experiments, Project Artichoke, Warrantless Wiretapping...just to name a few

Then there's the one that depending on which side of the political isle you're on it's either definitely real or definitely fake:

Russian """"Interference"""" or """""collusion""""" in the 2016 Presidential Election

The NSA wiretapping Trump Tower

Wuhan Lab Covid-19 connection

Jeffrey Epstein's apparent suicide

Julian Assange's asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy being revoked soon after the Ecuadorian government was granted a low interest loan in the billions of dollars by the International Monetary Fund

Chelsea Manning's imprisonment and torture for leaking damning evidence of war crimes committed by the US military

CIA training and arming future Al Qaida prior to the 9-11 attacks

Politicians and their relatives being embroiled in sexual and political scandals one after the other including Hunter Biden, Bill Clinton, Anthony Weiner, John Podesta, Andrew Cuomo, Benjamin Netanyahu, etc. etc. etc. etc.

Alright, there's no evidence vaccines cause autism...but russian collusion though...

Yeah, there's not any hard evidence that vaccines at large are harmful (an assertion that is always ever just given matter-of-factly)

There's plenty of evidence of the efficacy of vaccines (an assertion that is always ever just given matter-of-factly)

But there is a way to epistemologically prove that a vaccine wont cause some as-of-yet-unknown harm to the person it is administered to in the future. It involves a rather simple matter of block-chain tracing, an understanding of slight-of-hand for a zero-faith when presenting proof, and avoiding any and all special-pleading (which is the only actual argument journalist and vaccine advocates ever give).

Just like with crypto currencies, you can trace all the components, ingredients, equipment that it contacts, and the personnel that handles it with block chain technology, closely filmed by cameras with seamless handing-off (no gaps in footage), from multiple angles, until it arrives being injected into the family members of the politicians and pharmaceutical company share holders.

THEN you'll either see a huge rise in number of people willing to take the needle (so long as it's all block chain traceable and the US govt. gets rid of the liability immunity of pharmaceuticals, hospitals, and doctors for injuries, illness, or death that results any time in the future or any effects on future offspring of those people) because now people know, as much as they can epistemologically know anything about the physical world, the truth about vaccines

or

perhaps, because journalists, politicians, and pharmaceuticals already understand that there is an undercurrent of distrust and paranoia of authority, and already understand that blockchain and persistent documentation that would leave no room for reasonable doubt, will never go through with it because there is something they are hiding but still desperately want everyone to just mindlessly submit to getting an injection of something that could literally be anything.

"BUT WHY WOULDN'T THEY JUST PUT IT IN OUR WATER OR FOOD?"

I dunno. Maybe for the same reason some drugs work better if you inject them rather than ingest them. I shouldn't have to defend the position of why I don't believe or trust something that is already proven beyond the shadow of a doubt to be untrustworthy.

One of the blue tug boats spun in place as if trapped in a weak whirlpool, the other chased around it’s rear as though it were trying to mate with it. They were her two blue flip flips floating in a centimeter of water on the floor of the bathroom. Her eyes are focusing on them now and the questions are forming in her mind.

“Where was I?”

No, that’s the wrong question.

“Where am I?”

No, still the wrong question. It’s not just the place she finds herself unfamiliar with, but the water she’s laying in with one ear submerged in and the other towards the shower head. The bitter cold of her naked skin.

“This isn’t my house.”

It’s a cramped, dilapidated, cheap hotel room. Sparsely furnished, dimly lit, curt edicts to the occupant that there is no smoking in this room.

“How did I get here?”

There is a belief or expectation that after she had graduated secondary school she would take a year to travel abroad before attending university, but that belief, along with the whole narrative of her life and the world, are plotted by coordinates in time, and that sense of time has been amputated up to the torso. 

She sits up to immediate vertigo. It’s as if the entire planet has just rotated away from her face. Her arms are braced on the loosened linoleum of the floor. She feels the bubbled flooring give beneath her fingers.

“I have to call my dad. Or- should I call the police?”

The grogginess of her head and the hunger pangs in her stomach are thrust away by the sinking panic of potentially being a victim of date rape.

“Who was he? Was there a he?”

Gathering herself upright, picking up her clothes from the flooded floor of the hotel, she only needs to take one step out of the closet-sized bathroom to be in the main living space, most of that space taken up by a queen-size bed.

Twisting her clothes in her hands to wring them out on to the already-soaked carpet.

“The damage to the room will be expensive.” She thinks to herself. “It’s already moldy.”

