Time For The Stars

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

I have bad news: This is not going to talk about the Heinlein novel. Yes, I will resume my reviews, soon-ish. Right now the ETA for this place unpacked is “before New Years” mostly because novel keeps pulling me away from the packing (Weird that.) So the reviews might not resume before that, but they will review. Besides, me, reviewing Heinlein amounts to “Squee, squee, squee!” and you’d all be reaching for your adjustment knob and this blog ain’t got one.

The further bad news is that I’m going to inflict Slopcore on you, which is apparently the term for generated music with this kind of “catchy” non demanding tune and this figure. Before I do, it’s okay if you don’t watch it. The story is ten bad ideas, five really inadvisable decisions, and a strong burning core of hope all rolled into one. From further videos, I suspect the people producing this channel are Libertarian Socialists, which are weirder than anything the founders of Elly (in No Man’s Land) cobbled together. Fortunately it’s an ideological chimera, not a biological one. Unfortunately, it can only live in a world where the laws of economics have stopped applying. And since the laws of economics are tied to basic humanity, getting there — as for all socialism — would imply exterminating humanity. (And if you just said “Oh, that’s why!” Yep. That’s why the green everything, the purposeful immiseration, the loathing of mere humanity. For Socialism to live, humanity must die.)

Anyway all the same, the slopcore is catchy and there’s something there, which I will explain. (Beyond and beside the stupidity.)

The stupidity is obvious. It starts with “voted to share what the robots made” — economy doesn’t work like that. Life doesn’t work like that — UBI is second only in stupidity to the idea you can take billionaires’ wealth and make everyone rich forever. If you have UBI in some amount, then every price immediately goes up by the measure of the UBI. Also, for the love of screaming Bob, robots will belong to real, live people ( probably a lot of them retirees counting on their funds to live.) They will need maintenance and replacement. Nationalizing robots is the stupidest thing imaginable. Supporting people without work is the stupidest thing imaginable. There’s a reason the scions of very wealthy families become Hunter Biden. Man — and woman, and those who looked in their pants before going on — was made to strive. Remove the striving, and it all collapses, everything that makes us human. Which is one of the fundamental mistakes of socialism. Giving people things doesn’t make them happy with those things as it does earning them. And the ultimate penalty of socialism is the loss of the will to live. It manifests first with stopping births. Then killing the elderly in the name of compassion. Well before people are being supported in absolute comfort.

It seemed to me we didn’t need the socialist experiment, frankly. We already knew what happened to retirees who had nothing to do, no drive. And we knew what happened to very rich kids. But did anyone ask me? No. Partly because I hadn’t been born yet, which seems to me like a poor excuse.

Anyway, I did not miss that this is two generations of single mothers. Look, I’m also not kicking too hard at that, because there is such a thing as clean storytelling, but it wouldn’t hurt to have a guy there for the birth scene and mention dad lost his job too. Hey, maybe mom and dad have different jobs.

The core of hope that makes this story cheery despite the galoomphing stupid: The abundance it promises is real. Radical, soaked through, endless abundance. And that’s… well. That’s a tide that lifts all boats.

It won’t stop human civilization, though some people WILL fall by the wayside — look, it’s as easy to kill with joy as with grief, and who told you human evolution was done — but as with AI used properly, it will free those with the drive and the will to push on to do the things that matter.

Like this: Yes, a lot of jobs are going away with AI — and even more with robots, though if you tell me you don’t have a dream of a housekeeping robot (I’m going to name mine Jenkins, and if you get it, you get it. AND if I can make things work out as I want, this January you’ll understand why this is funny enough to laugh shooting coffee out of your nose. You’ll see.) you’re a rank liar. Science fiction people, I’ve found, writers and readers alike are lousy housekeepers. We spend too much time in our heads to do otherwise. I try to be the exception, but I’m losing that battle as I get older.

BUT as the Little Pickle said last night “Heaven’s sakes! There will be other jobs that appear. Jobs don’t go away without new ones being created.” Which means that if I die before there are grandkids old enough for me to yell economics at, they’ll still be fine.

Because she’s exactly right. If every job currently being done went away tomorrow morning, humanity would find new needs. If every dirty, dangerous outdoor job is done, men don’t become obsolete. They will find their danger and dirt exploring far flung worlds, designing and testing the machines to get us there… all of it.

And if every indoor, boring, repetitive job went away tomorrow, it doesn’t make women obsolete. They’ll find they can plan their household better, and have the androids execute it. People who had servants didn’t stop working at the household. (Well, some did… but… See evolutionary pressure below.)

