I agree, there's no really viable scenario for a tiny number of rich people to preserve all their wealth and power while exterminating the rest of the population through some covert scheme. The vast majority of wealth is in any case tied to productive capital, which mass automation of labor sans UBI would destroy in a catastrophic deflationary spiral, meaning most of the rich would lose their wealth too as asset prices fell through the floor.

What is more possible is UBI, but even in such a case people will ask questions about why those who happened to be rich in 2025 get to stay rich forever, while everyone else has to be poor on welfare forever.

>their hard earned resources

As much as I like markets this makes me kek.

There is a misunderstanding here, among the rich, there are also richer and poorer ones.

If they kill the common folks, the very threat that unites them would disappear. So the richest would use AI to kill the less richer.

And on and on it goes untill nobody is left.

Not saying this would happen but I find most of your arguments to be either wildly ahistorical or childish. First of all, the social murder of the poor is not an all or nothing game. And it does not require the most cartoonishly evil murder weapon possible to be done. We’ve seen it happen multiple times in history without Boston dynamics dogs strapped with guns executing order 66 for your Reddit epic awards.

>rich people do not see themselves as a collective in group

(Citation needed)- hundreds of years of history in everything from self consciously bourgeois revolutions to collective action within political parties to squash “populism,” even into personal lives in where the extremely wealthy are educated (in a place like England for example, they’re all largely together in a group of schools from the time they can read, and continue onto one of a handful of elite universities), even just to the modern intermingling of celebrity, business, and political culture all coalesce to tell me you already have no idea what you’re talking about.

The rich do in fact have a sense of class solidarity, that’s why in almost every western country, income is the most accurate predictor of voting outcome. Not race, gender, or social sensibility. Of course there’s infighting within the upper classes, that’s why you have (in America) democratic billionaires who recommend austerity and deregulation, and republican billionaires who recommend the same. The base of the parties are different, but as you climb the ladder of wealth it becomes increasingly easy to hop back and forth with cultural affect as it suits you. This is why someone like Elon could be a darling of the Democratic Party one year, because they’re more likely to pass policy benefiting an electric car baron, and republican the next, for some nice tax cuts, and an “Antiwoke” affect amongst other things.

Of course there are internal lines within an income bracket, a shopkeeper and a lawyer or doctor will have different interests, and these interests have interesting consequences within politics… but we won’t get into that, the fact is you start off your argument by saying “class politics don’t exist”

Laughable. Truly laughable. I don’t even feel the need to continue. But I will. Just a little while.

Any moral argument can be dismissed because of historical precedent. The Eugenicist political movement did not start (entirely) as a fight for racial purity but as class war coming from the upper class of England. See, Malthus popularized the idea that overpopulation was a serious problem and subsequently academics argued that things like poverty and criminality were familial, heritable traits. I can link some papers if you’d like, or some modern academics writing about it, or even a fun podcast about it.

The rich sought to, and enacted in government and private industry, policies to purposefully and systematically kill the poor through what would come to be called “social murder.” It’s from the social movement that brought us the workhouse that we still get a lot of our talking points about overpopulation today, even if “heritability” has at least partially been stripped out, but that’s neither here nor there.

Only later, did this expand from familial and class based thinking into racialized thinking, specifically when these ideologies were exported to the United States (especially the south, although a majority of states would enact at least a handful of directly eugenics-based laws), and then from there back to Europe again.

If you don’t think such a thing is at least possible to rise again as a method of class war under say, unprecedented and worsening climate crisis leading to lower crop yields and heightening social tensions, i really don’t know what to tell you.

As for the idea that the rich are slow to build up mass killing machines powered by robots, what do you call the massive expansion of drone warfare? They may not be autonomous, but since the great War liberal internationalists have written about and theorized a “humane War” to be fought without soldiers, or waged on enemy combatants without putting a soldier in harms way. That’s not to say that all the poor and wretched of the world will be killed in one fell swoop or anything like that, just to point out that between surveillance capitalism and automation within the military (and eventually the police), we could be headed for a more brutal world for the underclasses.

The idea that the rich would have any trouble investing in violence rather than practical solutions that could be cheaper is laughable if you take even one look at even local politics, and how much money can be demonstrably saved by housing the homeless for free. Costs on policing, costs on hospitals, costs on social services, all around, could be saved several times over, and it’s been done before. But where does money in the largest cities tend to go instead? Directly into police budgets.

