Artificial Intelligence – Page 5 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

A Tale Of Two Koreas: Dystopia On The Half-Shell

“From what I hear, which isn’t much, Iran financed it and North Korea supplied the bombs.” – Jericho

North Korea shows off it’s newly developed portable Internet device. (All memes as-found)

Imagine living in a Korea where:

a small group of corrupt elite wield godlike powers over the government and citizens,
kids work in factories at the age of less than 10, or, toil in school for up to 18 hours a day to study for a chance to please that same elite who control the entire country,
most non-elite live in drab, gray (or is it grey?) apartments with the main view of . . . other apartments,
adults work long hours in a job that mainly serves to feed the elite,
the fertility rate is 0.78, meaning life is so awful that parents don’t want to bring babies into it, meaning the population will be cut by more half each generation, and
the kids listen to K-Pop.

Yeah. South Korea.

You know, I know people love to call certain places hellholes while praising others as shiny beacons of progress, mainly due to one being capitalist and one being communist.

I get it. I hate communism, too.

I had a horrible dream last night that Artificial Intelligence controlled our lives, and then, thankfully, the alarm on my Alexa® went off and woke me up and then Alexa® went through my to-do list.

But what if I told you that sometimes the “better” option of capitalism is just a prettier prison?

In South Korea, a tiny cabal of families runs the show like they’re the Sopranos, but with better electronics, worse haircuts, and no fear of the FBI. These aren’t your average mafia dons; we’re talking about chaebols. Chaebols are massive conglomerates that have tentacles that extend all the way through all parts of society, like the corporation you work for owning your fridge, car, and your grandma’s pacemaker.

Take the Lee family at Samsung®: they’re not just peddling phones with spyware straight from the NSA, nope. In South Korea, they have fingers in everything from shipbuilding to life insurance to health care to construction to hotels in about 80 different companies that comprise about 22% of the South Korean economy.

Hell, if you sneeze in this country, there’s probably a Samsung tissue waiting to catch it. And when Daddy Lee gets nabbed for bribery and attempted bribery (again), does the empire crumble?

Nope, Lee Junior slides right in.

Is the guy who does security on Samsung™ phones the guardian of the galaxy?

Then there’s the Chung clan over at Hyundai®. These folks don’t just make cars. Nope. Hyundai builds cities, runs banks, and probably have a secret lab cloning K-Pop idols, Gangnam-style.

Power gets handed down generation to generation, and if there’s a whiff of scandal? Poof, it vanishes faster than a North Korean dissident.

Embezzlement?

Tax evasion?

Those are just another boring Tuesday for these overlords. They operate above the law, pulling strings in government like K-Y® covered puppet masters at a marionette orgy (I’m sorry I thought of that, but now you have to think of that, too).

I don’t know how to stop a killer sex bot, but I do know how to stop a hand puppet: disarm it.

These huge conglomerates eternal, sucking up wealth while the average South Korean fights over scraps. Capitalism is great at building stuff, sure, but when it goes full oligarch, it’s like giving all the Monopoly® money to the banker (drunk Aunt Betty) and listening to her tell everyone else to enjoy passing Go© without collecting $200 and then it’s the Thanksgiving from Hell and Uncle L.T. won’t stop talking about golf.

Excuse me. Some past-life trauma.

I’m not against wealth concentration when it comes because people created actual wealth in society. I think people should be rewarded for making the lives of others better. But South Korea? The top families make money because they control all the pathways of wealth creation and the government.

I’d bet they’re gonna make a move on religion, next.

Bold statement time: capitalism alone doesn’t equal freedom; and in South Korea it is just feudalism (which, I remind you, was also capitalism) with neon-colored LED lights.

And it gets worse. What really inspired me to write this one was about the kids. The South Korean economy is a beast that demands blood sacrifices, starting young. Kids are out there hustling like they’re in a Dickens novel, but instead of cleaning chimneys, it’s cram schools that make American homework look like recess.

I’d make a joke but I want to be seen as mining my own business.

For the grown-ups, it’s worse: 60-80 hour weeks are the norm, turning humans into zombies shuffling through cubicles. Monotonous? Try soul-crushing, like being stuck in the Matrix but without the cool kung fu and hot chicks in skin-tight latex. Adults are coding, welding, or staring at screens till their eyes cross, all for a paycheck that barely covers rent. And that’s the lucky ones – the effective unemployment rate flirts on a regular basis with 25%.

