Robo-pocalypse

Imagine a day in the not too distant future when you will go to an electronics store and have the lens of your eye removed and replaced by a liquid that is packed with nano-electronics, a camera, and a radio to give you super vision. You'll be able to see in the dark, have infrared vision, and be wired to the Internet 24/7. But what comes with this super-vision is supervision. You will not only be an upgraded Human 2.0, you will be part machine. Maybe the only way that humans are going to survive in the new environment of Artificial Intelligence will be to become integrated with machines.

Right now a lot of technologies are coalescing to accelerate this process. Most likely, we are not going to be prepared when machines become the upper mind in the world. When the day comes that computer intelligence exceeds our own, we will no longer have the ability to project the trajectory of our own future. We will no longer be in control and won't really know just how this intelligence will deal with us.

Some are referring to this time of the Singularity as a robo-pocalypse. It is not something in our distant future.  We're seeing the beginnings of its effects right now. The movement toward global automation is destroying the middle class. There is a massive class of people worldwide that all of a sudden are no longer employable. The number of people that do not have the skills to find a job in this new economy is skyrocketing. They are becoming expendables, and their numbers are expanding into higher and higher skill sets with no employment opportunities.

The blindly optimistic AI technicians suggest that everyone could someday receive a universal basic income to deal with the massive unemployment issue. But that's never going to happen. And if it did, anyone receiving government money would only end up being under government control. Kiss freedom good-bye. The real problem is that there isn't a Plan B in the minds of AI creators. There is no other option on the table to deal with this train of automation that is accelerating down the track on a collision course with the balance that currently exists in the world.

The really bad news is that people are no longer going to be necessary to drive the economics of our society. Except for the lucky 10% who continue to have a job, what will become of the ones Henry Kissinger referred to as “useless eaters”? We don't know. We should all be concerned about it. Are we going to end up in FEMA camps? Are we going to be left to zone out with minimal welfare on drugs, both legal and illegal, watching video games, getting fat and dumb watching re-runs of Three's Company for the balance of our lives? Who knows!

We'll become a world that must, of necessity, be totally controlled, otherwise there would be a restless populace that would get more than a little bit angry if it is ever able to start thinking for itself. All this could only be accomplished by giving most of us a dumbed-down education, feeding us dumbed-down genetically modified food, giving us awful entertainment, awful news, and otherwise continue to feed us a fake world of lies to keep the masses happy enough that we don't complain about the dystopia we are hopelessly mired in. Sound anything like the world as it is becoming already?

Do these AI optimists seriously believe that trans-humanism is going to work for seven and a half billion of us being merged with machine components and enhanced to become immortal? Seriously? That's just not how humanity works. Take a look at history and observe how there is always only a small group of rapacious, dominating people at the top who never, ever voluntarily give up that privilege. Never going to happen. All of humanity is never going to benefit from this super-intelligence and potential for immortality, even if it were a good thing, which is questionable to say the least.

Technology is growing at such a rate today that any widespread realization that we as a civilization have already achieved such advanced capabilities goes unnoticed. We are all being protected from knowing what is going on “for our own good”. We are getting rolled over by progress and the powers that be who want to keep it that way. Before it is too late we really need to be having intelligent conversations across society about the implications of this emerging change in human evolution and whether or not we can still salvage some control over it.