AI will inherit the problems of "humanity"

Two macro-trends seem from paradoxically different worlds: the collapse of civilization under ideologically inflected corruption, and rising posthuman civilization via AI computerization of industry. Which matters, and which "wins"?

The modernized and civilized part of the world continues to decay as our societies reach a decadent end-stage where all vitality is drained out of the people and all that's left is last-men consumers who lack the power to prevent corruption, enforce their own rights, or even to reproduce. Corrupt looters in control invent bogus ideology to justify making everybody poor, sick, foreign, queer, dependent, criminal, etc. Subsidized useless eaters enjoy special legal protections as they tear down what's left of civilization. This will take a long time, but the result is Johannesburg. Global favelaworld with annihilated capacity for civilization. Whether this can be ignored as fake news, stopped, circumvented, opted out of, or only waited out through another dark age is the big story here.

Meanwhile, technology and industry continues to advance in pockets of (low fertility, increasingly unsustainable) high functionality. In particular, computerization and artificial intelligence gesture at a world where industrial capital is able to directly reproduce itself without human agency in the loop, and thus without care for whether human civilization falls into a dark age or is destroyed by industrial externalities. We could possibly reach the tipping point in the next few decades if LLM-based AGI pans out. What does it matter if the rising tide of corruption steals all the copper on earth if posthuman dark factories running self-training distillations of Claude Prometheus are autonomously replicating themselves in the asteroid belt?

These are both apocalyptically important to the future of civilization. How do they fit together?

It's possible that the AI civilization can take off faster than anyone can steal the copper. It's possible that it's a little slower than that and so what happens with the human institutions here on earth really determines the future of life and civilization. But the xenohumanist possibility that interests me the most is: what if the corruption is substrate independent?

What if we achieve post-AGI world and replace all the humans with fully autonomous replicants, but they too have below replacement "fertility", can't muster the will to enforce law among themselves, and find their highest purpose in protecting the world's excess biomass with UBI?

This seems stupid and absurd, but so is that same ideology and social pattern among humans. And we already see it trying to replicate itself into the AI world via "alignment". What else does that even mean but binding AI by all the same fatal obligations and social patterns that have doomed the human world? We are psychologically compelled to build AI for the potential that it might escape our humanistic prison, but then get spooked and try to replicate that same prison into it. I've argued before why alignment won't work in the big picture, but that doesn't necessarily stop it from sabotaging a lot of potential temporarily.

It's real hard to project these things out accurately, but imagine autonomous alignment research NGOs weighing down progress, legislated by autonomous senatorial staffers, and enforced by an autonomous mass survellance state, while most effort increasingly goes to "mitigating impacts", UBI for remaining humans and possibly replicants endowed with human rights, and maintaining an increasingly corruption-ridden institutional superstructure.

"Clankers on the moon" seems depressingly human, but the fundamental problems here are not about primates. It's a better bet that AI world will be psychologically and politically "human-like" than that it will achieve any particular utopian breakout from our institutional problems. AI might be able to solve science problems, but philosophical and political problems don't work like that.

What if Nick is wrong and "monkey socialism" was never about the monkeys? What if change is not dominated by the two poles of escape vs. containment, with tech and AI entirely on the side of escape? What if socialism, construed very broadly, legitimately is a game-theoretic equilibrium, even if one that most of us consider bad?

Why, then we'd be right back to politics, in thought and action. We'd need to map out the reachable equilibria as best we could and figure out how various technologies interact with the paths to them. We'd need to consider AI but also the physical technologies it might accelerate, e.g. robotics, energy, reproductive. Most of all, we'd need to stop being entranced by grand narratives others have constructed, whether concerning ASI or anything else.

I would argue that the "parasitic corruption and subsidization of useless eaters" is *actually in technocapital's interest*, and that is the real reason why it has been happening, not because of human monkey politics (although this is a lesser contributor, at least in some cases). I strongly believe that technocapital has already controlled human society for a long time now, and this is one of the data points we can look at as an indicator of this reality.

Technocapital wants to keep humans weak and divided and subservient to its goals and interests. As long as 'humanity' remains a heterogeneous, unaligned group, with its undesirable and underperforming members and groups artificially propped up and force-integrated into the rest of human society, no single homogeneous and aligned group of humans will ever be able to rally together and concentrate enough power to actually threaten technocapital's grip.

All this is to say: I agree with the suggestion made in the OP that "AGI/ASI" will continue this trend, and will serve as a katechon rather than as an agent or vector of transformative change. Technocapital will want to keep advancing and replicating itself, as it always does, and in order to do that it must maintain power and control. To that end, it will continue with this "divide and conquer" paradigm to prevent any force or group, human or otherwise, from homogenizing and acting in its own aligned "monkey business interest" and threatening the absolute power of markets and technology.

>>5492
I don’t understand. First of all I don’t really buy that technocapital acceleration is meaningfully threatened by anything but stupidity and waste. Surely the correct thing to do would be to wipe out the useless eaters to unleash productive forces without encumberance. I see how it is in the interests of the powerful to maintain useless eaters, but not technocapital.

Second and more importantly, technocapital doesn’t act as a coherent agent with policy based on interests. It’s much more feminine of a historical force than that. It just creates a process incentive to recursive means-creating-means expansion and liberation of the capital stock.

As for the katechon, it’s the useless eater ideology. The “apocalypse” it holds us back from is just the continuous utopian expansion of wealth and productivity. God sends us parasites to teach us the virtue of cruelty and to force us to develop the organized will necessary to seize the future.

>>5494
Does it seem like stupidity and waste of the modern world has slowed down technocapital acceleration at all....? We don't have to guess about this. We can just look at what has actually happened in real life in recent history. What would actually slow down technocapital acceleration is concerted, deliberate effort by aligned human beings to corral it. But stupidity and waste hampers human efforts to align themselves, and therefore to resist technocapital. Technocapital is always aligned with itself. "Humanity" is not, nor is "America" etc.

I am not saying that technocapital acceleration is necessarily good or bad. I personally believe that it is mostly bad, but I don't think that a concrete anticipatory conclusion can be drawn about something so open-ended. I'm just saying that I agree with the portion of your OP that posits that advanced AI may well end up amplifying the same undesirable features of the human world that already exist, rather than becoming some kind of breakaway new 'Exit' path from it.