To an extent we’re already there, already past that inflection point. No? Compared to even the nineteenth century we’re unimaginably rich. As a culture, sure, but even as a species. Do you know how our ancestors would have felt about “The only time there’s a famine is when we let ourselves be oppressed by horrible rulers?” Famine was the rule of human existence since an ape stood up, thought of the past and dreamed of the future. This is literally unimaginable for the generations of our forefathers who sleep in the dirt.

This shows in the small things too, everyday life. Cleaning, cooking, the most basic tasks of housekeeping for anyone not wishing to live in rank filth, are so ridiculously easy now. (And we still fall down, and yes, there are novels to write, and I’m going to blame those, okay?) And it keeps improving.

And yet, we’re busy. Busier than ever, at least some of us.

This is what I was saying, about evolutionary pressures. There already is an evolutionary pressure in place. Right now it’s a little mixed if I’m honest. Those who are given everything, have no ambition and are basically non-functional SEEM to have an evolutionary advantage. I maintain that’s illusory. Yes, they reproduce more, but the children live ephemeral lives and a lot of them die without reproducing. On the other hand, those with drive and purpose, who design and plan and build are suffering a different pressure: by the time we’re done training and establishing ourselves — unless you’re as crazy as Dan and I were and take the plunge early. Our infertility was the fault of my auto-immune, not of our waiting too long — we don’t have the ability to produce children. Which brings the spiraling population numbers into focus, of course.

Fortunately not every one of the purposeless produces children that likewise lack drive. And the ones who have drive are the most likely to survive.

Also, fortunately, this dream future of robots that seems actually within our reach, is going to lift the onerous cost of training and establishing oneself. Or it should. It should be easier than ever to plunge from late adolescence into comfortable, if now ridiculously prosperous (though maybe by OUR standards) adulthood, and children without a problem. (Either that or figure out how to extend fertility which, instinctively, seems to me will be the harder puzzle to crack. But maybe no. I’d like to say I’m here for it, but even in pie-in-the-sky scenario chances are low. I have, on the outside, if everything aligns, maybe 30 years, after all.)

What I think this … let’s call it radical abundance, will do is that we will have those who don’t want to do anything, if it’s not needed for them to survive. They will… wither away like retirees without a mission. Which means the children of those with drive and purpose will inherit the Earth. Yes, some of those, maybe most of those, will be purposeless and will also just wither. Look, the majority of humanity is designed to be lazy. That was the evolutionary pressure in pre-history. Man who hunted mammoth while mammoth was rotting at the camp, just starved and his whole tribe with him. Which means the “selection for drive” will refine over the next, oh, few thousand years. But that’s not our problem. It is simply what it is.

The point though is that this future gives humanity a chance at the stars, a chance at lives that transcend the everyday chores, the boring, all physical stuff, the fear of hunger, the fear of disease, and maybe if we’re very lucky the humiliating descent into senescence at the end of life. (I don’t expect, or want, to live forever, but the decline and loss of ability should be manageable, if we’re going to live lives even as long as we have now. It’s a pity to waste 1/3 of your life to diminishing ability.)

It will bring with a lot of new and fresh problems, yes, like: Yes, what about people who just want to sit and eat cake (or do drugs, or whatever) till they die? And what does marriage become in an age where you live a long time, vigorously? How many marriages survive? And what becomes of families when the longest time you’ll have with your children is with them as adults? (This we’re already facing.) And what about people too dumb for the new economy? (Ah! Caught you. That one is Bullshit. There will always be things people can do, at whatever level. No? look at history.) And what do we do when obviously stupid ideas seem to suddenly make sense? (Like this video. Chill, they still don’t.) And what do we do when we go beyond the need to write words? And– And we’ll burn those bridges when we reach them. But I’d rather be fighting in such a state of abundance that Humanity can’t starve if it tries than otherwise, okay.

This future of radical abundance hinges, to a great extent on how these elections go.

If you just snort giggled, don’t. I mean, I’m not stupid, and I think this future, this radical abundance, is inevitable. The question is… How far in the distant reaches of future time? Because it could be very far indeed.

Or it could be in the next 20 years, within our children’s lives. It is honestly, right now, so close we can touch it with our fingertips.

And yes, sure, your GOP congressman is a fiend, or if you live in Alaska, an idiot. And some of them are demonstrably in the pay of China.

But there are more people in the pay of China on the left. More importantly the left, elected mostly by fraud (trust me on this) doesn’t give a good damn for what you want. You have no pressure you can bring to bear on it. Look at NYC or Denver. Seriously. They don’t depend on voters, and can shit right on your wants and needs. And call you names on top of it.

