Rather than place the blame on a lack of structure, community or spirituality, I see this as just a natural consequence of a system optimised at every turn for

Rather than place the blame on a lack of structure, community or spirituality, I see this as just a natural consequence of a system optimised at every turn for economic output. I've heard a lot about a singularity doomsday scenario where a paperclip-maximising AI realises people are much less useful as paperclip constructors than they are as paperclip ingredients. Surely it can't be so hard to see that the productivity-maximising AI that we've cobbled together out of economic rather than electromechanical components is slowly realising it doesn't need us anymore either? The truth is the economy soon won't have any use for poor whites other than consuming the output of rich whites. The last bastions of unskilled and semi-skilled labour are being automated or sent overseas (to be automated there). I'm really curious to see what America's 3.5 million truck drivers do when they lose their jobs over the next ten years. I guess we'll teach them to code? But don't feel too sorry for them; the rising tide of productivity caught poor blacks before that, and all the hamster-wheeling busywork of the middle class is up next. Managers and decision-makers will stay above it right up until they realise abstraction cuts both ways. It'll just be the quants at the end, tweaking the last few parameters and getting the lights on the way out. I think most of the world at least tries to keep the economic AI from being in charge of everything. It's hard because it keeps buying our politicians, but even so there's a sense that it should be serving our values, not the other way around. We might work with it, respect it even, but we don't trust it. The USA is pretty strange in this sense, because somewhere along the line a huge chunk of the population got convinced that if they just leave everything to the paperclip AI it'll take care of them. And, for a time, it will, and the people who work hard to make paperclips get rewarded, and the people who start paperclip factories get rewarded more still. But, inevitably, you're not a paperclip, and your value is incidental in this system. Faced with that, then, your only options are to find a system where people have value independent of their productivity, make being valueless palatable, or just go die quietly somewhere. It's probably not so surprising that, in the absence of the former option, the latter two are becoming increasingly popular. And, I guess, not so surprising that the paperclip worshippers are particularly unconcerned with mental health and sensible drug policy. Still pretty gross though.