Now as to any action like this requiring a United front, I think this misunderstands collective action as well. We’d much more likely see the return of poor houses accompanied by lower wages and harsher policing as a means to accomplish the social murder of the poor than some single mass culling of the poor like you’d see in a science fiction movie. This seems to be where most of your problem comes from. You’ve already picked the method, and decided that intent is necessary. But the Victorian bourgeois didn’t need everyone to be on board. Only the ones with political power. Hell, most of them didn’t need to be conscious of what was happening on the ground for the impoverished. Their own world was segregated enough that they could dismiss it as inevitable or unfortunate.

So what do I think is likely to happen as a worst case scenario if not exactly the “mass culling” you imagine?

A slow, grinding reduction of quality of life amongst the middle and lower classes, a collapse of the middle class altogether back into the working class they arose from, a steep increase in deaths by preventable causes, continued and steepening asset price inflation preventing the lower classes from building wealth, consolidation amongst corporations and property owners, increased wealth inequality, the return of the company town, increased police militarization, the criminalization of parts of life previously untouched by a police presence, increased surveillance, harsher penalties for deviance or delinquency, and violent crackdowns on social unrest, the return of great power conflict and proxy wars. Anything sound familiar with processes already historically under way?

Much more akin to the conversion of parts of the world into an open air prison than the machine war from terminator.

i dont fully understand the motive behind the rich genociding the poor…

1. poor ppl and rich ppl are biologically the same, one of them just got lucky.

2. cant rich ppl just enjoy their wealth withOUT killing poor ppl?

it feels like a pointless murder

If ultra elites got killbots they would be turning them on rivals.

"I'll unite the plebs to use them against you" would be at least one super richguy's strategy.

If the machine is of superhuman intelligence then it's not going to be bound by human instructions, it's not a soldier because it can't be commanded.

I appreciate that you even tried, OP, but doomers are gonna doom and conspiracy nuts will just find some other piece of “secret knowledge” to cling onto.

I don't think it will happen either, but you are missing an obvious route to carnage; the route of accident, circumstance, deceit, incompetence and failure. In that scenario, it starts out with 'reasonable measures', 'law and order', 'supporting the military' and so on. Over time the frog gets boiled as none of the individual steps seem so terrible, or at least are terrible but happening to other, 'bad' people. Then one day we wake up to find we've handed over all the power and control to a small group of people that no longer need anything from the rest of us AND we've actually paid to build up the systems of control and management that allow it.

So I agree a deliberate plan to reach this outcome would probably fail for some of the reasons you have outlined, but an accidental, paved-with-good-intentions route? Yeah, that's totally believable.

Will the rich build a robot army with the goal of genocide? Of course not, I doubt anyone maybe short of some crazy person would do that. (As we’ve seen in history much more likely genocide would revolve around race, religion or ideology)

Would they take all the wealth created and retreat to gate communities defended by kill bots and ignore the suffering outside their gates? Yah we’re already 80% of the way there. That’s the issue, people will demand UBI or higher taxes and help in providing basics and the rich will use their lobbyists and power to shoot down that legislation. Normally you would have a revolt/revolution but that won’t happen because it would be pistols and some ARs vs a robot controlled Abraham tank and robot f35.

There won’t be out right genocide just immoral indifference to suffering.

What about a scenario when one/small group of evil rich obtain ASI first (assuming it is easy to go from AGI to ASI by i.e. just scaling it up) and then uses it to kill everyone else? The probability of this is small*,* but it still seems a bit too high for comfort

Cool now do AI engineered communicable pathogens, virii and infectious agents.

1% of 8 billion is 80 million.

USA is the richest country in the world, with 330 million people.

It stands to reason the majority of the 80 million will be Americans.

Americans also have the most guns and advanced killing technology in the world, and most don't have a passport.

I think it is very likely the 1% is indeed plotting to kill off the rest of the world.

It turns out the phone call is indeed coming from inside the house.

Now that’s a Bing-0 and I don’t even have to read it all

It’s comical and somewhat frightening what reddioters think of rich people. Basically exactly what the nazis thought of the Jews

https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/02/27/were-all-the-1-percent/

There are so many factors no one in this subreddit is considering tbh. For example, its somewhat ironic because American wealth of most citizens is probably and comfortably in the 10% of the world, and at least 10% of Americans likely fit in the 1% of the world. This is a very American or western centric post and also comments. There's nothing wrong with that, except it's totally biased and makes most of the purpose of this discussion null.

Not to mention the fact that for most people in the world, the barrier to entry into wealth is actually authoritarian governments who limit or ban the market approach. Thus never giving any "common person" the opportunity to rise above the poverty line. A lot of countries also never get the opportunity to industrialize properly, and remain agricultural based economies which are understandably poorer than industrialized or service based economies.

