That reminds me of an old Libertarian scifi online web serial, called "The Australian Project"? (I think? Can't seem to find it via Google)
TLDR in the near-ish future Australia becomes some magical libertarian wonderland while America is an evil technocrat controlled failed state where 90% of the population has had their jobs replaced by AI robots/everyone is on welfare/they are being drugged & vaccinated to be infertile/die quicker.
Edit:
It might have been
this? By Marshall Brain
Manna is one of the stories I can never find when I want to, but yes, if you want to see the "nice" version of our future under the likes of Musk, look no further.
All the jobs humans can easily do are taken by robots. Truck driving alone would fundamentally reform (read: crash) our economy. Robotic food prep like fast food joints. Once they get LLM powered robots that can "see" and "react" in real time, that's also clerks, security, military, warehouses, orchards... If they can at least code as well as a Jeet, that's the vast majority of programming jobs. Art? Writing? Media? Those already are being supplemented by AI. Another 5 years and you'll have one really skilled prompter churning out entire seasons of AI Slop TV and another handful of prompters generating it all.
Or video games. How long until we're at a point that you could take say, Skyrim's engine or Minecraft or SS13 or Roblox or what have you and use a LLM Agent to create whatever you want on top of the framework?
2 months ago, apparently. In a year, in 5 years, this will be putting out perhaps not AAA tier stuff but probably pretty close -- and the AAA studios will be heavily using it behind the scenes, just like Hollywood is using AI today.
We're a few years out, 5 to 10 or so, from AI just leaving the vast swaths of people simply without anything to do for a living. And it won't just be the retards or the lazy. Anything that's repetitive or can be coded in any way including via a neural network. That's almost every job. It's just a question of if it's economic to do or not. You won't be competing with Jeets you'll be competing with if it's worth telling a drone to do it for free instead.
What do you do with lets say 6 billion people who suddenly have nothing to do and more importantly no way to earn money for food or rent? Landlords aren't going to just let them live for free. Unless we get fully automatic communist robo-farms up and running ASAP, well, these people aren't going to be eating for free either. Electricity, barring some sort of innovations in power generation (solar plants in orbit/the moon/mercury/etc, Gen 5 Nuclear, etc) won't be free.
Elon and Zuck and or whoever replaces them will convince themselves the "nice" way to deal with this problem is to prune us back to manageable levels naturally. Keep us drugged fat and happy in what amounts to cages while we slowly die out. THEY will be immune because THEY are important (and we are not). Their pet Jeets will be the first against the wall (no one, not even AWFLs, like Jeets) and the Jeets will dive into the pods stinky-ass cowshit encrusted feet first -- just promise them bobs and vageen, or tell them how high status they are for going in first, and they'll be first ones into the suicide booths.
All this would be A small investment -- a mercy -- for 6 billion sterilized useless eaters to enjoy what amounts to a worldwide Carnival Cruise until they're old fat and stupid and can be quietly put down over the years.
That's what we'll all likely live to see. A bunch of techbros with a messiah complex deciding they have the right -- the DUTY -- to euthanize the world becuase we're no longer useful compared to AI powered drones.
What are the alternatives? Genie's not going back into the bottle. UBI? Maybe, but it wouldn't be communism (real communism has never worked before). Post Scarcity is the Term, and we'd have to jump straight to it and avoid a whooole lot of pitfalls on the way. If so, 15 minute cities becomes a luxury to maximize how many people we can get in utopian -- but authoritarian -- living conditions. (This falls apart the second you have to add Dindus or Jeets as neighbors, of course.)
Mind uploading in the medium to long term? Shove everyone in some sort of Minecraft like VR game and decelerate it 100 times over (so a day in VR is 100 days -- or a year -- IRL) and forget about them on a server in the Antarctic while the rest of humanity moves on. Every so often you peek in on the monitor you have in the hallway watching your ancestors live in VR and see what great-grandma and grandpa are doing -- looks like Grampa hooked that fish off the rings of Virtual Saturn and Grandma is learning goldsmithing in a class of 250 other mind uploaded Americans from the old world. How quaint!
Sterilizing the world and just waiting for it all to go away is the "easy" and "nice" answer, if you're starting to think of the problem at this scale. Lets think smaller. What do you do with 300 million Americans when ALL their jobs are gone? Hell, what do you do with 50 million? They can't find work because robots took the jobs. They need food, water, a place to sleep. They can't be trained to do other jobs, robots took them and the jobs the robots didn't take require talent skill and creativity/brainpower.
Now look up and realize that's round one, those 50 million are about to become 300 million, and it's not just the US -- it's happening everywhere in the world.
as a post rating?