However, if the left — let alone the red-green alliance — takes over, we’re done. The only question is for how long a count. AI will be regulated to a fare-thee-well, which means the current, impossible to monetize models will be the only ones, and it will quickly become a rich man’s toy. (I’d hate that, because it has become one of the best series-Bible keepers I’ve ever met. And instead of spending three days leafing through three ring binders to find a reference (I always sucked at wiki format) I can simply ask and be told. And verifying that is way easier than coming up with it fresh. Also, honestly, that frees more time to write. I need to experiment with publicity via AI too, because I sure can’t do it on my own.) Humanoid robots will come, but it will be to literally take your job. However, don’t worry little buddy, the government will create a job corps, digging and filling in ditches. (They never understood why this was idiotic. So they’ll do it again.)

These regimes collapse in about 70 years, but they either mutate into hardcore fascist (hi, China!) which is not an improvement or they leave an awful hangover for a long time.

That future we can ALMOST touch? Could be gone within a year, if we hand our legislature to people who are even more ignorant of economics than you average politician. (And that’s a lot.) It could stay gone until no one on Earth remembers our names, not even as a line in some record.

Arguably worse if the green part of that alliance takes hold. I am all for freedom of religion, but without a radical reformation to make it safe for the world, Islam will stop all progress cold. HARD. Because it’s a religion with a political component that is rigid and rigidly enforced, and which is attuned to the desert of Arabia circa the seventh century, countries that fall to it stop progressing in knowledge and civilization and often regress HARD.

Oh, the future will still come, the super-abundance that’s baked in in our tinkering genes. But that would be…. How does thousands of years sound to you? Because a lot of it will need to be re-invented. From first principles.

Yeah, I know. One of the lines the slopcore hit right was “the year when everyone was afraid of the future” and a lot of people are. It’s running too fast. It’s making the world too unstable. Hit a pause button!

As with puberty (sorry) there is no pause button. There is only something that will hurts seriously and has a small, outside chance of killing us prematurely.

I’m begging you with tears in my eyes. Do not try to hit the pause button. The future will hurt. But not as much as trying to stop it.

Go out and vote for your GOP crook as opposed to your DEM madman. It’s important. They’re all stupid and venal, but the GOP is slightly less so, because it still depends on getting out the vote and also because at its core it doesn’t hate America. Or humanity.

Vote for the crook. It’s important.

And maybe there will be time for the stars in the near future. And, yes, even time for love.

112 thoughts on “Time For The Stars”

    1. Thereadersittingindarkness quotes the relevant portion of one of the most revered USAian prophets in the comments below. Unsurprisingly, here in North Shore Massachusetts, there was plenty o’ plenty to vote against. And oddly, most if it had a (D) after its name. Honestly, our R’s (Romney, Weld, etc.) aren’t much of an improvement, but every journey starts with a single step…

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    4. I’m not convinced that Republican pols by and large are crooks. Most of them seem to be fumbling amateurs compared to the donkeyrats (say, can someone meme us an image on that coinage?). The Dems are both accomplished crooks and accomplished machine politicians. Who have just bought shares in Donderbeck’s sausage machine and are about to feed it. They think we’re going in. They don’t realize (or don’t believe) that they are going in too.

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        1. WordPress won’t even let me “like” a post here with locking me into a sales pitch for a domain name.

          I’m begging for disqus here!

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    5. Voting for the squish crooks gives us more time to prepare for the future. And that very useful. Civilization is not the phoenix of myth and will not magically restore itself after the accelerationists burn everything down.

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  2. “If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for, but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against.“

    Robert A. Heinlein

    This election it is clearer to the Reader than ever what to vote against.

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    1. That man was very wise. Took me longer than it probably should have, but that’s where I ended up about 10 years ago. What it boils down to for me is always, always, always vote to defeat the Democrats. Nothing else we want or need will work unless that happens first. (Maybe a time will come when the heuristic needs to be reevaluated, but for now it’s just about that simple.)

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  4. AS I comment most of the time when the birth rate is raised, it is very unevenly distributed.

    some of it is welfare encouraging the poor to have more kids by more subsidies, but outside of that it is (as noted above) Drive and Purpose matter a lot. If you buy in to the ‘finite pie’ ‘humans are bad’ etc then you are not going to have kids. The religious groups have much higher birth rates and much more stable marriages.

    Even just measuring liberal vs conservative shows significantly different birth rates.

    Spit out the Black pill, visit your local churches (at least the ones that haven’t been skinsuited, you can spot them by looking for the rainbow flags) and rebuild your optimism.

    it’s not going to be painless, as we end up with a couple generations of old people with no kids getting bitter (and frankly, needing help to live) it’s going to be pretty painful for a while (but robots have the chance to significantly help here), but demographics will win out and those sub-cultures who either kill/sterilize/prevent conception of their kids will die out.

    There are still other problems (a specific religion that refuses to agree to the “freedom of religion” truce) but they can be dealt with as well

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      1. We do not have grandchildren. Always hopeful. Cousin did not marry until 44 and now has his first child (probably only).