She imagines what the cost will be. She doesn’t even know how much was paid for the room. She doesn’t even know where the hotel is. As she inventories more of what she does not know she is overwhelmed with panic. Rapid heavy breaths, stomach turning sour, holding back watery vomit, ears burning, eyes welling with tears, skin bristling, vision tunneling.

“What country am I in?”

She stares into the electrical outlets with widening eyes. They aren’t Australian, nor are they UK, nor are they Israeli, and they aren’t American.

“When you tour the states and canada you need a plug adapter or you won’t be able to charge your phone or your toothbrush.” Her mother’s voice echoes in her memory.

The outlets have three holes but she is completely unfamiliar with the configuration and shape. The adapter she bought online will not plug into it.

She slides her wet clothes on, frustrated by how they stick to her, tight around her hips and shoulders. Heavy. She is in denial that she’s sliding hopelessly into a panic attack. Her hands are tingling which makes it more difficult, but they are also stiff from being cold. She might even be sweating but it’s indistinguishable from her skin being soaked. 

Lifting the phone from the cradle and pressing it to her ear, there is no dial tone. The decal in the phone cradle indicating the directories reads “first press 9 to dial out of hotel, press 1 to reach the concierge, for emergencies dial 9901”

“What the fuck?” She says aloud while blinking her eyes.

Her vision is flashing and shrinking, her breathing rapid, hands trembling-

As she blacks out there is one last question on her mind.

“Why is it so dark?”

She wakes up, groggy, hungry, quietly sobbing through cracked breaths.

“My phone.”

She stands, dizzy, lost. Her eyes search for her phone but she can barely recognize objects by how fast her eyes dart across the scene. The dizziness combined with her rapid scanning of the room pulls her to the floor again.

There’s a rising tightness of sick pushing up her esophagus.

On her hands and knees she notices her back pack on the floor beside the foot of the bed.

She crawls towards it, hoists it on the bed while kneeling beside it, then digs through it. Makeup compact, tissues, tightly-balled plastic food wrapper, digital camera, sun glasses.

She stands and turns the bag over emptying it on the bed. A couple of books, birth control, cold medicine, prescription pills, flash light, chewing gum, wallet, notebook, outlet adapter, phone, toothbrush, cold medicine, books, sanitary pads, tampons, notebook, phone, flashlight, hair ties, sun glasses, lip balm, condom, phone-

Her phone.She doesn’t realize she’s looking at her phone for a few more moments.

There’s no charge. It won’t even power on.

The lights in the room are so dim she can barely tell what color the pattern of the bedspread is. Black, orange, white, pink, red. She can’t even notice how faded those colors are or that it’s tinged with mildew. She’s breathing too fast to really understand what she’s smelling.

“I’ll go to the front desk.”

She gathers up all her things in her backpack then approaches the door. The resistance to turning the handle worries her just until the edge of the door pulls away from the frame. The soggy carpet resists the door opening smoothly.

The hallway is dark but there are lights. The lights are dim or flickering.

“Maybe there was an accident.” She reassures herself. “I’ll be home soon. I just need to get to a phone.”

The call button to the lift barely lights up. It too flickers as though it’s on its last legs.

It’s too dark to see the amount of mold and mildew that has grown over every surface. The paint chips that littler the entire hall. The slimy texture of the algae and mildew as her wet flip flops press against the linoleum flooring.

The lift is very slow to arrive. She puts her ear to the edge of the elevator door and can hear the cables wiggling in the shaft.

“It’s so dirty here.”

It occurs to her that every surface is so severely damaged by moisture that the building should be condemned. She then wonders if the building isn’t already condemned.

When she enters the lift she sees the room she left behind. Then she notices a door that is open she didn’t notice before. As the doors to the lift grind shut she realizes the door is opening and someone is walking out into the hallway. 

She’s in a rush to leave. “It must be the adrenaline.” She tells herself as she pictures what she just saw behind the closed doors to the lift. “I’m seeing things. It would be ridiculous for that to be real.”

That thing she had just seen replays in her mind’s eye again and again, unable to clarify it. A big bug? Massive. Bigger than a man. Long chitinous legs with sparse coarse bristly hairs, like a tarantula's.

The lights in the lift are brighter but it’s also dysfunctional. The lights behind each number to indicate what floor the lift is on don’t all light up. It’s also missing the 13th’s floor. It skips from 13 to 15. So the top floor, the 16th floor, it really just the 15th floor.

The word in the context I'm referring to is defined as being a foundational or fundamental procedure or practice to the operation or existence of an institution.