Did you know that China's middle class represents more than 50%+ of the population? It's quite ironic again, that people are always shouting "class war" when the majority is the middle class, who represents an in between of rich and poor. In most western countries if not all, the middle class is 50%+. It's not hard to imagine considering that 3% of China grew to 50% in 2018, that this is a global movement, and the rest is likely to happen in other countries such as India and in Africa and Latin America more generally.

https://chinapower.csis.org/china-middle-class/

But you've forgot one element that is most important. Historical wealth. If you jot down a line of today's 8 billion people we would own more than 99% of global historical wealth. Yes today, all 8 billion people are in the historical 1% of history.

TLDR

Any dystopian future will be the unfortunate result of too many operating with too much discretion to know that they should ever feel bad. Sadly even Maslows hierarchy is still not enough to limit the damage we may inflict upon eachother.

I agree with your idea that the rich will not kill the poor with a robot army.

More likely it would be an asymmetric action of a singular actor via a biological vector.

An action like this could be carried out without contradicting any of your reasons why a class war won't happen.

Rich won't kill the poor. They will live a comfortable life in gated communities(city or enclave), fortified and secured by cops paid for by taxes.

The poor will be only used to do work where robotics is expensive. They will be allowed to exist outside the gated cities and plan their life around nature.

I agree with your general point here and I think it does a good job of addressing the really hyperbolic argument people have.

However i think you're focusing too much on one specific scenario to notice all the other really bad options. We as a species tend to revile the very idea of tolerating or being active evil but are generally alright with passive or apathetic evil. While active evil requires much rarer emotions like hatred or constant fear, passive evil is something that everyone participates in one time or the other and is extremely easy to take to great lengths just because it supports one's own convenience.

I think that while some kind of active genocide of the poor is very unlikely there is a genuine chance of the rich just not caring and letting "nature take its course" so to speak. Giving just enough to avoid some kind of mass violent movement as the average person slowly gets overtaken by hopelessness and depression. Another is the creation of entirely useless but highly demanding jobs to continue an undead version of today's economy just to keep people too tired to ask for more.

These options are all generalised, but my point is that there's a lot of extremely awful outcomes that do not require some kind of reverse Leninist "kill all the poor" stance.

Now, do i think that this is guaranteed or even likely? No. But the problem with discourse on this sub is that either side of the argument seems to consider it a strange binary and rarely ever admit any possibility but their own specific doom fantasy or regular fantasy.

I think extremely negative scenarios need to be discussed at length because we cannot afford them to occur, even if everyone thinks the chances are small. I'm all for discussing the positive effects of ai but there's a lot less benefit in my mind to discussing vaguely good scenarios rather than analysing the worst cases and possible ways to prevent them, no matter how likely one thinks they are to occur.

Doomerism is bad but extreme optimism is outright dangerous before we get to a good scenario.

Step one would be disarming the poor to minimize resistance. This has already been done pretty much everywhere on earth with the exception of American, Africa and now Afghanistan. I would expect it to happen in America fairly swiftly over the next decade because of the wealth concentrated in that region.

I would not expect a mass culling based on net worth or skill set, but culling individuals based on behavior analysis is quite likely. When predictive AI is skilled enough to identify individuals with mental health issues early, mandatory treatment will become a thing. It would also make sense if the people that can't be cured with 100% reliability would "disappear".

Of course death wouldn't make sense. They want slaves, or near zero-cost labor. Ever hear of sweat shops?

a good enough AI could make them like the Illuminati with full control and little trace to be found

>Rich people do not see themselves as a collective in-group,

No, they totally do. They just try to downplay that when talking to outsiders.

Honestly, the easiest way I see them achieving this is just not using a workforce and letting everyone starve and prepare for when the economy crashes into the literal core of the earth. They could easily have enough food ready as they see the crash coming or in the middle of it, they still would have buying power above others, especially for labor.

Edit: before we get too deep here, i understand their power would go with all that and it would be a lose-lose scenario, but i don't believe the wealthy and powerful would weigh that foresight over cutting labor costs and i see when the process starts they could stonewall any progress to feeding the poor.

1 well built robot could kill the entire population if it has enough abilities

Billionaires say that they are humble and caring from their private islands and jets, but democracy gets in the way. People want to hang onto their jobs and way of life. They will vote for the party that would protect them. They will go on strikes. Sounds inconvenient for the billionaires.