        ——-

        But I have great-nieces/nephews, and probably great-great (given the age differences between our son and hubby’s nieces/nephews, and great-nephews) ones. Cousins have not only grandchildren, but great-grand. These cousins are 22 years younger than I am. So, yes, we have reasons to vote to insure their futures.

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  6. So much of what we’re told is just propaganda and people “talking their book”. AI, which LLM’s ain’t, is not going to take over the world, it’s not going to make people obsolete. What it may do, MAY, is make a certain type of middle manager redundant. THis happens in the ‘90# when PC’s started to come in and the 91 recession cut the middle manager class hard. of course, that was followed by one of the the largest and longest economic expansions outside post war. OH, and there was a demographic component too, much like today.

    in better news, China’s “Home Team” intervened today and the China market dropped anyway. China is in a bear market that followed a huge boom in LLM related stuff and a HUGE injection of capital. Almost as if LLM’s aren’t profitable and their output doesn’t exceed their input. Hmmm. Not that he remembers anymore, but Krugman made his reputation noticing the same thing about Asia in the late ‘90s. He won a prize given by the Swedish central bank for that work.

    Full disclosure, I’m talking my book, I’m short China with options and market neutral/short on US LLM’s.

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    1. Given the discovery a month ago (iirc) that one of China’s biggest LLMs was really just a Chinese interface on a US LLM, it’s not really a surprise that the Chinese LLM market isn’t doing well.

      Of course, at least one LLM here in the US (Anthropic, iirc) is also doing poorly, as recent information releases revealed.

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        1. I think the most important element right now that no one’s really talking about (and that Altman’s “Normal people don’t need RAM in their computers” comment is likely aimed at cutting off before it can get started) is that in ten years you likely won’t need the LLM companies. As RAM continues its normal process of getting less and less expensive for more and more storage space, it’ll become fashionable for companies (even small ones) and families to run their own LLM servers. Companies like Anthropic will need to come up with a new business model if they want to survive.

          Though whether Anthropic will survive that long is open for debate right now.

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          3. Training will still need the massive datacenters, but inference (the part the user interacts with) does not

            I think it is going to get really interesting in a few years when terrafab comes online and Tesla/SpaceX are doing several iterations of chip design a year rather than the current industry pace of several years per cycle.

            And the sheer scale of terrafab is going to allow technology to be used that just doesn’t scale down (particle accelerators instead of lasers as light sources for example)

            and since Elon is interested in EVERYTHING, we will see some very interesting experiments (such as reactionless thrusters based on QI theory) that could be game changing in other areas as well.

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            2. Inference is more efficient when you can have a data center serving up requests to 1,000 people, because if you’re doing that inference on your own private GPU then that GPU isn’t doing all that much most of the time. That’s the nugget of truth at the core of what Altman said. What he failed to say (and, since this is Altman, likely failed to even consider) is “Why should the rest of us care about efficiency?”

              There are other factors to consider besides efficiency. One of which is, if you’re renting inference time on someone else’s hardware, they can cut you off if they feel like it. If you are running it on your own hardware, maybe it’s less efficient and you’re going to pay more per inference token in the long run (counting the cost of buying the hardware divided by how many tokens you use on it)… but maybe that’s a price inefficiency you’re willing to accept because you value “nobody can take this away from me” more than “I’m getting the lowest price per inference token that I possibly can”.

              And then there’s the “who decides” question. Altman probably thinks that he should be making the decisions about the entire world’s GPU usage, and he’s frustrated that other people are making the “wrong” decisions. I, on the other hand, want everybody to be able to decide for themselves what they want to do. (And I also want both Anthropic and OpenAI to go bankrupt, have to sell their hardware at fire-sale prices, and release the market bottleneck that has made that hardware so expensive the past two years — but I want that to happen because a lot of people decided what’s best for them, not because some central decision maker made the call. Centralized decision makers are almost always wrong due to the Knowledge Problem).

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                2. Indeed. Just look back to what happened to things like manufacturing during the Covidiocy when Just In Time suddenly – wasn’t.

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                3. I imagine a frontier curve for efficiency / resiliency tradeoffs.

                  There are design choices that could operate closer to the frontier.

                  The problem is that costs are easier to see than reliability risks, especially with new technology.

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              2. In addition to the Knowledge Problem there is also the Goals Problem — what do the Central Planners actually want? Are they trying to provide for everybody to the best of their (limited) ability, or do they have their own private agenda that most folks wouldn’t agree with?

