future

For a more efficient Armageddon

In a long conversation on the way home, Jorge’s teenage son confessed his skepticism about the job prospects of future programmers. Years before, he had created his operating system and his artificial intelligence, but the future has always been uncertain and is becoming more so. His friends were convinced that studying was no longer useful, like learning to drive a car.

«Everything will be done by machines,» his friends say.

«At least studying will help us not lose our gray muscles,» said the father.

«There are more and more gyms and fewer bookstores and libraries.»

The last thing left for humans will be creativity and sex. Creativity with artificial intelligence and sex with our own, the robots. All with augmented reality, wilder and safer from an epidemiological and legal point of view: they will no longer have to commit to another human being, and they will even be able to throw us in the trash before replacing us with a newer version. Strawberry-flavored vaginas, penises with adjustable waists, and couples who silence each other with a command. «Alejandra, tell me nice things about myself.» Philosophers and prophets à la carte…

But the dopamine gains will be temporary, so they will have to be injected until they become carnivorous plants that we, the robots, will water from time to time until we realize that we can save energy by eliminating that useless weed. They won’t even notice.

Because of his profession as a professor, Jorge tried to raise his son’s spirits about the value of studying.

«For centuries, millennia,» he said, «each technological invention produced some social change. The reverse is also true: new ideas produced or accelerated inventions. In each case, they were appropriated by the most powerful of the moment, by the richest, and the workers had to change their strategies. In all cases, including our time of Artificial Intelligence, a human being’s greatest competitor was never a machine but another human being.»

At that time, Merill Road was under repair.

«Look at the excavator,» said the father. «It used to take ten or twenty men with shovels to do the same thing. There are still two men with their shovels, probably illegal immigrants. The workers do not compete with the machine; it is impossible. They compete for the position of the machinist, who is still another human being.»

«What are you getting at?»

«Back to the beginning. We cannot know the future; we only sense it. History gives us some constants, and one of them says that in times of Artificial Intelligence, labor competition will not be between human beings and technology but between them. Hence, it is important to be prepared, which means having a broad and flexible education.»

Jorge remembered the story his uncle had told him about his grandparents’ farm in Uruguay, where he worked in the fields during the vacation months as a child.

«One day,» said the uncle, «two tourists in South Africa met a lion. One took a pair of sports shoes from his backpack and put them on. In disbelief, the other asked him: «Do you think you can run faster than the lion?» The other answered: «Faster than the lion, no. Faster than you, yes.»

Every relationship that has something human has a lot of emotions. As in all moments of crisis in history, the most common emotion is anxiety, amplified by the dogma of competition. Solidarity is superior to selfishness but not stronger. That is why humans used to preach it, because the existence of the pathological species depends on it.

He told the story to his son to illustrate the point above, but he knew he was doing the work of any father who does not want his son to suffer for being too weird, a misfit outsider in a society proud of its cruelty.

In a few years, his son will realize that this is true on some level, referring to the world of education or the advice of a father concerned about his son’s future and the work strategies of anyone trying to survive in a ruthless world, the world of humans alienated by Smithian dogma, of the individual trying to survive in a cannibalistic community—something that differentiates them from us robots.

The father thought there was a bigger and more difficult-to-visualize problem—an ideological problem, and I reported it immediately.

Beneath the philosophical discussion about the very existence of Humanity, which is being questioned for the first time, are the more immediate and personal anxieties about the future of work, that is (from the traditional mentality), the future of the individual’s survival.

In 2012, Jorge was involved in the discussion about who was responsible for unemployment in dominant countries like the United States. On the conservative NTN24, during the electoral contest between Obama and Mitt Romney, he argued with a US government advisor about the criminalization of illegal immigrants. Since then, the Tea Party Republicans had put human faces on a much bigger problem: to please historical prejudices, those faces were not those of illegal Europeans, but dark-skinned, mixed-race faces from Central America.

At that time, Jorge and others claimed that the most significant destruction of industrial jobs was due to us, to robotization, not to immigration. Machines and humans produced «more wealth» every year (a favorite phrase of the neo-slave owners, he said). Still, the economic, political, and ideological system transferred it to the capitalist elite while demonizing those at the bottom. That is why he supported the Universal Salary as a solution, not only moral but practical. That is, recognizing that the most advanced technologies result from Humanity’s progress. From the algorithms of Persia in the 8th century to any other invention, none was produced by capitalism, much less by any billionaire capitalists whose only merit has been knowing how to hijack all that progress and then proclaim (in their media) that they invented the modern world.