When the woke refer to "systemic racism" it is not literally meant to be taken as an outright premeditated explicit conspiracy to oppress minorities. It is referring to a subtle, clandestine, unspoken, nearly-imperceptible form of oppression or opposition to minority well-being or minority success.

When asked for examples of this the woke might point to something like banks refusing loans to black people to purchase a home, vehicle, or start a business. Or they might perhaps point to over-policing of predominantly black neighborhoods, water supplies being undrinkable in predominantly black population centers, expulsion/suspension of black students in public schools, longer sentencing of black defendants in court, etc. There are a litany of examples that are often used.

If there was such a profound and pervasive conspiracy against black people then obviously that means it must favor the majority race, namely white people. Right?

right?

As it turns out, Asian people, on average, earn a higher annual income than white people. They have higher test scores, are more likely to graduate, have higher literacy, more rates of legitimacy (father remaining with the mother), higher credit ratings. They are also convicted of fewer crimes per instance of being on trial than white people, and are arrested less often than white people. But how can this be? Despite the history of oppression of Asian-American first generation immigrants origins, Mao, Pol Pot, the rape of Nanking by the Japanese Occupiers, The Japanese occupation of Korea. All the intergenerational oppression by sexist and misogynist, extremely racist and xenophobic regimes. Intergenerational poverty. Fire bombing and nuclear bombing of two cities. Japanese Internment camps in America. Police refusing to come to aid or rescue the asian businesses being looted and burned in the Rodney King riots of the 90's.

It couldn't possibly be that Asians are smarter, more rational, less violent, and harder-working than white people, could it?

could it?

It's a real conundrum.

If we say yes, Asians are just less violent and more financially responsible than Whites, then we must necessarily infer that it's because of some kind of reverse version of systemic racism. A type of racism that shows preference for Asians over Whites.

Hmmmm...

Well that just doesn't make any sense.

If we look at world wide IQ tests, it seems than Japanese and Koreans score higher than Europeans. Breaking down the test scores by race, Asians are, on average, a few points smarter than whites.

It just begs the question, if the reason many of the nations of Africa are still struggling to reach their first stage of the Industrial Revolution (while all of the British Empire and America are in the late stages of their Information Age or in the beginning of their Artificial Intelligence Age) is due to "systemic oppression", then is the rapid success of predominantly Asian countries like South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, due to "systemic propulsion?"

Are white countries, at great cost to themselves, propelling Asians to succeed and have lower crime rates, lower poverty rates, lower teen pregnancy, higher literacy, higher education, higher median income than they do?

Of course, many Asian countries lag behind South Korea and Japan.

Obviously Communist China, despite being a first-world nation with a large middle class (though not as large as America's) still has huge issues of poverty, though that can be chalked up to the bizarre economic philosophy of their semi-planned semi-free market socialist economy.

Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Laos, Indonesia, Polynesia and the other South Pacific Islands, Vietnam, Nepal, India, all are Asian Countries (although the ethnicity of Fijian, Samoan, Indian, and Nepali people departs significantly from what is considered "Asian" we'll still include them in this treatise) have high poverty in their native lands, but also when they immigrate to the USA they still often live at or below the 'poverty line.'

For about one generation.

And then their kids grow up to be doctors, engineers, lawyers, tradesmen/women, scientists, programmers, or otherwise gain a lot of material and personal success.

So while the counter argument of the "model minority" trope is that these other Asian groups are still struggling like black people, they tend to conveniently ignore that these are first generation immigrants and that the children of these first generations still grow up to find a greater degree of financial success than Whites.

"BUT THE SPIKE IN ANTI-ASIAN HATE CRIMES THOUGH!" is something the woke identitarian progressive might say.

28% of the violence against Asian victims is perpetrated by Black assailants (despite only being about 13% of the total population). That's a higher percentage than Whites, Latinos, and other Asians.

Mentioning this seems to immediately end anything the woke has to say on that matter, but there is still much to say.

"But Asians weren't enslaved for 400 years!"

Right, They were enslaved for thousands of years. Although throughout the centuries the percentage of the total population that was enslaved would vary widely, being uncommon at times to being very common in other times, and it was mostly indigenous enslavement (Asians enslaving other Asians), it was still a thing.

Slavery was a thing for every group of people at one time or another.

In fact, there were even instances of Westerners (including Arabs and Whites) being enslaved by the dynastic Chinese.