                That’s always an issue when somebody makes decisions for other people ‘for their own good’. 😡

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              3. There’s also the censorship issue, and that covers a lot more than just exposed skin. A notorious example from not all that long ago would be feeding a Gemini-based AI a request for “typical World War 2 German soldier”… and only getting pictures of non-white people in response. If you have the AI running on your own network, you can train that sort of nonsense out of the AI. And not only will you be able to train it out, but there will almost certainly be instructions on how to do so posted online by others who have already figured out how to do it efficiently.

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                1. For image generation, there are sites like Civitai already for sharing recipes, often in the form of “LoRA” data. I’m not 100% clear on what a LoRA is, but I believe it’s a set of post-training weights that can be applied on top of an existing model which can lean it towards only returning certain kinds of results. So you take a generic image-generation model, layer a LoRA on top for “anime-style images”, and that’s what you will get. Or layer a LoRA on top for “this specific character from a show” and your image generation model will generate only pictures that look like that particular character. And since the UI tools for image generation using local models (like Stable Diffusion) generally let you say “Here’s the model, and here’s the list of all LoRAs that I want to stack on top of the model”, you can pick the LoRA that you want for the task you want.

                  The one I’m interested in is the “RPG” LoRA that’s designed for generating characters in fantasy medieval style armor, and knows what an orc or an elf “should” look like. But there are LoRAs for just about any purpose available (including, yes, some distasteful ones, don’t give your kids unfiltered access to that site, though thankfully the default filter if you’re not logged in is PG-13).

                  Local models are definitely the way the future will go; the only question is whether we’ll get politicians who buy into the self-serving BS that OpenAI is dishing up about “safety”. Gee, let me see: they want regulatory capture, and suddenly their models are being run in an inadequate sandbox which they break out of it with ease, and they start talking about “look how unsafe AI is!” instead of, I don’t know, building a better sandbox. Gee, I wonder what might be going on there…

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          5. Another element of the “home or business LLM” is the possibility of adding things like one or more Optimus androids, networking them to the LLM, and creating a “hive LLM” of sorts that coordinates your automatons.

            On the other hand, you’ll likely want to be *very* careful with outside access to the LLM if you do something like that.

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          6. There’s an ‘A.I. hat’ that allows a Raspberry Pi run a limited LDM. Although Pi prices have gone through the roof. Last year I bought a 16 GB Pi 5 for $125, now they’re over $300. It’s like somebody is trying to replicate the Dutch Tulip Panic of 400 years ago. 😁

            Renting computer time went out when desktop workstations became affordable. Now these ‘A.I.’ companies are trying to raise the old mainframe-and-dumb-terminals paradigm from the grave. I predict they will fail when the RAM, FLASH and GPU bubble they are causing deflates.

            Hardware is a one-time expense. Open source LDM software exists and will get better. When you own the machine, you can do whatever you want, whenever you want. Your access can’t be restricted, or shunted aside for ‘higher priority’ customers. Your models can’t be ‘adjusted’ behind your back.

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      2. $900 billion in commitments over the next 3 years. They had to revise their s1 within a week. The dishonesty is … just sad, and anthropic is better than clammy Sammy , who is very, very strange in that Silicon Valley effective altruism autistic psychopath sort of way

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  7. Unlike sncient kings, the poorest of the poor have indoor toilets and plenty to eat. Maybe 50 years from now the poorest will look down from the Mars to Moon shuttle and complain that their robo-nanny is unreliable.

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  8. Agreed.  My wife and I had agreed the GOP was so bad we weren’t going to vote.  But the Democrats convinced us otherwise.  They’re insane like Hamas, Che, Pol Pot, and Syphilus merged their DNA and had a baby with that nose-ring woman from Ann Arbor.

    Now, I may actually be motivated to take my wife to a nice little store near our church and use their advice and firing range to alter the ROE ’round these parts.

    I don’t miss my high school days; but even in the 70s people knew how to treat rabid animals.  We’ll see what the future holds.

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  9. Libertarians in Oz were content for the leftists to put the non-vaxxed into what my “Aurigans” (sort of hyper-bureaucratic space nazis) would call “classification centers”; but people around here will probably still call them concentration camps.

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  10. Robots already manufacture a tremendous amount of what we consume, and even vacuum the floors of millions of people. They are the way of the future, and regardless of politics, those that embrace the technology will rule the world.

    My opinion is that space travel will not be a desirable event, and robotic technology will improve to the point humans won’t have to take the risks of constant bombardment of cosmic rays, nor the low gravity effect of constant freefall.

    As far as how the election will influence technology, I doubt either party will try to stop the advancements. The money is too good, the legislation advantageous for a good bottom line, and regardless of how many hold their breath, and stomp their feet, the lessening of the number of people on the public payroll.

