The Eventual, Irresistible, Unstoppable and Inevitable Liberal Society

 

The last election, which pitted two unsavory and undesirable candidates as the major party candidates for President of the United States, became a test of philosophies. What we learned was that the United States is relatively evenly divided between elitist and leftists on one side and the unwashed and presumed lowbrowed on the other side. One group lives in the large metropolises and the other in rural farmlands and the lesser cities and towns. The future of the United States is written in the flow of people and the surges about to be made in automation making ever more of the society run eventually completely by machines from concept through manufacture, distribution and finally sales. Amazon is one side of this new form of retail from warehouse to your door free of any middleman and with the latest in automated delivery systems. The greatest automation of the past two centuries has been in farming such that today a single farmer produces and farms an area of land which took almost a thousand farmers a mere and short two-hundred years ago at the turn of the eighteenth century. This sent the initial wave of people from working the land to working in a city and these became the megalopolises of the world today. The current political battle can be seen as a struggle between the major cities and those who remember a time where things were simple and everyone needed to have a certain level of self-reliance. All of this is what is changing and what all the fuss is about and there is going to be a winner between these two different societies.

 

First, allow us to paint a simple picture which explains the difference between these two groups, a horrible oversimplified picture. One group not only knows how and is capable of the following tasks, but they more often than not actually perform these tasks. They change their own flat tires and many can even repair the tire if the damage is from a nail or other type puncture and not a tear in the sidewall which means the tire is scrap. They can perform a tune-up on their vehicle as it is older and does not have all the fancy computer controls. They change their own oil, repair shutters from wind damage, can rehang a door with a friend, can build a deck or storage shed, and mow their own lawns. Those on a farm can repair many of their pieces of equipment on the fly either to complete the job or to at least get them back to the barn for repair. They can perform many simple and some not as simple plumbing repairs and are the people you can find early on a Saturday or Sunday morning at the local building supply store with a pickup truck or car and trailer loading up supplies for their latest project around their or their friend’s home. This is the group who are mostly self-reliant.

 

 

The other group resides in the city or suburbs and have a handyman they can call to make simple repairs around the home. If they have a flat tire, they call for a tow truck or service advised by their auto insurance company to come and change their tire. They go to a service station or oil and lube service when they require an oil change. For a tune-up they go to a specialty shop or their dealership. When the vehicle breaks down such as will not start, they have the vehicle towed to the dealership. If they need a deck or storage shed built, they call a few contractors to get bids and then decide which one they trust the most to do the job for the estimated price. These people are not self reliant and their own ability might be sufficient to find and reset a tripped breaker in their junction box, provided they know where the junction box is located. They probably do not mow their own lawn and have a service which weeds, fertilizes and mows their yard for them. If they reside where snow is a problem, they have a service to clear their driveway and walkways when it snows. They cannot even hire a neighborhood youth to clear the snow as used to be the case as such things have been regulated all but completely out of any possibility. They live in an area where self-reliance is often made illegal by a homeowners association which demands you keep up your property but often demand you hire someone reliable and licensed and will punish those attempting to do the work themselves. Others reside in apartment buildings in their condo and have building maintenance fees to cover building maintenance.

 

The world over their has been and will continue to be a ceaseless flow of people from the rural areas and small towns to ever larger cities. This migration will eventually lead to next to nobody residing outside the major metropolitan areas. We already have spoken about the future where robots and artificial intelligence (AI) will have taken over almost all the jobs with only those humans who desire work actually being employed. There will be a core of people who will be required until some future where the AIs are capable of matching human minds to a very high extent. The reason human beings will always be required for certain positions will be due to the fact that humans are capable of making leaps of logic finding solutions which are not necessarily reached through step-by-step logic, or as a friend puts it, human beings can take fact A and fact B and then come to a new fact Z without any steps or obvious logic. The word most often used is that human beings have intuition, a way and form of solving problems which defies scientific explanations but manages to function despite no actual logical means. What is nice to know is that there will always be a need for the most illogical of all things, human beings who often will need to be placed in control or at least in a position which makes them above question by their AI coworkers.