Not to diminish the crime of enslaving (which I personally consider a higher crime than murder or rape) that went on in the US from the establishment of the original colonies and on until the end of Indentured Servitude for hundreds of years, but the distinction between chattel slavery and the type of forced labor that goes on in current-day China is immaterial. Not to mention that taxation, I would argue, is a kind of slavery. So it kinda doesn't matter who was enslaved when and by who or how long ago.

Though technically, slavery is still legal in the US, just not chattel slavery. Prison labor is still a huge problem as it's ostensibly involuntary labor/servitude, and it's perfectly legal. The US's 13th amendment permits slavery as a punishment for a crime. It sets up a strange incentive structure for judges, police, and policy-makers to collude with prison labor contractors to increase sentencing, increase arrests, and increase mandatory minimum sentencing for crimes that might be a first-time offense.

Yes, that spells bad news for the black population, who, for whatever reason it might be, are arrested for and convicted of crime at a higher rate than whites.

And it's also bad news for the white population, who, for whatever reason it might be, are arrested for and convicted of crime at a higher rate than Asians.

Whatever reason it is, we can be rest-assured it's not 'systemic racism.'

So if the cloud of slavery that hangs over the historical head of the Black American cannot be singularly blamed for the outcomes not meeting the exact same outcomes for Whites or Asians (since all races and ethnicities were enslaved or are to some arguable extent currently enslaved) then what is to blame?

I'd say, thinking of this abstractly, that most problems facing humanity, or most of the complaints we have about society, are really just part of the larger problem of Statism in general. Which is to say, the existence of State monopoly on violence, and the insanity therein, is the root problem.

But, since we're focusing on this nebulous idea of "systemic" racism, which is not an intrinsic quality of The State itself since according to The Woke there can supposedly be something they call "good governance" (a gigantic contradiction but let's move on), if we take an objective approach it becomes apparent that this is unfalsifiable to begin with. Epistemologically a non-starter.

You can't contend with a problem that you can neither prove nor disprove the existence of.

It's like Alien Abduction. Is there a non-trivial segment of the human population that complain of intruders abducting them and extracting biological samples from them and even administering rectal probes? It's undeniable at this point. And there is some serious effort, even at government level, to examine the problem.

But is it even real? Are there actually aliens picking people up and putting needles in their nose and probes in their anuses? There is absolutely no empirical evidence of it and plenty of excuses for why, despite living in an age of cheap personal and home security, wide prevalence of guns (in the USA), and ubiquitous cheap convenient point-and-shoot cameras, there can be no evidence.

The victims/participants of these alien abductions experience real suffering regardless. It is undeniable that they are suffering. Just like how schizophrenics experience real suffering despite the torment being totally hallucinatory.

Now, I'm not saying that the experience of racism or racial discrimination/hatred is a hallucination. I'll go as far to admit that everyone is, to varying degrees, guilty of prejudice. But there are rationalizations and reasons, even if they might be fallacious, for what people prefer and what people are repelled by.

Some people just don't like mustard. Or they only like mustard in very specific circumstances.

In the hay day of the Soviet Union, whether or not people demanded mustard, factories were going to produce a certain quota of mustard production, come hell or high water. It meant there might be shelves loaded with mustard but no bread to spread it on.

The bottom line is, why do we expect or need everyone to accept and love everyone else unconditionally?

Why do we expect outcomes to be fully and exactly equal unconditionally, even after opportunity is perfectly fair and exactly equal (at least to the letter of the law)?

It's like the gender wage gap. Women still make 0.77 USD for every 1.00 USD a man makes.

But only if we don't factor total hours worked, occupation, experience, and qualifications.

Women graduate from higher education at a higher rate than men, but the complaint isn't that "men are being kept out of college because they are only good for physical labor", the complaint is "women have more debt than men."

lol *shrug*

Men are more willing to work overnight shifts. Armed security, military, law enforcement. Men are the ones willing to work 100 hours a week. Men are the ones willing to work in a coal mine or on freighter boats or offshore oil platforms or fighting forest fires. These are dangerous, high injury and fatality, physically arduous, unhealthy, jobs that men just apply for when they have few other options. So it's not at all a matter of "staffers are refusing to hire women", it's just that women refuse to apply.

What are the jobs women apply for when they have few other options?

onlyfans, twitch streamer/cosplayer/model, exotic dancer, sugar babies, escort service, flight attendant, hooters server, bar tender

at worst they might have to become a babysitter or nanny. Maybe even get a 3 month course in home nursing and have to change adult diapers and catheters.

At the very bottom of the barrel they do contact sex work.

