You ain’t seen nothing yet. Facebook’s (sorry, Meta’s) VR, and then Neuralink, used to suck many people into virtual worlds and keep them “engaged” to feed the

You ain’t seen nothing yet. Facebook’s (sorry, Meta’s) VR, and then Neuralink, used to suck many people into virtual worlds and keep them “engaged” to feed the profit motive of the Wall St quarterly earnings (capitalism requires platforms to extract rents after all) But why stop at the virtual world? Ubiquitous cameras and wifi that can easily track everyone by their appearance, gait, heartbeat and other signatures etc. become commonplace. Artificial intelligence with access to this info is used to predict all kinds of inconvenient gatherings and movements taking place and nip them in the bud, leading to precrime. Deepfakes that make any sort of video evidence useless, while AI creates plausible “parallel construction” to win court cases against anyone Drones become cheap to manufacture, and rogue drones can drop grenades anywhere without any way to figure out who launched them Swarming autonomous slaughterbots that bring down the cost of eliminating anyone, first by governments, then by private actors. Guns become cheap to 3d-print while replicating biological agents become cheap to release. Bitcoin mining rewards make it more profitable to spend kilowatt-hours on using Proof of Work to secure those same 7 transactions per second than on air conditioning and brownouts regularly occur worldwide. Think this is far-fetched or we can somehow solve these problems? How are we doing with the last few decades of problems: the anthroposcene ecological collapse plummeting biodiversity (insects, birds, tigers) non-biodegradeable plastic greenhouse gas effect Humanity is like a young teenager that lives on a credit card, that future generations have to pay. We think we are so clever and so much smarter than previous generations, because we know the truth revealed by science. But we aren’t wise enough to use it sustainably. At best, humanity is building a zoo for itself to be run by a benevolent AI, while the rest of the planet is turned into monocultures and factory farms. At worst, the AI will not understand human needs and we’ll just all be frustrated all the time, or perhaps countries will just nuke the planet. Where is that nuclear clock?