TLDR

The author argues that the scenario of a global conspiracy by the rich to kill off the poor is not feasible. The author lists several reasons why this plan is unlikely to happen, including the fact that rich people are not a collective in-group and are not cooperative team players. Additionally, it is impossible to synchronize their actions perfectly, and there will be infighting, incompetence, and resource drain. The author also points out that rich people are not universally evil and some may have moral compasses and be against mass genocide. Furthermore, executing such a plan would require logistics, production, and storage of massive numbers of killer robots, which would be glaringly obvious. Governments would also have to do nothing, and it is more likely that they would develop and use the technology for their own purposes. Finally, even if the rich did succeed in killing off the poor, they would still have to share the spoils and are likely to turn on each other.

If y’all don’t want this all over insta I suggest you unban me in cybersecurity who is your awww friend?

Starting to mentally fatigue after so many responses so I'm probably going to dial back on posting them.

Culling the normies only needs one rich person with the necessary resources. I nominate Elon Musk. He will have the resources and there is a good chance he has the mindset.

I agree. It also doesn't make sense why the rich would want that power in the first place. The most likely thing they could want is a bunker with full dive VR to live out any existence they want.

They won't use a blunt instrument like a "robot army". An engineered virus for which only they are vaccinated, nanobots the clog arteries or a poison for which they only have the antidote are far more likely scenarios. I read a novel recently where robots poisoned all the fresh water with lead.

It just takes one rich guy right?

With the right connection they can develop a virus.

With the right amount of money they can buy a massive robot army.

Climate change would be the main reason to cull the global population. If you were infinitely wealthy and humans were infesting your only planet, you might be inclined to deal with the infestation.

You're thinking about things in terms of a movie, not in terms of reality. Things don't happen in one big climatic event, they're a chain of smaller events. The unthinkable is unthinkable until it isn't. It's a process, not an event, as they say.

So in this case the murder dogs and venom bees don't show up on the front end of the apocalypse. They're cleanup on the back end. Of a disastrously bad timeline where an Epstein or fascist cult manages to maneuver themselves into a dominant position.

At the end of the day, everything is about power. Being able to replace people with robots obviously dramatically tilts the scale even further in favor of capital over labor.

As you say, "why would they want to get rid of people" can just as easily be flipped to "why would they want to help people."

We live in a happy world where "let them die" is a common attitude towards healthcare and the homeless, and those in positions in power are 100% happy to keep things that way, or make it even worse.

Technology has made things better than the past and I believe it's the only way to avoid dooooom for the future, but I understand nothing is a guarantee.

Malice and neglect, the yin-yang vital essence of the conservatives and liberals, will be the start of social change. How it will end, no one knows. Not me, not you. Even Ray Kurzweil thinks SGI has a 50/50 shot of being "good" for humanity as a whole, and he always notes that he's considered by many as something of an optimist.

Always remember the spirit of the anthropic principle and survivor's bias: things only worked out so incredibly well in the past only because they had to for you to be here to see it. The dead and those without the leisure and means to casually chat on internet forums, might have other opinions.

>Like, what do the actually gain from it?

> More land?

> More resources?

> They can get infinite of both. And could kick anyone they wanted dout of their land at a moment's notice.

Uh... yeah? They could have all the atoms by kicking everyone off of their planet?

Here's the rules for rulers video so you can learn more about how power structures work, and how the elites do very much think of themselves as a collective in-group. tldr: They're pirate ships that need to constantly acquire more loot and rents to feed themselves. If you're not expanding, you're shrinking.

OP have you been living under the rock for past 2 years ?? Kill jab is exactly how they start curling people en mass!

They, wouldn't use ai and a robot army to do any of this. The logistics of a culling would be quite elementary if you weren't using robots.. There are several viable ways.

A highly transmissable virus, or pathogen with a long dormant phase, and a near 100% death rate. By the time symptoms start popping up from the contamination of say, corn syrup, or any food staple, the overwhelming majority of the world would already have been exposed.

Or one could introduce chemical agents designed to sterilize over long periods of consumption, or to initiate incurable disease early in life. (The long game)

A robot army is infinitely more work, and more complex, and provides significantly less reward.

Ai has already unlocked an unimaginable amount of new proteins and chemicals.. it will soon unlock the downright cornucopia of genetic engineering... Imagine mosquitos that reproduce every time they bite someone. Eggs enter the circulatory system, hatch, and grow inside the body. Nothing is stopping this, except resources and intelligence, both of which will be available aplenty post agi.

You're right that there is little incentive to do this, but you only need it to happen one time. Perhaps 99.9999999% of the elites or people in general won't seek such an outcome, but all it would take is 1.

Hopefully I'm just a negative Nancy, with an overactive imagination.