And speaking of rent—everyone’s jammed into these towering commie-blocks, gray slabs of despair that make Brutalist architecture look inspiring. Check it out on Google™ Maps© Streetview®. It’s like The Sims® but with new Depression Mode enabled: tiny apartments where families stack like cordwood, dreaming of escape but too exhausted to move.

The place where it gets really grim is that they’re working themselves to death. South Korean birthrates are in the toilet, flushing away the future one non-existent kid at a time.

It takes 2.1 kids per woman to keep a population stable. In South Korea, it’s 0.78 kids per woman. In about 100 years, that might mean that instead of 55 million serfs potential employees Samsung® might only have a just a few over 7.5 million left.

This isn’t sustainable; it’s societal suicide by spreadsheet.

You know what jokes about low birthrates aren’t? Childish.

Everyone thinks it South Korea is all Squid Games and high-speed internet, but peel back the veneer, and it’s a dystopia where families (well, not all families) get ground to dust. Sure, they’ve got flashy tech, but at what cost?

Their souls, apparently.

Now, let’s cross that fortified border to the hermit kingdom of North Korea, where the dystopia’s got a different flavor but the same aftertaste of oppression. Point by point, because why not?

Corrupt Clique in Charge: Instead of chaebol families, it’s the Kim dynasty. Power passes from Kim to Kim like a Habsburg chin. Voting? You don’t vote on a living god. The elite live like it’s a South Korean oligarchy, but make theirs communist, so, uniforms and marching and Soviet-tech. So, tie.
Economic Shackles on Steroids: Child labor? Oh yeah, but it’s “patriotic duty” with Nork kids harvesting crops or building monuments to Stalin instead of studying like their southern counterparts. The system is a joke, with rations so meager you’d think calories were capitalist spies. Families toil in state farms or factories, nukes, missiles, and spare MiG parts while the Kim family imports Twix® and Coors™. The South doesn’t have death camps, but I’m not sure if that’s good or bad at this point, so, tie.

This definitely hurt the North’s score.

Soul-Sucking Slog: Just like being at the Democratic National Convention, life in North Korea is a parade of propaganda and forced smiles, living in actual commie-blocks that crumble like the regime’s promises. Monotonous work? Try endless marches and indoctrination sessions. It’s like 1984 but with worse food even than English food. I’ll give this to the South, since they come here from time to time, and I’ve never had a North Korean visit.

What is this, a school for ants?

Birthrates Below Replacement: Around 1.9 kids per woman, much, much better than the South, so eventually there will be more Norks than replaceable Samsung® assets. Besides, who wants to raise a family when Junior might rat you out for humming the Brady Bunch theme? This one goes solidly to North Korea.
K-Pop Equivalent? Nope, just state anthems praising the Dear Leader. I’ve got to give this to North Korea.

If black people move there, will they make K-Rap?

Point total? To the North.

Okay, if I had to pick, I certainly wouldn’t pick the North, but let’s be honest, the South is awful as well. I’ve been trying to make this point again and again: capitalism is an economic system, and it’s only a useful economic system if it generates wealth and supports families. When capitalism captures the systems of government the people begin to look like property, exactly like people look to communists. In Korea, people are either cogs or convicts.

The Founders didn’t mention capitalism or socialism, they just turned people loose with guns and a few rules and let them figure it out. In the West today, business wants to import foreigners to become better cogs, and the GloboLeft wants to import hordes of foreigners who are used to their government treating them like convicts.

Though on the bright side, my Samsung™ phone has lasted for years . . .

The A.I. Bubble: Two Outcomes

“The ban on research and development into artificial intelligence is, as we all know, a holdover from the Cylon Wars.” – Battlestar Galactica (2004)

When I asked my mom if I was ugly, she said, “I’ve told you not to talk to me in public.” (All memes as found.)

I remember the dotcom bubble.

Back in the late ’90s, everyone was throwing cash at anything with a “.com” slapped on it. Anything. Take Pets.com™, which had the idea that they could take orders for dog food online and that would lead to them being worth a trillion dollars. Instead? They spent $11.8 million on ads which resulted in $619,000 of total sales. But wait, there’s more! Their business strategy was to sell their products at 30% of what they paid for them!

Genius! I suppose they thought they could make it up on volume?

