10 Comments

Intelligence is used to control nature. Sooner or later someone is going to rewrite human species. Nothing you can do about self organizing processes. It’s true. Normies die out in history as dirt, not even a footnote. Slaves exist because no one challenges the rulers and if everyone was a ruler then evolutionarily speaking we would kill each other until some group comes up on top. Humans are a hierarchical species. Families who plan decades ahead have a greater responsibility to rule than people who fuck randomly squirt out a kid or two then kick them to the curb at 18 while being at the whims of others.

Expand full comment

The Left has been talking about the problem of 'automation' and it's effects on 'utility' of humanity. Andre Gorz was looking at this problem over 40 years ago. The capitalist system is a system for morons who want to believe that navigating the moronic maze created by other capitalists makes them 'smart'. It doesn't but a selection system always ends up selecting what it selected for. Now you have people who think they can socialize capitalism and still make 'capitalism' make sense. But it won't. One AI send memos to another AI about failure to comply with existing regulations created by a third AI isn't an economy. But, human beings performing the same actions aren't either. And this is the point: Human beings have become so debased and their life-ways so distorted that large-language model computing can do 75% of the existing 'busy work' that most of us do.

There have been 'too many' people since the dawn of the industrial age. Each successive iteration of industrial development -scientific application of engineering principles to production - has displaced human labor. This is what the Luddites were all about in the first place. And every time a form of effective, unalienated labor is displace, whole sub-cultures die. Do you know how to churn butter? How about turn wool into yarn? Or tend to sheep or cattle? See what I mean?

The advancement of technology is the degeneration of culture and the redundancy of humanity.

Expand full comment

'The Great Reset' has some great ideas in it. One of them is offloading the endless shadow work of maintaining daily life in Metropolitanland *back* onto the experts. Chattel slaves *always* had it better than wage slaves. Now, wage slaves will get some of the benefits of chattel slavery: room, board, guaranteed income. It's silly to fight against what 2 centuries of social justice struggle has been fighting for: guaranteed material security for all. Think real hard about what sort of 'freedom' it is that offers endless struggle followed by nursing home neglect.

Expand full comment

My initial impression of Harari was formed after reading the first five words of "Sapiens" that a liberal friend gifted me because of my interest in anthropology. I had never heard of him, but upon reading the title of his first chapter "An Animal of No Significance", I was immediately struck by his elitist and nihilistic dismissal of pre-Homo sapiens people.

I continued reading, hoping for new insights only to be smacked again and again with his nihilistic comments that dismiss human progress and discoveries as "myths" and "fictions". His progress-schmogress attitude towards the benefits of the Agricultural Revolution in Chapter 5 started me laughing out loud, and that's when I concluded he was nothing but a nihilistic downer and quit reading.

Sometime later I learned more about his political agenda and activism and realized that he writes on interesting subjects in order to subliminally promote his nihilistic worldview. His role in the Great Reset seems to be promoting a common mindset that agrees on the next logical step for what to do with "Animals of No Significance".

Expand full comment

In the end he is right, many people are redundant and do not fit in the economy. What with the so-called shit jobs, or the many white collar employees that once retired do not have anyone replacing them because their role was basically that of a useless paper-pusher, and had only been hired because of internal managerial politics, to bolster the number of a department at the expense of another, etc.

Usually in these cases you send surplus people somewhere else (emigration) or dying in wars. Nowadays you cannot even do that, so the surplus people must be culled as you would do livestock

Expand full comment

So who decides who is surplus ??

Expand full comment

the bosses/globalists

Expand full comment

"A Great Reset technocracy can only be challenged by a committed counter-elite, with a will to power and grand aristocratic visions, not the conformist masses"... hmmm... I suspect the vast centralization we've seen over the past several decades will be undone with the loss of Imperial extraction in the coming years as the Center that commands, requires it, and we'll instead witness a significant amount of political and economic decentralization. We may see a multitude of differing systems, perhaps even some that are yet hitherto unimagined. To paraphrase an old, dead Klingon general: We're voyaging to an undiscovered country

Expand full comment
deletedMar 4
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

Harari is stating a simple fact. At each iteration of mass production techniques, large numbers of the laboring class were displaced. Were it not for the invention of busy-work in the form of regulatory compliance and *conspicuous consumption*, 75% of the people now working would be unemployed. All Harari is saying is that the 'white collar' workers in large areas of the 'compliance' system are going to be redundant to large language model computing (so-called 'AI').

Expand full comment
deletedMar 4
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

The thinner of the two is the one who works harder at not appearing to be a useless eater.

Expand full comment