Thatingles t1_jd0ku63 wrote
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.
Eleganos OP t1_jd0ncg2 wrote
Honestly, the accidental route is more than plausible, small scale.
Issue is, when we see a culling happening in one country due to the course of events you point out, no sane person is going to stay complacent and wait for it to happen to them too.
It has to happen 'everywhere' and 'all at once' for the the organic route to occur globally for a successful poor people genocide. Maybe when they're in power they'd coordinate to make it so after the fact, but power hungry megalomaniac are enot known for their cooperation, and are very much known for having a 'fuck you got mine' mindset.
And it would still require the group with power to unanimously want us all dead. Lots of rich and powerful folk are egomaniacs who need throngs of brain dead supporters to stock their egos. Maybe they're th eonly ones who live, but it still means the lower classes get to survive.
One way I'd put it is your scenario is as likely to happen sometime this century as an organic worldwide communist revolution would have been last century. All the pieces in play, right motivations, means are available, so on and so forth.
Reason communist revolution never happened is in alot of places people just couldn't be bothered to seize the means of production.
In this scenario, I really think that the rich just wouldn't care about putting in the effort. If they've basically won, why bother doing a coup de grace when you can instead parade your victory to the starving masses for the rest of time (if their AGI doesn't kill them all off at some point).
Anyways, I sent see America, Britain, China, Australia, Japan, Israel, France, Germany, and so on all suffering this exact centric amongst them, sl again, it's not really feasible in scale to begin with.
All it takes is one nation with undisclosed nukes or the will and means to aquire them to secure their continued existences and that of their allies via M.A.D., if not risk using them to get rid of the problem at the source.
mescalelf t1_jd1ctis wrote
They could roll out next-gen LLM-powered disinformation/agitation bots and rapidly turn people across the world against their neighbors over all sorts of locally-contentious topics—and LLMs are capable of accounting for that context.
Why do most of the dirty work with physical (autonomous) weapons when you can just get your “enemies” (us) to kill each other? Then it’s just a matter of mopping up. This doesn’t even necessarily take a massive conspiracy, either, as it’s a lot easier to covertly “stockpile” computing power + bandwidth than to stockpile drones or other autonomous weapons.
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