That’s just one example, and there are thousands of companies that burned through money like cocaine-addled chipmunks going through nuts. Billions of dollars vanished, but hey, at least we got Jeff Bezos managed to get a slightly used wife out of it.

Fast-forward to 2025, and we just may be in Dotcom 2.0: the AI edition.

This time, it’s not websites filled with dancing hamsters. Nope. Data centers are sprouting like marijuana in a Colorado hippie’s backyard. Chipsets are piling up like Indians in Canada. The spending is insane on this bubble, and if history’s any guide, the pop could echo for decades.

The source of this frothy mess?

Massive investments in AI infrastructure. In the first half of 2025 alone, spending on AI data centers and related gear added more to U.S. GDP growth than all consumer spending combined. This is about $75 billion from AI infra versus $69 billion from folks buying lattes and lawnmowers.

I tried to get the lid of my pen for ten minutes. Nothing was working. Then it clicked.

That’s right: Big Tech’s server farms are propping up the economy more than shopping. Companies like Microsoft®, Google®, and Meta® are pouring trillions into building these behemoths, buying up NVIDIA® chips like they’re the last Twinkies® in a zombie apocalypse. It’s not just servers; it’s cooling systems, fiber optics, and enough wiring for George Bailey to finally lasso the Moon.

Why?

Because AI needs compute power like a teenager needs a cell phone: continually and without gratitude.

So, how long can this bender go on before someone yells “last call”?

Analysts are projecting explosive growth through 2030 but they also told people that Pets.com® made sense. Bubbles don’t burst on schedule, they pop when reality bites. McKinsey estimates we’ll need $6.7 trillion worldwide by 2030 just to keep up with compute demands from the various AI products, while the global AI data center market is forecasted to balloon from $236 billion in 2025 to $933 billion by 2030, growing at a scorching 31.6% yearly.

Where will the power come from? 10 gigawatts of new data center capacity will break ground this year alone, with construction at record levels and power transmission delays stretching to four years in some spots.

Before electricity, were people sentenced to death in the acoustic chair?

Let’s extrapolate this:

If spending keeps doubling every couple of years, as it has since ChatGPT lit the fuse, we’re looking at a timeline where the frenzy peaks around 2028-2030. By then, data centers could consume as much electricity as Gavin Newsom’s blow dryer, and the supply chain for chips and rare earth metals starts buckling.

Analysts predict data center power demand surging, but what if AI hits diminishing returns? We’ve seen it before: the dotcom buildout assumed infinite internet growth, but when the stunning genius of selling products for 70% less than you bought them for didn’t pay off, the house of cards folded. Rapidly.

If AI doesn’t deliver massive productivity gains or the company can’t figure out how to make it up on volume, investors pull the plug. My guess? This bubble could inflate for another 3-5 years, then deflates when ROI reports come in looking like a kid’s lemonade stand profits for some companies.

Salmon don’t watch cable TV. They prefer streams.

It’s not just the data centers themselves; the ripple effects are creating mini-bubbles in related bits of the economy. AI’s thirst for electric power is turning it into the new oil. The International Energy Agency projects global data center electricity demand more than doubling by 2030 to 945 terawatt-hours, enough to power Australia several times over if they ever figure out electricity.

This means billions funneled into new power plants, grid upgrades, just to keep the lights on in these silicon sweatshops. Utilities are scrambling: nuclear restarts, solar fields the size of small states, and even deals with fusion startups that sound more sci-fi than spreadsheet. This is trillions spent on infrastructure, from transmission lines to cooling systems that guzzle water like a camel in the Sahara. If the bubble bursts, we’re left with ghost grids and stranded assets, much like the fiber optic cables buried post-dotcom that still haunt telecom balance sheets.

What do a ring, a baby, and a threesome have in common? None of them are going to save a relationship.

What happens if AI reaches its mature end-state? We’re talking Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) where machines that can do any intellectual task a human can, not to mention Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), where they outthink us like we’re Mexican mall lawyers trying to fix a copier.

Some whisper we might already be there, with models like Grok™ or whatever OpenAI®’s cooking up blurring the lines. But assuming we hit it soon, the economy does a backflip.

In the AGI/ASI world, productivity explodes: AI handles everything from coding to curing cancer, slashing costs and boosting output.

But jobs? Poof.

Hey, let’s see it take a 15 minute coffee break.

