Another example: Rome under Julius Caesar killed something like 2/3 of the population of Gaul. They had well and truly won well before that, but they Just. Kept. Going. It wasn’t just war, it was systemic slaughter.

Culling the normies only needs one rich person with the necessary resources. I nominate Elon Musk. He will have the resources and there is a good chance he has the mindset.

They could roll out next-gen LLM-powered disinformation/agitation bots and rapidly turn people across the world against their neighbors over all sorts of locally-contentious topics—and LLMs are capable of accounting for that context.

Why do most of the dirty work with physical (autonomous) weapons when you can just get your “enemies” (us) to kill each other? Then it’s just a matter of mopping up. This doesn’t even necessarily take a massive conspiracy, either, as it’s a lot easier to covertly “stockpile” computing power + bandwidth than to stockpile drones or other autonomous weapons.

I agree with your general point here and I think it does a good job of addressing the really hyperbolic argument people have.

However i think you're focusing too much on one specific scenario to notice all the other really bad options. We as a species tend to revile the very idea of tolerating or being active evil but are generally alright with passive or apathetic evil. While active evil requires much rarer emotions like hatred or constant fear, passive evil is something that everyone participates in one time or the other and is extremely easy to take to great lengths just because it supports one's own convenience.

I think that while some kind of active genocide of the poor is very unlikely there is a genuine chance of the rich just not caring and letting "nature take its course" so to speak. Giving just enough to avoid some kind of mass violent movement as the average person slowly gets overtaken by hopelessness and depression. Another is the creation of entirely useless but highly demanding jobs to continue an undead version of today's economy just to keep people too tired to ask for more.

These options are all generalised, but my point is that there's a lot of extremely awful outcomes that do not require some kind of reverse Leninist "kill all the poor" stance.

Now, do i think that this is guaranteed or even likely? No. But the problem with discourse on this sub is that either side of the argument seems to consider it a strange binary and rarely ever admit any possibility but their own specific doom fantasy or regular fantasy.

I think extremely negative scenarios need to be discussed at length because we cannot afford them to occur, even if everyone thinks the chances are small. I'm all for discussing the positive effects of ai but there's a lot less benefit in my mind to discussing vaguely good scenarios rather than analysing the worst cases and possible ways to prevent them, no matter how likely one thinks they are to occur.

Doomerism is bad but extreme optimism is outright dangerous before we get to a good scenario.

Purpose built robots will always be better than a humanoid.

As reliant as we are on all of our digital technology, we don't need it in every day life. Yeah it would fucking suck to have to go to the library instead of googling, and you have to check the newspaper for stuff like showtimes... but it wouldnt cripple society. Electricity is definitely a need for various reasons, but likewise, most of our modern world could be analog and we wouldn't miss much but our memes.

GPT kind of falls into the same category as smartphones, imo.

Nice to have, but if they all broke tomorrow our lifestyle quality wouldn't change much.

Super interesting, thanks for sharing!

as soon as we can afford to go shopping again

Literally the last person I responded to

"You honestly can't envision a scenario where people who naturally feel that they're the pinnacle of the human hierarchy thin the herd of all the rabble and enjoy an unstressed planet with half the people and therefore double the resources? Your imagination is limited."

Honestly feels like some are just tprojecting what they would do if they were the rich ones.

Actually, scratch that. By implying that ALL rich people are genocidal monster by default, no exceptions, they're basically admitting that they'd start working on gas chambers if they happened to stumble into excessive wealth.

The Onion writers never fail to surprise me how stupid they are

Fair enough. It’s amazing how something at least a little founded in reality like “the upper classes don’t have our best interests at heart” or “in an emergency, the rich don’t tend to protect the poor first” comes to just cartoonish positions like “the rich will gun everyone who doesn’t own enough property down in a giant reverse-Passover type of situation”

Shareholders like to pay the bare minimum to CEOs since their pay eats into the shareholder’s profits

> The average CEO is earning nearly 400 times what the average employee makes, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI)

The average CEO of the top 350 companies in America. There are 40 million companies in America with the actual average CEO being less than $200k

It’s comical and somewhat frightening what reddioters think of rich people. Basically exactly what the nazis thought of the Jews

10 years? 😂 Nah. Half that if we're being pessimistic. In 10 years we're ALL unemployed. Never forget that the axiom underlying the singularity is that technological development is an exponential process. This is even more exaggerated during paradigm shifts which is where we are right now.

Starting to mentally fatigue after so many responses so I'm probably going to dial back on posting them.

I've got a creative writing degree mate. Believe me, I can think of a million different scenarios if I wanted to.

I can just tell where plausibility ends and fiction begins.

The fact is that nuclear weapons exist, along with governments that would rather have power than a bunch of rich psychopaths.

There is no functional collection of rich people who are actively pursuing the eradication of even half of humanity, Thanos Style, who could aquire the means to do so before the United States or China could.

They don't have an auto sense for like mindedness, and while they have a disproportionate amount of madmen amongst them, most rich people are just selfish assholes, not genocidal monsters.

It's like expecting a high-school bully who steals your lunch money and breaks your toys to grab an AK47 and start mowing down people the moment they graduate.

It'll just be more of the same, writ large, at worst.

They aren't nearly creative enough, or motivated enough, to end the world.

Btw it’s a terrible source. It can easily be wrong about established facts. Last week it tried to tell me Thomas Digges posited the existence of alien life. Digges is a pretty early astronomer when the church was dominant so that really surprised me. When I questioned it again, it “corrected” itself and apologized… which, great, but if I hadn’t already known enough about Digges to be suspicious, I would have accepted it in the list of all the other (correct) information.

Chatgpt is awesome, but it’s no more a source than Wikipedia, in fact it’s potentially worse because you don’t have anyone fact checking what chatgpt says to you in real time, whereas there is a chance others will have corrected wiki pages by the time you read them.

It’d be a lot easier to quell an uprising than committing genocide on a scale never before seen

Firstly, I made this post to deliver a rebuttal SPECIFICALLY to the people who keep on INSISTING that the scenario I addressed with my post will happen to a T.

I did not make this post as a general address of ALL rich people doomsday scenarios.

The whole purpose of this was to point out how ludicrous the idea is. And I did it because people keep bringing it up and it kept driving me crazy every time that I was reminded that people actually, genuinely believe it will happen 100% guaranteed.

I'm talking full "they WILL make a robot army and they WILL gun down every last man woman and child in the streets".

You make fair points, and I'm not going to argue about me needing citations for my statement on rich people not being a collective in-group. Though I would maintain that they aren't to the point of being up for collectively deciding to kill everyone who isn't above some arbitrary standard of wealth (and also enough not to turn on each other to 'win more' once any rich folk culling scenario was concluded).

The fact I felt I needed to make this post to correct people with this bad take makes me want to drink.

Currently (as I understand it), AI works by making a collage of the training data with numeric weights and probabilities guiding the output.

So, the data is re-ordered, but nothing novel / new is made.

AI can write ten thousand spin-offs but not a new series without a human spark (prompt).

This man said it in 1891.

https://www.quotes.net/quote/20383

You honestly can't envision a scenario where people who naturally feel that they're the pinnacle of the human hierarchy thin the herd of all the rabble and enjoy an unstressed planet with half the people and therefore double the resources? Your imagination is limited.

If y’all don’t want this all over insta I suggest you unban me in cybersecurity who is your awww friend?

Done a bit of it in replies to comments in this post.

Might do a breakdown on it depending on if I see it getting brought up as often as I did the murderbots.