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Notes -
I guess we shall see how China deals with more unrest. The surveillance aspect already happens in most western countries anyway, tho I assume China acts on it more (see the aftermath of the recent protests in china - police searching people’s phones for western apps and pictures/videos etc, or Chinese cops using relatives still in china to force ppl in australia to delete tweets etc). AI will be insane in china in the near future. I mean they can already ID you based on your walking gait…
Ironically @2rafa is a big fan of this particular technology, gait recognition, as a tool for suppressing violent crime. It's not like those programs and models are secret – any developed nation can do it.
But of course only rather intangible things such as «social contract» can stop the state from redefining most any dissent to crime.
No need for all this fancy stuff. Victorian England in 1870's managed to drive violent crime down to the asterisks, without any technology higher than telegraph - not even fingerprinting and card catalogues existed at the time (Moldbug writes about it in his usual long winded style, too lazy to find it).
It is not about superior genetic peacefulness of AngloSaxon people - the same country was extremely violent and gang ridden in 18th century and now is again.
What is the secret sauce?
The secret is understanding that violent crime is gang crime, that police must not be the biggest gang in the hood American style, that police must be the only gang and no other gangs must be allowed to form.
Easy to to, if you have the will. Why the modern ruling class does not have the will? Because they are smarter than Victorian ruling class.
What happened in peaceful Victorian and Edwardian UK - working class organized itself enough to demand some concessions.
What happened in modern world since the sixties when gangs and criminals were give freedom to run wild? No need to elaborate about it, we all know.
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It kind of seems like the PMC class defense strategy here is to regulatorily require human bureaucrats for ‘compliance audits’, complete with required certification, and tell the call center workers who actually get replaced to smoke weed on the dole or do sex work.
Capital’s interests are to tell the PMC to get stuffed, and the red tribe’s interests are to let automation take its course, rather than making special exceptions for the PMC(who would not, after all, return the favor). The last human to be fired will be a security guard previously overseeing Jose the Guatemalan peach picker somewhere in Georgia, after all, and the third to last will be Joe the plumber.
I predict a red-tribe/capital alliance arrayed against the PMC with hangers on as a response to accelerating automation, and that’s essentially exactly what we have.
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Marshall Brain is, from what I understand, a socialist, and thus given to conspiratorial reasoning where the class of actual, as-recognized-by-Marx capitalists are organically hostile to the rest of the society, more powerful and more connected. I think you raise valid objections against this viewpoint and its implications.
But it's a matter of degree, not kind. For those of us who are neither PMC nor large property owners, it mostly changes the schedule of going into terrafoam. The incentive of efficiency is the same.
Besides. In Manna, he says that this largely dehumanized welfare population is <230.600.000 people (<1500*cube capacity). The main character could work for 10 years after the major breakthrough in automation, and even had a stint as an administrator. So in our timeline that's 2032 at the earliest. Population Pyramid says there'll be 352 million Americans by that point. Census Bureau is more bullish and expects more like 360 million. So very naively, 360-230=130.
36-37% of the population is quite a lot more than Peter Thiel and Brussels class. We don't have that many NYT journalists either.
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