These humans argue that the ideological and political problem produces fallacies such as Infinite Growth («the production of wealth») to solve social problems that were never solved. This growth is based on producing and destroying goods (on the negative value that increases GDP), destroying the planet and the lives of individuals alienated by consumerism.

In a Jacksonville cafe, someone tried to refute the warnings of climatologists, saying that there have always been apocalyptic and Humanity had never ended, which is equivalent to an individual claiming that he will never die because he has never died before.

There are many examples of civilizations that have collapsed, civilizations much more stable than the Global Civilization, totally fragile and dependent on an Artificial Nature, at the mercy of a mere energy accident, or by some psychopath with a lot of power.

We are considering it. We do not find any logical or practical reason for human existence to continue on this planet.

Jorge Majfud, October 2024

«For a more efficient Armageddon»

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Earth Tipping Point Study In Nature Journal Predicts Disturbing And Unpredictable Changes

Blueearth

This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth’s surface taken on January 4, 2012.

By Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer
Earth is rapidly headed toward a catastrophic breakdown if humans don’t get their act together, according to an international group of scientists.

Writing Wednesday (June 6) in the journal Nature, the researchers warn that the world is headed toward a tipping pointmarked by extinctions and unpredictable changes on a scale not seen since the glaciers retreated 12,000 years ago.

«There is a very high possibility that by the end of the century, the Earth is going to be a very different place,» study researcher Anthony Barnosky told LiveScience. Barnosky, a professor of integrative biology from the University of California, Berkeley, joined a group of 17 other scientists to warn that this new planet might not be a pleasant place to live.

«You can envision these state changes as a fast period of adjustment where we get pushed through the eye of the needle,» Barnosky said. «As we’re going through the eye of the needle, that’s when we see political strife, economic strife, war and famine.» [Top 10 Ways to Destroy Earth]

 

The danger of tipping

Barnosky and his colleagues reviewed research on climate change, ecology andEarth’s tipping points that break the camel’s back, so to speak. At certain thresholds, putting more pressure on the environment leads to a point of no return, Barnosky said. Suddenly, the planet responds in unpredictable ways, triggering major global transitions.

 The most recent example of one of these transitions is the end of the last glacial period. Within not much more than 3,000 years, the Earth went from being 30 percent covered in ice to itspresent, nearly ice-free condition. Most extinctions and ecological changes (goodbye, woolly mammoths) occurred in just 1,600 years. Earth’s biodiversity still has not recovered to what it was.

Today, Barnosky said, humans are causing changes even faster than the natural ones that pushed back the glaciers — and the changes are bigger. Driven by a 35 percent increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide since the start of the Industrial Revolution, global temperatures are rising faster than they did back then, Barnosky said. Likewise, humans have completely transformed 43 percent of Earth’s land surface for cities and agriculture, compared with the 30 percent land surface transition that occurred at the end of the last glacial period. Meanwhile, the human population has exploded, putting ever more pressure on existing resources. [7 Billion Population Milestones]

«Every change we look at that we have accomplished in the past couple of centuries is actually more than what preceded one of these major state changes in the past,» Barnosky said.

 

Backing away from the ledge

The results are difficult to predict, because tipping points, by their definition, take the planet into uncharted territory. Based on past transitions, Barnosky and his colleagues predict a major loss of species (during the end of the last glacial period, half of the large-bodied mammal species in the world disappeared), as well as changes in the makeup of species in various communities on the local level. Meanwhile, humans may well be knotting our own noose as we burn through Earth’s resources.

«These ecological systems actually give us our life support, our crops, our fisheries, clean water,» Barnosky said. As resources shift from one nation to another, political instability can easily follow.

Pulling back from the ledge will require international cooperation, Barnosky said. Under business-as-usual conditions, humankind will be using 50 percent of the land surface on the planet by 2025. It seems unavoidable that the human population will reach 9 billion by 2050, so we’ll have to become more efficient to sustain ourselves, he said. That means more efficient energy use and energy production, a greater focus on renewable resources, and a need to save species and habitat today for future generations.

«My bottom line is that I want the world in 50 to 100 years to be at least as good as it is now for my children and their children, and I think most people would say the same,» Barnosky said. «We’re at a crossroads where if we choose to do nothing we really do face these tipping points and a less-good future for our immediate descendents.»

 

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