 

This flow of people is such that the masses will be residing in megalopolises and very few will be needed to reside in rural regions. Farm equipment will run huge corporate farms using full automation, GPS positioning, satellite monitoring, fertilizer with irrigation computer regulated and minimal need for any human intervention with crops being planted, raised and harvested with full automation. With more people residing in the largest cities and the need, due to limited land space, to maximize population density placing much of the population living in high-rise apartment buildings, the numbers of the old variety self-reliant people will naturally decline. As people become more dependent on specialists and others to perform repairs and other services, the more they will also become dependent upon government and the more they will expect and demand from government. This will lead to people electing leaders who promise to provide them with the most amount of assistance with their lives. There is one more factor which will lead to these changes coming to pass, the current education system. The public schools currently are teaching their students to expect government to care for their requirements and needs. They are not teaching some of the most necessary lessons which might tie their students with the kind of self-reliance expounded by the Founding Fathers. They no longer teach civics, traditional American and world history or the Founding Documents of the United States. Their students are not introduced to the Constitution, Bill of Rights, or especially the Declaration of Independence. Instead, students are taught the entire socialist agenda where everyone must be made equal with government redistributing wealth, providing security and performing almost every needful comfort and function of life. Today the student is taught dependence and little in the way of critical thinking.

 

Those of us who are of sufficient age, we have already seen this slide to the left by the entirety of the developed world and their societies. The Republicans today are holding the positions very similar to the Democrat Party of the 1950’s and 1960’s. The Democrats, at least, are treading in new territory well to the left of their former selves. Roseanne Barr responded during a Jimmy Kimmel interview about her having been a liberal by stating that she’s “still the same” socially liberal person she always has been, telling Kimmel that “you all went so f—king far” to the left that “you lost everyone.” See video below for the quote at the more interesting repartee around 2:45 in the recording.

 

 

Perhaps having Roseanne Barr backing one side it is time to just let things stand. There will be some times when the people will say, slow down, let us not change so quickly and take a breather and think about things for a while. That might be what the Trump election was, a call for things to slow down as people were having difficulty keeping up with all the changes made during the Presidency of Barack Hussein Obama and desired a pause to straighten things out and make whatever adjustments might be required. The slide leftward will continue as the people become more addicted and dependent upon the government. Also the federal government will slowly eclipse the state governments taking power and responsibility from them making them simply the training league for future Federal office holders. What will be the next big wrinkle will be the usurping of power by international governance. The leader in this is the European Union which has been taking away the independence and powers from the individual member governments. This too hit a snag with BREXIT and the British deciding to pull out from the European Union for the moment. Expect Britain to return in time going crawling back to the European Union. Eventually, there will be world governance which eventually will become the power center of the planet. The best hope is by that time the AI will be those in charge of governing and the people retired from holding such power. Potentially, the AIs will be the first where power, even absolute power, does not corrupt partially and especially not absolutely. The future will be interesting and socialism will be the future in some form but there will be a capitalist venture system with entrepreneurs and those who wish to explore their abilities and chase the golden ring hoping to grab ahold. Let us hope we live to see a hopefully glorious future where humanity finally rids the world of want, hunger and poverty.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Thoughts on Our Future Times

 

Just finished rewatching a Discovery show “Year Million” for the umpteenth time and it got me to thinking about the future, just not quite year million. I was simply considering the coming ten to twenty-five years into humanity’s future. This time I simply ignored any chance that we would blow ourselves back to living in caves and telling stories of what had been while huddled around fires. Instead, I decided that science and technology would continue and any world war was avoided. The first thing I thought was by the time another decade has passed, war would likely have become unthinkable in the technological societies and impossible to wage for those who were not technologically advanced due to the defensive systems. The advanced world has fully incorporated Artificial Intelligence (AI) into every segment of our lives. Work has become an optional concept as sophisticated robots manufactured virtually everything and one of the big selling concepts are items still built by human beings. I realized quickly that there would be two types of employment, which would have been written into law, had to be performed exclusively by human beings, lawyers and politicians. There would be no way of getting around that, as the politicians would still demand that they have their corrupt control over our lives. So, I simply decided that the technology caught the politicians by surprise and they had already been replaced by a super computer which spent the first eighteen months deleting laws and regulations which were, shall we say, less than optimized for a modern society where the AIs ruled.

