I keep feeling this dread that A.I + surveillance + drone warfare is going to unleash unspeakable horrors on the world sometime in the next twenty years. And just like WW2 it will be precipitated by economic collapse.

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Germany’s economic collapse was brought on by outrageously unfair surrender terms and conditions laid out in the Treaty of Versailles that Hitler and the Nazi Party could sink their teeth into as a tangible scapegoat for their nation’s woes It’s harder to point the finger at who will light the powder keg next time, if indeed there is a next time
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Benking 1 month ago
Yeah… it’s a heavy thought, and honestly not far‑fetched. History tends to rhyme, tech leaps mixed with economic pain usually bring chaos before renewal. Let’s just hope more people choose wisdom this time 👊🏻
It’s a race between freedom tech and totalitarian dystopia. I worry that we will loose for a decade before we start winning. Long term I don’t believe AI can be the master most think it can be.
Essentially but palantir has masters, what happens when its new masters are a hundred times more unscrupulous than its current masters? Nothing good.
Nym's avatar
Nym 1 month ago
At least we can use AI to help us learn to make tools to defend our privacy and freedom. But it will at the same time give immeasurable power to fringe violent groups who want to destroy society and of course to governments, who will use these groups as a reason to legitimize ever more totalitarian methods. I hope we are just overreacting like others before us have when new technologies arrived and people thought the world would end. But it feels almost inevitable
Constantin's avatar
Constantin 1 month ago
Right now, we have AI + surveillance and AI + drone warfare, so I'm afraid you're being generous with your prediction. I'm thinking of 5 years if we're lucky. But one of the reasons I follow you it's because I need your optimism. 🤷
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WildBill 1 month ago
Read the Bible, move away from cities, get sovereign, make lots of babies, touch some grass (in no particular order). It’s time to start thinking about the next generation.
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The_Crin 1 month ago
according to the collapse of both the USA and several countries, it is inevitable, what happened in Nepal, Madagascar, France and several African countries along with the Middle East, show that even the most stable country can fall due to bad decisions by their governments. The US, China and Russia will also collapse, it's just not time yet
Constantin's avatar
Constantin 1 month ago
I think the UK might be the first one to do it in this 5-year timeframe. At least the first one from the "civilised" countries.
Imagine drone policing too - drones that flyover and can force your smart car to pull over. House arrest enforced by drone. There’s lots of tyranny short of bombs to consider as well
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Prince Aleph 1 month ago
There's already the technology to create swarms of suicide drones inflicting enormous casualties in densely populated areas. Just no one has used it yet.
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CASCDR 1 month ago
White pill: maybe the surveillance and technology gets so good that leaders just have an arms race on who can do targeted assassinations better and the risk of being personally assassinated forces cooler heads to prevail. Kinda like highly targeted mutually assured destruction and not Strangelovian Dynamics. image
there is a rich history of this kind of bounty marketplace in "dark web" writings. the idea is the higher the bounty, the more incentivized the politician is to act right. and if crowdfunding is opened up to their whole political constituency, there are a lot of people available to vote with their dollars. I don't know that I endorse this because I am opposed to violence and coercion, but I can see the logic of the argument, as demented as it may be. a centralized version of this would be shut down in a heartbeat. a decentralized version running on a privacy-preserving payment protocol would be a different story...
I'm really scared of all of that but I tell myself that in 1989, nobody could've imagined a worse type of tyranny given the technological means of the time than was in place in the Soviet Union and its client states - and then it all just went away. Unfortunately, I do believe that things have to become as bad as they possibly can before large amounts of people refuse to put up with it any longer.
Andrew's avatar
Andrew 1 month ago
Im not at all technical, so maybe this isn't possible, but someone on here should write a protocol or something that makes the cloud infrastructure for Ai decentralized. Maybe kind of like running a node for btc, but your node provides the storage and gpu power for whatever people want to use Ai for. Keep it decentralized. Then if people operating these nodes don't like what Ai is doing then can shut down their node. Probably could do something like this to replace youtube. Seems simple for all the developers on nostr.
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Caleb Gregory 1 month ago
There’s a non zero % chance this is true. I hate that this is facts, but it’s the reality.
I don’t totally recall the movie Robocop bc I was a kid but recall drone-ish things in it. Predictive programming? Or just sci-fi? Idk. But, yeah, f da drones.