Economists at AEI outline scenarios where AGI displaces masses of workers: truck drivers, lawyers, artists. Optimists say it will augment humanity, creating new gigs in “AI wrangling” or whatever.

The dark side for this case: inequality skyrockets. A few tech overlords own the AIs, reaping trillions, while the rest scramble for UBI scraps.

Civilization-wise, it’s transformative: endless innovation, but if ASI “solves” economics without humans, we enter a post-scarcity utopia . . . or dystopia, where labor is worthless and purpose is a luxury.

If we’ve hit AGI/ASI now (debatable, but let’s play along), the bubble accelerates short-term as companies race to integrate, then crashes when overcapacity hits. Data centers become obsolete overnight if ASI optimizes compute down to a laptop. The fallout? Trillions in sunk costs, like building railroads right before cars took over.

Scooby Doo® taught many kids that if they smoked enough pot, their dog would talk and help them look for snacks.

If AI fails (and there is no sign of this) we end up in, at least, a dotcom-style recession.

At least.

If AI succeeds, in the best case we end up in a strange, post-scarcity world, but a world that hardly needs us.

I guess we could make it up on volume?

It Came From . . . 1995

“Man, there’s not a year that goes by, not a year, that I don’t read about some escalator accident involving some bastard kid that could’ve easily been avoided had some parent, I don’t care which one, but some parent conditioned him to fear and respect the escalator.” – Mallrats

Is that Neandergibson? Joe Piscopo?

While the 1980s allowed for gonzo productions of very uneven quality to become classics (Better Off Dead, for instance) the 1990s box office was much more crowded and the studios began to spend even more on the films. I’d say that a random movie from 1995 was more professionally made than a random movie from any year in the 1980s, but had a lot less heart.

As to the continuation of the series, I’m not sure if we’ll do 1996 or end it here. I think I’m done with the 1970s, though I have another idea that amuses me that we’ll try in late August. As always, I’m also willing to consider lists of genre flicks, but pretty soon that ends up with movies no one ever saw.

As usual, sequels are excluded on the list. I don’t consider Mallrats a sequel. Thankfully, I make the rules. You may appeal. It will be denied.

As an aside, I don’t think you can overestimate the propaganda impact of films. Just like listening to music puts your brain into a state of suggestable hypnosis (which is why I like to listen to kick-ass music rather than sad stuff most days) so does film. Film takes the next dimension above music by adding visual stimulus, making the hypnosis even more effective. What I take in does impact me, so I consider that more and more as I grow older and as it’s thrown in our faces with the last decade’s worth of propaganda films. I understand now why some don’t like horror films for just that reason. I do like them, still, but I’ve become much more selective as to what I let in the transom.

Speaking of which . . . .

That poster gives me tentacles. I mean tingles. And it looks like Ralph Macchio.

In the Mouth of Madness – I love good Lovecraftian horror. Cosmic horror is at its best when it sketches a universe of limitless expanse where we’re just nubs sitting in the darkness while titanic forces beyond our understanding play out around us. It’s like whistling through the graveyard, if you will. When I first saw In the Mouth of Madness I hated it, because I didn’t get it. Now? My opinion is that it’s great cosmic horror, and shows off Sam Neill as he unwittingly brings about the end of the world. With popcorn. Like most of Carpenter’s work, it has a large following, but was box office poison. But he gets the last laugh in this one.

I have a particular set of skills. Murder and guitar solos.

Rob Roy – Scots fighting to be fiercely independent, while being swindled and taken advantage of by rape-y foreigners? If only they would do that in 2025. Tim Roth steals the show in a perfectly creepy performance with hair appropriate for Isaac Newton if he played guitar for Queen®. It did okay at the box office.

If you’ve seen the movie, this makes a little bit of sense.

Crimson Tide – Another submarine movie because, well, why not? In this one, though, Tony Scott (same guy who cooked a Goose in Top Gun) gets the most out of Denzel Washington and the late Gene Hackman. To be clear, Hackman was still alive during the movie. The two are officers on a nuclear missile submarine that have to decide if they’re going to shoot off nuclear missiles after losing communications with Starfleet®. Me? I would have launched the missiles because that’s one way to get in the history books.

Should this one be called “Bravefelt”?

Braveheart – Tons of historical inaccuracy? Check. Mel Gibson with more hair than an 80’s glam band? Check. Ludicrously long runtime of nearly three hours? Also check. In spite of these things, this was a huge hit. Swords. Women. Bravery. Sophie Marceau at her peak Marceau-ness. What’s not to love?