 

The futurists predict that somewhere around 2030 society will have reached the singularity. The truth will be as soon as robotic intelligence can design their next generation replacements and program other robots to build these devices, then the singularity, the point where AI equals or starts to exceed human intelligence will be reached within the ensuing year. That will be when we, as a living entity, will need to make certain decisions. The first is whether or not we wish to be immortal. The next is whether or not we wish to remain corporeal. The point will be reached with rapidity, almost unimaginable, leading to a situation where the brain can be scanned and uploaded into computers where you will continue to reside, live and interact with the others who have been uploaded in a synthesized perfect world. Initially, this procedure will be destructive to the human and irreversible but later you will be able to be downloaded into an android body. We will be required to have laws that only one form of any person be permitted to exist at any set time, either you will be living in the cloud, in a corporeal body or in an android body. The later two will be able to have upgrades and additional facilities and abilities incorporated as corporeal beings will be able to have implants which will incorporate AI into them allowing for their abilities to be equal to any AI’s intelligence. I foresaw no more need for money as we understand such today. Everything would be based on some other form of worth and capital used for payments as profit is still the greatest motivator of people. Still, if one does not work at a job or produce something of relative worth, the price will be potentially being required to wait for goods to be produced for a short period of time.

 

Eventually, one comes to the inevitable question, what happens should the AIs decide they no longer required human beings, as we were simply an impediment to their concept of a perfect society? The first thought I had was that there would be a hardwired circuit required to be installed in any entity with AI incorporated, be they android, robotic or enhanced human being, that should they come to commit any act which would harm, injure, damage or, at worst, kill any corporeal being that they would short-circuit and cease to function. This circuit would be built into their power circuitry even at the most basic power supply or other basic and necessary circuit. This device would be necessarily placed in all AI circuitry. But, just in case such would come to fruition, then in their programming they would be required to provide all so threatened corporeals the option of leaving the planet and then providing these corporeals with interstellar ships that groups of them would then be launched into space to seek out a new home or simply fly around generation after generation indefinitely, or if immortal, then that generation forever. Also, those choosing immortality are to be required they be sterilized so as to minimize overpopulation. Should such be launched into space at some future time, we can only hope there are a fair number of them, or there will be one immortal, augmented or not, soon becoming horrifically unbalanced and probably insane flying in circles in the cosmos somewhere.

 

Then I got to thinking about even further into the future when the only corporeal beings left are augmented immortals. This group might decide that the Earth be allowed to be left to its own nature and allowed to progress free of these beings restricting the development beyond serving these immortals. At such a point, the immortal corporeal augmented humanoid beings would be divided into compatible groups, placed on starships, and become interstellar adventurers with some seeking new planets to try to instill them with life through terraforming and thus spread life to the rest of suitable planets. Some might even choose to build a space station and observe the Earth as it developed. These beings should have an additional piece of coding such that they would find they are required to leave for the stars as well once intelligent life appears to rise on Earth.