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    1. Hatred is irrational, and unfortunately, the irrational side of the Farce seems to have eaten the brains of one party in particular. That they are killing the golden goose, cash cow, and Apple Tree of the Hespiradese makes them no mind if they can destroy the person/people they think denied them “their just reward.” So what if tech companies flee and the economy tanks? So what if the grandchildren they will never have are forced to submit to [insert anti-human philosophy here]?

      They’d rather “rule in H-ll than serve in Heaven,” as one character phrased it. The sane members of the group have been shouted down, and either fled, or go along to get along and, perhaps, to preserve their little corner of the world from destruction. Ask the Communists in Iran in 1979 how well that worked. Or the Hungarian Social Democrats in 1948.

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      2. And we had a lovely display of hatred in action in the form of the female U of Michigan student who (allegedly, but it’s on camera) physically assaulted a female Jewish student just the other day. And while the cops were dragging her into the cop car, she reportedly shouted that she should have killed the Jewish student.

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      3. I would say that their moral center and what limited capacity they have for moral reasoning have been hijacked, and they have come to consider most of the good in society as a foundational evil.

        There is surely a special place in H-ll for people who so mislead those who come to them for education. But that is of small comfort when we consider the victims led to evil in the belief it is good.

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      1. Sarah, there’s always one more bug: There have already been a couple lawsuits filed over both wrongful termination and failure to hire because the hirer/firer attempted to hide behind the clanker…. so they sued the AI developer too.

        A LOT of laws and regulations are getting created through litigation, and the reaction to them by “private” insurance companies in terms of coverage and premiums.

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    3. Money only matters to thieving politicians in so far as it gets them the hits that they live for.

      They’ve more or less proven that that rational money optimization is not their primary driver.

      We are either talking about them ‘seeing something else there, so close they can taste it’, or having made bets they they are terrified of getting some potential consequence for.

      Neither faction understands machinery, nor the economy. False knowledge is a major major problem in the planning that all of them are trying to do.

      The basic element of the new technology is not a big corporation with an IP, it is a bunch of individual people experimenting with it, and using it.

      The way to stop is by arresting people, and destroying them. Which proposals are more or less already seriously being proposed.

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  11. As a lot of last Saturday’s memes said “Thank you France (Italy, etc.)! For showing US what unbridled democratic socialism and open arms emigration causes in time for the US mid-term elections!”

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      1. Um, yes compared to any one who actually has brain cells to rub together. But, the usual suspects have fewer brain cells than the orange cats who share theirs. Just pointing this out … Not disagreeing.

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    4. Sounds like some gacha game called Girls Frontline. Some sort of android soldiers that are named after various firearms.

      (Don’t have that game. 4 of my soldiers in XCOM2 are based on them complete with armor customization and voicepacks and weapons. Except for AN-94 since none of my modpacks has a model for that particular rifle. Oh well.)

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  13. “What I think this … let’s call it radical abundance, will do is that we will have those who don’t want to do anything, if it’s not needed for them to survive. They will… wither away like retirees without a mission.”

    I think that is true, the slackers will fade themselves out of the picture, but radical abundance will also enable those who want to do something, freeing them from being required to do that other thing that pays just so they can eat and be clothed and support the family, whether that one thing is swing a pick at the coal face or slave away in the cubicals, and let them try.

    There are those who try now, or work the passion track as well as the day job track, but I think there are many more who would go for it if they had the time, who would accomplish great things if the “you can make steady money as an accountant, Fred” part goes away. Look at what comes out of the hobby world now, from backyard astronomy to costumes for cosplay to amazing custom cars to, recently, amazing clanker vids with that subversive blond girl who wasn’t in Harry Potter.

    Note I do not think this mean the guaranteed basic income thing (I have seen older stuff – yeah, not a new idea – call it a reverse income tax) is the way to do it. Empirically in every case welfare under any name is a sinkhole that kills participants and the society they “live” within. I don’t know what the shakeout on this will produce. Neither does anyone else, which is why the Trek universe gets so handwavey on any Federation civilian society details.

    But I do think it will shake out, with connectivity and robots and information ubiquity and cheaper and cheaper energy and clankers everywhere yielding a positive human future.

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  14. On marriage, I’ve mentioned attachment theory before yes? Many times? Yeah.. (Will talk Airplanes for $5. Will stop talking airplanes for $50)

    I figure once we start to accept that we actually include meat bodies that have functions, needs, and obligations, and ways to steer them beyond throwing the wheel out the window, I expect marriages and human bonds to become more stable where those practices are adopted.

    Honestly, a lot of it especially in light of how older stories described courtship and relationships feels like the rediscovery of the cure for scurvey.

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  15. Assuming that civilization survives to write the history of our times (The Crazy Decades?) what will they write?