I still remember when he outran Kevin Spacey to maintain his virginity in the climax.

Apollo 13 – This movie follows the life of a young transgender long-distance runner (Tom Hanks) who needs an older mentor (Kevin Bacon) to buy him shoes because he grew up in a third-world country that couldn’t afford to have a Nike® store or electricity or food.

I need to post this on Rob’s X® feed.

Judge Dredd – Some comic book purists don’t like this version because in the comic books Dredd never takes off his helmet, but Stallone wanted to show off his hair. The (much darker) 2012 reboot Dredd features a Dredd™ that always covers his hedd. I didn’t care, really, since I found this movie both stupid and hilarious and one of Rob Schneider’s best roles. Huge flop. I wouldn’t recommend it, but yet I enjoyed it. Does that mean I hate myself? Anyway, the 2012 version is a much better movie.

Wait, what if every suspect was Rob Schneider? That would be wacky!

The Usual Suspects – Cost $6 million, made nearly $70 million. This one gets the most out of fairly talented cast in a crime mystery, and I will admit that the ending did surprise me when I watched it on a rental VHS tape from Blockbuster™, because I did not know that late fees could get that high. I still don’t know how the tape ended up behind the couch. Maybe it was Keyser Söze?

Wow, those guys are more swole than I recalled. The 90s rocked!

Mallrats – A $6 million dollar budget. $2 million in ticket sales. I think the budget skips all the advertisement for this thing – you couldn’t go anywhere young adults were in 1995 without seeing ads for this movie months before it came out. This movie is a very stupid comedy that brings us Jason Lee (My Name is Earl) as a guy on a quest to get his girlfriend back. I think. It’s funny in a juvenile way, but was also the product of its time. Watched it with my boys, they thought it was hilarious, but were also fascinated, like anthropologists studying a world that existed a thousand years ago.

I hope it’s as good as the sequel to Hamlet.

Leaving Las Vegas – Darkest movie on this list. Watched it once, not sure I have it in me to watch it again. The guy who wrote the semi-autographical novel it was based on killed himself when he found out it was going to be a movie. Guess he really, really, really, really didn’t like Nic Cage.

Heat – I was debating if I was going to do “It Came From . . . . 1995” at all, but the meme above (as found) convinced me that I should. Big hit that I somehow missed and watched a few years ago after Aesop mentioned it. No weapons were injured during the filming of this movie, but not for lack of ammo. Thank heavens Sig® hadn’t introduced the P320™ yet or else half of the ammo fired wouldn’t have needed an actor fanning the trigger. Related news: I hear Alec Baldwin is going to be Sig©’s spokesman.

Four Rooms or Fur Rooms?

Four Rooms – An anthology film that I saw in an arthouse theater (the only time I’ve ever been to one) with a buddy. I guess being in an arthouse theater is with another dude is the gayest thing I’ve ever done in my life, besides that one time I had a wine cooler. Regardless, I enjoyed it, since each one of the four films was essentially a joke tied together by Tim Roth’s best comedic performance. The first film is by far the weakest, but, I can’t call it awful because, boobs.

“Waiter, there’s a rubber chicken in my soup.”
“No there isn’t.”
“Yes, there is. What is it doing there.”
“The backstroke, I believe.”
Now for something completely different.

12 Monkeys – Is he crazy, or is it time travel? Why not both? Terry Gilliam was generally the weakest member of Monty Python®, but he’s done much better as a director. Regardless, this movie brings together Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt in roles very much against the stuff they normally did, with Pitt even getting nominated for an Oscar™.

Not included? Seven. Species. Strange Days. Sense and Sensibility. Really, any movie starting with ‘S’ from 1995. I kid. Things to do in Denver When You’re Dead also nearly made the list.

What did I miss?

It Came From . . . Patriotism

“Freedom!” – Braveheart

“The most difficult thing about being humble is not being able to brag about it.” – George S. Patton

Housekeeping: We should be a go on podcast tomorrow night, though I’m on the fence on a Friday post, as I just might take the day off.

I’ll change things up a bit due to Fourth of July (or as it’s known in the metric world “Friday”), and have a slightly different take on films this month – patriotic films. In this, I don’t necessarily confine the patriots in question to entirely American patriots – I do allow some room for a couple of films that show patriotism from other cultures. These are in something of an order, but don’t put too much on that. Let’s just say the easiest to include on the list are first, and the ones that just barely made it are at the bottom.