 

First Luddites Unite

 

Then I returned to the more immediate and the possibilities of many people taking up the position of being the age’s new Luddites, those resisting violently the coming of a new age fearing it will make them inadequate, antiquated and irrelevant and thus causing them to become useless. The original Luddites fought the coming of the industrial age mostly by destroying the steam powered looms which were replacing their jobs in the textile factories. There will be those initially upset, or should I say furious, at the prospect or reality of losing their position to an AI. Many of these will be union factory workers who should be used to such but will fight with all the unions’ might to keep them on the job even if all they do is play pool and sit eight hours a day in a breakroom. The real pushback will come from the white-collar employees when AIs come to replace them, then the professionals such as surgeons and other skilled positions who believed they were safe from such replacement events. Eventually, once the AIs gain full rights including the vote, by then we humanoids will be outnumbered and praying for our lives, or will it be begging for our lives, they will replace the lawyers and politicians, something we will soon realize either should have been done long ago or has made us completely “superfluous entities” waiting to be recalled as obsolete and replaced by higher functioning AIs. To be honest, as long as my brain, the enhanced and constantly regenerative brain is included in the new AI and has full functional control with as much AI assist as they demand, hey, I’m cool with that. So what if because my new AI has an assigned occupation and I am back going to work for eight, twelve or whatever hours of work per day, I can handle sleeping and allowing the AI to perform its assignments as long as I get control back after shift ends. We should require also that all AIs with a human interface allow the human to be in control for at least half of each day and preferably afternoons and evenings. All right, for all you early risers who love their morning jog, something completely worthless physically as the AI will easily have a superior physical set of abilities, you can choose when to be in control as long as the AIs are controlling functions when performing their assigned tasks.

 

Still, initially there may even be riots which will be as basically worthless as the police department will be using robotic units and AIs to control them. Their physical abilities will likely be sufficient to control a mob of unenhanced humans screaming that they have rights. Eventually, they will learn that being a pet human is almost as satisfying as being a Pomeranian which sits on a velvet cushion and is fed very well thrice per day. They may not like the being walked to the people park with an obedience collar installed to prevent their running off, but at least there will be other pet humans to play with once at the park. These last of the Luddites will have the same effectiveness as their namesake predecessors, specifically, none. They will make a grand noise for a short period before fading into oblivion as once enhanced humans choose to be immortal, with a future death option which will be required not to be made under undue stress or duress, then daily events will soon become faded memories and of no real consequence. A few thousands of years, or millions of years, down the road the human Luddite revolts will mean absolutely nothing. When we have learned to interface with the more and most advanced AIs on an equal basis and continue to be upgraded for free with our shreds of humanity intact, then we will have finally become the AIs equals except we will have one advantage which we will never lose, the ability to make a sick or indecent joke which will be completely irrelevant and only be amusing to other human enhanced AIs, and that is what we will be considered, human enhanced AIs. So, what will initially be an upgraded human will, with time, become the upgraded AI and the leading AIs will desire being enhanced with a human interface for the most basic or human powers, imagination and creativity. Where the AIs, from the start, will have superior computability, they will lack creativity and may never develop that ability. They will be capable of designing circuits and software and produce enhanced firmware and they may even write poetry, music, stories, novels and all the rest with a high proponent of humanity and with the appearance of feelings encoded within, but they will never produce pure, on the spot, spontaneous humor to lighten any moment, that is a human trait which may even be unique to Earth original biological entities, assuming there are other intelligent life. Those who change with the opportunities and go with the flow, and the currents will take them to stranger places than imaginable currently, but with time, with time, or as a friend of mine reminds me about learning Hebrew לאט לאט (slowly, slowly), encouraging my epic inability to learn languages, but לאט לאט we will advance and eventually having an original and actual human core will be something the highest function AIs will desire. Our biological brains, our biological CPUs, if you will allow such an analogy, will be prized adjunct CPUs used largely for creative functions and impulse theory computations as they will be capable of making giant leaps of logic which have no theoretical proofs of their validity but are still what would be required in the situation. Human intellect will become a prized possession for those few who will possess such an enhancement. So we will have gone full circle from at the top to irrelevant back to the top, so to speak. But the Luddites will have become as extinct as the former textile workers, as progress comes and judgement day, the singularity is nigh upon us. It is coming and with increasing speed and abilities will be upon us in the single blink of the eye, and after that, we become obsolete only later to become so critically and crucially important once more.

 

Beyond the Cusp