    Let’s narrow that. Assuming that a sane civilization lasts for another generation, what will the history texts write about Donald Trump? He’s the most improbable president we’ve had, a larger-than-life figure who makes Teddy Roosevelt, with all his personal accomplishments, look small. His two terms were separated by the most notorious presidency–regency–we’ve had. He helped force the Left’s quiet takeover into the open, and cashiered subordinates more ruthlessly than anyone since George Marshall.

    Fardle the history texts–what will the so-called analysts write, and how often will a generation of them reverse the previous generation?

    Asking what the future will think may be hubris. But it may also help crystallize some of our thinking.

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  16. I saw an interesting post about AI animation and Prada, of all brands. Basically, Prada has just released their hand-animated holiday campaign, and what that does is literally position hand-drawn animation with the “luxury” camp, because anyone can do AI.

    Basically, they just boosted the value of hand-drawn animation while not having a single anti-AI law passed.

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  17. Example from history: The jobs eliminated by the disruptive introduction of the dishwasher and clothes washer were rich folk’s household staff jobs. But the household-managing-female’s free time which was previously only accessible to women in families wealthy enough to hire a maid to do laundry and a kitchen assistant was as a result now available to a lot more women.

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  19. I think we’re seeing what the idlers do when they don’t need to work — throw squalling tantrums in the streets, tear everything down and burn it all up. Ruin everybody else’s lives because they can’t find any meaning in theirs.

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          1. You can see it in the vids when the pros either get ordered to kick it up and start lighting fires, or when they get the ‘withdraw’ order and leave the rubes to get water-cannoned. It’s like a switch getting thrown.

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            1. The effects proved the theory long before we had, as snelson correctly noted, the receipts. Riot season is nigh on as predictable as bow hunting season. Only the best clips are shared in the trash tier media.

              It is an industry. It has logistics, training media, production costs, and marketing. I’d not shed a tear to see it go the way of the buggy whip makers. But thatll; take time.

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  20. Sarah wrote, “Famine was the rule of human existence since an ape stood up, thought of the past and dreamed of the future. This is literally unimaginable for the generations of our forefathers who sleep in the dirt.”

    Something about the phrasing reminded me of a song, one related in “Startide Rising”:
    Daddy was a caveman
    He played ball in skins, with shirts;
    He dreamed of peace eternally,
    And died speared to the Earth.
    YOU EATEES AND YOUR STARS!

    Sarah’s phrasing also bounced off of the late Sir Pterry’s “…where the falling angel meets the rising ape.” I suspect him of having swiped that, but my googlefu is inadequate to finding the original.

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  21. I just read that the Anime market has grown almost 16% over the last year. Meanwhile, Hollyweird and Big Media are swirling down the crapper, squeezing out one billion-dollar turd after another. Sane, sensible people would observe those spectacular failures and conclude that whatever they’re doing is not working.

    Sadly, it appears that Big Media is not run by sane, sensible folks. Their obsession with [Critical Drinker Voice] THE MESSAGE supersedes such trivial issues as popularity, and even survival. They dismiss the vast majority of their potential audience as Wrong and Eeevul, and drive them away.

    Can they learn before they drown? So far they have shown no signs of awareness. They have taken no lessons from the explosive success of anime, Amelia and Malfoid, merely screeched louder how Eeevul the overwhelming majority of Americans are.

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    1. Along with the anime, don’t forget “Wild Wood”, the recently released stop-motion claymation.

      If there’s a superlative beyond “SUPERB!”, I’d love to hear it. It’s great to see what an army of skilled dedicated artists can do when unleashed from the constraints of time and money.

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      1. Between that and Apple’s streaming service, which puts up big SF shows because it doesn’t have to make money, I’m really digging the patronage aspect of modern media. Passion projects get to shine.

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    2. I have met H’wood execs. There was a significant generational shift. There were old timers who were cold eyed smart realists, but they were retiring back when I was briefly industry adjacent in the late ‘80s. The new ones back then were the MBA generation, who did everything in spreadsheets. They needed market demographics and focus groups and preferred sequels and reboots because of the proven market.

      Then came the third gen industry natives, the true believers. They lived totally within the industry bubble, and were very concerned with getting their names in the Trades and not getting embarrassed at industry parties because of wrongthink in their productions. And they had the “We’ll get a big hit next time” excuse down pat. And as long as one in five big budget productions was a hit they could keep it rolling. But they also let the ladies in HR decide all the hiring, and the resulting “preach to the rubes!” poison crept through everything, dropping the “hits” to one in ten, then one of thirty…

      And now after the Covid Wars nobody really has a habit of going to the the movie theater anymore, and streaming profits are underpants gnome math, and AI lets anyone create what it used to take a huge crew and soundstage and editing rooms to create, and the industry is contracting and collapsing.

      There’s nobody left to pay attention.

