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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   10541 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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It’s definitely a problem if you need lots and lots of disposable people to stand in a trench and hold rifles.

We’ve barely even entered the drone swarm age where your shielded underground factories can pump out millions of kamikaze drones to blacken the sky and scour trenches to find enemies to kill, all autonomously even if a signal with a base station or satellite is lost.

It remains to be seen whether we can actually bridge the gap between our current situation and that eventuality. It's entirely possible that our current system suffers catastrophic collapse before it achieves full automation. Given the likely outcomes of the sort of future you're describing, such a collapse might even be preferable.

Ah yes, the glorious technocratic future of South Korea where the wasteland is viciously guarded by an autonomous kill swarm. Nobody knows if a single South Korean yet lives. But trapped, deep underground, is one last 300 year old South Korean, asshole destroyed beyond all recognition by the ass wiping robot made to purpose that has desperately needed maintenance the last 78 years. Truly a bright future South Korea has in store for themselves.

The competitive pressures that cause South Koreans to not have any children may well be destroyed by a 50% drop in population or fully automated luxury capitalism.

Maybe, maybe not. What started as competitive pressures could rapidly become cultural or just generalized dysfunction. What happens when a society forgets how to have and raise the next generation of itself? Once that institutional competence is lost, can it be relearned in time? Will anyone even want to?

"society" is to some extent a fiction. There's a range of fertilities in Korea with a long tail. The people who aren't having any kids aren't going to be represented in the future, so their inability to raise kids doesn't matter.

Come now, if you know anything about Korean youth culture, surely you must know how enamored they are of broadcasting the most mundane of activities for all the world to see.

If you want a picture of South Korea’s future: I have no ass and I must stream.

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