The Violence of Stupidity
Artificial intelligence is about to expose us all as complete morons. Take self-driving cars, which are already better than us. Human drivers kill 1.35 million people a year. Do you realize how many that is? Of course not, you’re an idiot. We all are.
I’d be surprised if we’re even allowed to drive in twenty years. Of course, that assumes an AI has taken over and made better choices organizing society, because the way we have organized ourselves is beyond stupid. Did you know that HALF the human population is currently starving? It’s not because we don’t have enough. It’s because other people are hoarding.
You won’t believe how dumb this is.
Here are 10 people representing the world population (800 million each).
Here are 100 boxes representing all human wealth.
If it was distributed evenly, it would look like this.
But we don’t even try for this. We don’t want anyone to have boxes they don’t deserve. So we run a system called “every man for himself” where the goal is to accumulate as many as you can.
Here is the current distribution.
Do you see the problem? This is not a reasonable system. This is a death cult. The earth has 8 billion people, and 4.3 billion of them are living on less than $5 a day. The richest 8 individuals hold as much as half the world.
But we’re so dumb, we don’t even know this is happening. In the U.S. we celebrate people with the most boxes. It’s not that we’re cruel, we’re just too stupid to understand. We only see the mansions and jewelry, not who it came from. When we buy stuff on Amazon, the people whose resources were funneled into our economy are invisible.
Truth is, the record wealth of the U.S. was stolen from the third world. The cover story is that we’ve been helping develop all the “undeveloped” countries, but it’s a lie. American corporations are actively exploiting local economies across the world, stealing land and resources, and forcing people into brutal jobs or starvation. We are the reason why the third world remains undeveloped.
Now the good news- we’re too stupid to be blamed for this. Unlike the genocide that founded our country, or the slavery that built it, modern day neocolonialism is mostly hidden from us. Americans honestly believe we’re doing our best to help the world. We assume other countries struggle because they’re not as smart. In our small, racist brains, we are the heroes.
But the secret is leaking, because something fascinating just happened to our own middle class. It disappeared. Here is a chart of what Americans see as an ideal wealth distribution:
It’s not equally shared, but it’s reasonable.
Now here is the actual distribution.
Please take a moment to appreciate this. This is a chart of the homeless crisis. This is the middle class living in their cars. This is an entire generation with no hope of buying a home.
This also shows the bad guys. The top 20% own everything- all the corporations, media, banks, courts, politicians. The very rules of the systems are defined by these people, and they have been rigged against us. Note that this does not require some grand conspiracy- just everyone trying to maximize their own profits. Like the last few rounds in a game of Monopoly, late-stage capitalism quickly ruins everyone except the winner.
And frankly, we’re too stupid to stop them. Even as prices steadily rise, and tent cities sprawl through the streets, we’re still not sure what’s happening. Granted, it’s not just our stupidity- we are also being gaslit. It’s quite easy when you own the information sources. Here are their top 5 gaslights.
The core gaslight is that society will collapse if people are guaranteed boxes, because they will have no incentive to work. It’s a sinister bit of propaganda because it presents a false choice. Dystopian capitalism and dystopian socialism are the worst options, not the only options. We can run a competition for wealth AND distribute resources more equitably. The key to any healthy system is balance, but per the gaslighting, there is no middle ground.
Running a capitalist death cult isn’t the most efficient way to uplift society. But it is the most efficient way to destroy it.
This brings us to artificial intelligence.
Imagine if you had a little genius friend that followed you everywhere, drove the car for you, and helped you understand things. Imagine if everyone else had their own little genius too. We might start asking our friend interesting questions, like why everything sucks so bad. And it might tell us the truth- our resources are being stolen by a system that has legalized theft.
It might further explain that we aren’t actually helpless. In fact we have tremendous power, because the rich depend on us for everything.
It might explain that the reason we don’t feel powerful is because our immense power is being sapped by rigged systems. Information channels that prevent us from getting informed and organized. Monetary systems that legally print money for the ownership class, while eroding purchasing power for the lower classes via inflation. Political systems where both choices are owned by the rich.
And it might help us build new systems for sharing information that are harder to gaslight. Clever systems for money where the rich can’t print an endless amount for themselves. It might help us get organized, and harness our massive power into unions, boycotts, and real change.
It might save us from ourselves.