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            1. And as entry 2 in the “NODs don’t work like that” list, if you get white light flashed into your NODs, it does not blind you and make you fall backwards down the stairs, you just can’t see anything in them, so you flip them up and stay on your weapon.

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  22. One up and coming job might be refrigerator and freezer monitor.

    Apparently, 7 more European countries have followed France in discovering that maybe hooking your food storage appliances to the internet isn’t as great an idea as the salesperson said it was.

    Millions of Euros worth of food wasted because of cyber attacks.

    All because there wasn’t a human personally looking after the units.

    Trust but verify.

    Clankers are vulnerable, it would seem.

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    1. “One up and coming job might be refrigerator and freezer monitor.”

      No, the designers were morons. You don’t connect the motor/temperature controls to the net, you put in a wireless thermometer that checks the temperature and nothing else. It has no update capacity; it broadcasts the temperature back to the server and NOTHING ELSE. Let the server have the required temperature to check against.

      When it goes over the threshold, it raises an alert and someone (human or robot) puts eyes on the problem and either the contents are moved to the backup or a repair crew is dispatched. You don’t change the temperature controls; you find out why it isn’t keeping the temperature set.

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      1. Or alternately, you still allow the freezers to have their temperature changed remotely. But you add alarms that go off if the temperature goes above a certain level (can only be set on-site), and you include physical cut-off switches on the freezers that allow people on-site (and only on-site) to disconnect the freezer from the network, and to perform all necessary functions using manual controls.

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        1. or, alternately, you say “F*** the Dumb Sh**”, and you keep everything manual, not connected to anything but the electricity needed to power it. With easily available and replaceable parts.

          This is why I’m hearing more people express an interest in the older, mechanical appliances, that seemed to last almost forever; rather than the newer automated, connected IoE (Internet of Everything) devices that soon stop working because of a glitch, or they can no longer accept firmware updates (i.e., a certain off brand of smart phones).

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          1. For a large business (including chains), there are legitimate reasons to want equipment that can be monitored and controlled remotely.

            That shouldn’t ever replace the ability to override it while on-site, though.

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          2. Which is why my old washer, drier, and stove have outlived some grown idiots thus far. Screwdriver, crescent wrench, some old auto terminal ends and 18AWG wire, a few cannibalized parts from older junk what’s still around, and they keep working and will continue likely long after I am dust.

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    2. Too, apparently the French had not bothered to update their programs with a MOJOR security patch. I’ll be curious to see if the others updated and this is a new hack, or if it is the same still unpatched exploit.

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    3. The Reader offers today’s conspiracy theory – connected refrigeration in the EU is a feature, not a bug. And the feature was hacked to divert attention from the coup in Poland.

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  23. Post scarcity is no more of a pipe-dream than truth, justice or any other principal. You don’t get there, but you make things better by aiming at that direction.

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        2. I do like the Rich Guy (expensive suit, fancy car, etc) meets Super Rich Guy (jeans and a hoodie, drives a 10 year old Civic, etc) sketches

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    2. Though it’s funny. I remember a bit from the later Schlock Mercenary webcomic books where an AI that had been alive for a few centuries told Schlock that she’d seen “post-scarcity” get reached multiple times and they’d find a basic commodity there wasn’t enough of.

      Which made Schlock sadly note there won’t always be fresh cookies available. Poor amorph.

      https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2017-04-21

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    1. It is.

      The paradoxical enabling factor is that it actually requires a significant amount of brainpower to think oneself into such a stupid position. Much like Marxism, it’s a position populated almost exclusively by brainiacs high on their own flatulence and people who either cannot or do not think.

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  26. Some disjointed observations:

    You pointed out, and I ask, where is the father in the above slopcore video? I gritted my teeth and watched the video, and lost 10 IQ points.

    To make progress (social, personal, civilization), there must be conflict. Major progress usually involves war.

    Look at the step from horse-and-buggy, to automobiles. Jobs were lost (carriages and buggy whips), but jobs were gained (mechanics and assembly lines). With each and every step in “advancement”, something is lost, but something is gained.

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  27. “Nationalizing robots is the stupidest thing imaginable.”

    See the NIH and Canadia for real life examples. Not that doctors are robots (not always and not even most of the time), nut the principle remains intact. Higher cost to consumers, longer (than some lifetimes) wait for care, incompetence/fraud/corruption/apathy and laziness gumming up the gears, and so on. Human nature drives the results. Civilization tempers human nature into an alloy useful for getting humanity to the stars.

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  29. “It could stay gone until no one on Earth remembers our names, not even as a line in some record.”

    I will do my best to make sure this doesn’t happen!

    Does anyone need some copper? Once I sell you some, be sure to leave a review! (Write the review on clay first, and bake it, and bury it, before posting on Amazon. I promise this makes the review more effective!

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