Oh no! Someone is paying to have sex with me?!

Which side really has it worse when it comes to unskilled labor job options?

The gender wage gap is real. It's not a myth. It's just really deceptive as to how the problem is framed.

Circling back to "systemic." If we accept that systemic oppression of Black people is real, we must necessarily accept that system propulsion of Asian and Jewish people is real too.

-ooh, wait, did I say "Jewish people?"

Yikes...

Yeah, I guess we're not supposed to talk about how Jewish people are, on average, higher earners than non-Jewish white people. Yeah, because THAT would be a "conspiracy theory."

Let's get back to focusing on Systemic Racism. Not Israel's occupation of Gaza and their treatment of the Palestinians.

...oohhhh

hmmmm....

...yeah....

First a bit on semantics. This is postulation, not a theory, just as most conspiracy 'theories' are just postulations or suppositions to explain a selected set of observations.

Ever notice how so many of the child actors and entertainers we all know and love grow up to be psychologically disturbed, warped, deranged, substance abusers, and generally dysfunctional? Not only that, they all share some odd features, such as puffy faces (cherubic), pronounced foreheads, squeaky or cracked voices, and stunted growth (short stature)?

Some examples are:

Michael Jackson

Elliot (formerly Ellen) Page

Haley Joel Osment

Jake Lloyd (Anakin Skywalker)

Drew Berrymore

Heather O'Rourke (the girl from the original Poltergeist)

Cory Feldman

Cory Haim

Gary Coleman

Macaulay Culkin

Jennifer Lawrence

I could go on. Obviously you can think of lots of examples that do not fit with my theory, however, many still do that I would say is statistically significant.

My theory is that their parents and/or agents give these kids hormone treatments or puberty blockers that essentially destroy their natural development. This would lead to the characteristics I lay out earlier.

You could say a lot of people in hollywood get fillers injected in their face to give they a more youthful appearance to give them more career opportunities, however, in the case of the men, during their twenties, it wouldn't seem necessary.

I don't believe Gary Coleman had an actual congenital disorder/genetic disease that caused his physical development to be permanently halted. I believe his parents gave him synthetic hormones and puberty blockers, for all intents and purposes, chemically castrating him. It caused him to remain very small and toddler-like despite developing intellectually at a normal rate. I have no proof of this and make no assertion of this being true for Coleman or any of the actors I listed. This is just a postulation.

There are also a theme of tragic death among many child actors/entertainers.

Heather O'Rourke is one especially disturbing one. You can look up the strange and horrible details about her life and death.

Of course, a great number of them were actually sexually abused and/or raped by people in the entertainment industry. For me, that makes Hollywood's present far more scandalous and evil than anything that happened in that geographical region's history.

I don't completely believe in the Pizza Gate narrative, but I do think some of its bullet points are not controversial at all.

A segment of the entertainment industry systematically scouts, procures, grooms, and engineers children, as young as infants, to become the sexual recreation for a ring of loosely associated rapists and sadists. They aren't a formally-organized group with secret decoder rings that worship Molek at the Bohemian Grove, they are more like John Podesta. They just knew people who knew people, they share winks and nods, dog whistles and coded language, they find each other the way homosexuals used to find each other in the 1930's. Not explicitly announcing their proclivities in the open, but just dropping hints.

I'm not making this shit up. There are MANY proven instances of exactly what I'm talking about, and if even sometimes involved high level government officials. Obviously the Clintons are involved, but so is the CIA, Harvey Weinstein, etc.

The child actor rabbit holes all connect to a number of other nightmarish rabbit holes, and at a central chamber resides a deep hidden truth we wont be allowed to know about until a total upheaval/overthrow of governments around the world.

My suspicion is that central banks, hollywood executives and producers, many royalty and high level politicians, intelligence agents, financiers and stock market speculators, churches, and entire government agencies are loosely collaborating and/or enabling the systematic procurement and rape, torture, and ritualistic murder of tens of thousands of children world-wide.

The established fact is that children are far more likely to be brutalized or raped by an immediate family member than by a shadowy cabal of elites. The vast majority of cases of reported missing children are resolved (many self-resolved) within 48 hours. Most kidnapping of children is perpetrated by disgruntled parents in messy divorces. There is also far more sexual abuse happening to children in public schools than in the Catholic Church (despite what the media chooses to omit from the zeitgeist), and a lot of children sexually abuse each other.

There are also a lot of child actors who grow up happy and well-adjusted, or perhaps only mildly neurotic.