I will say, I liked the way the A.I. posters turned out this time.

So, here are my top 10 patriotic movies:

No man could salute like Patton. At least, no human man.

Patton

George S. Patton knew he was going to be a general in the United States Army from when he was a child. He lived that life to become the enigma that George C. Scott portrayed perfectly on screen. Patton wanted glory, but also was personally filled with bravery and admired the men who displayed it. Patton was for an America ruled by Americans, and was willing to lead hundreds of thousands of men to capture 82,000 square miles (6.3 megaliters) of Europe and capturing nearly a million enemy soldiers.

No matter how he tried to retire, they kept dragging him back in.

The Patriot

How could I skip this movie? Well, I couldn’t. The United States wasn’t given to Americans, it was willed into existence by men such as the one played by St. Mel of Gibson in this film. Interestingly (to me at least), the main character is pulled into military service not because of his zeal to kick the British out of the colonies. Nope. His motivation is personal – his son being killed by a British officer untouchable by justice.

If he had been born in 1970, he’d have been William Wallace, Guardian of Scotland and Walmart® greeter.

Braveheart

I warned you that not all films would show strictly American patriotism, and this one chronicles the life of William Wallace, the Scottish rebel who fought against England to attempt to free Scotland. He failed to free Scotland, but it wasn’t long afterwards that Robert the Bruce did lead my ancestors against my other ancestors to win freedom. Braveheart clocks in at somewhere close to three hours, but doesn’t seem that long. A good film, and St. Mel again chews up the scenery.

Is that a French submarine surrendering?

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

One of my favorite movies. A captain, very well played by Russell Crowe takes his ship on a journey to fight the French, who only surrendered once in this film. This line, about Lord Nelson tells the tale: “The second time… The second time he told me a story… about how someone offered him a boat cloak on a cold night. And he said no, he didn’t need it. That he was quite warm. His zeal for his king and country kept him warm. I know it sounds absurb, and were it from another man, you’d cry out “Oh, what pitiful stuff” and dismiss it as mere enthusiasm. But with Nelson… you felt your heart glow.”

The Soviets weren’t expecting what they got when they parachuted into Henson, Colorado.

Red Dawn

1984 was Reagan’s year. He had made it clear that the United States would stand toe-to-toe with the Soviet Union, and would win. At that point, the country was together much more so than now, and you can see it in the vote total Ronnie got for re-election. A movie like Red Dawn was a slam dunk – plucky American teenagers being insurgent guerillas against an invading multicultural force of commies. Huh – that was back when we could sense danger, I guess.

Well, I guess we know what they serve there now.

300

Submit? To you? Here? In Sparta? No. Because . . . This. Is. Sparta. Leonidas fought against all odds to contain the Persian horde from entering Greece because that’s patriotism. Did he die? Yes. Gloriously. So gloriously that he’ll be remembered in 10,000 years. I think that’s how long the A.I.’s memory cache will last.

I can hear Kenny Loggins now, singing about Maverick after he lost his pilot’s license, “I waited in the loading zone . . . “

Top Gun: Maverick

I found this a much better film than the original. I always thought the original was boy meets girl, but with fighter jets. Here? It’s all about the mission. And Tom Cruise flying that F-14 Tomcat one last time before Social Security kicks in.

“Houston, we seem to have two more problems.”

Apollo 13

Not all patriotic films have to do with war, and Apollo 13 is a good example. The movie is about Americans fighting to win the Space Race and get to the Moon. Oh, we did that already? NASA has made it boring? Well, let’s see how they do if their ship explodes while they’re the farthest away from Earth that anyone besides a few other Americans have been. Excellently plotted, filmed, and told by an ensemble cast of great actors led by Tom Hanks, it’s a movie I can just start watching from any point and enjoy.

Wonder how this would have gone if all the characters were played by Tom Cruise, like some old Peter Sellers movie?

Saving Private Ryan Cruise

This one was the last on my list. I’m not sure why. It does feature the everyman (Hanks) who sacrificed everything because that’s what the orders said to do. It features the shared burden of that sacrifice on those who survive. It’s stunningly filmed, and, though the story drags a bit in the middle, is tense. I think that the reason that it’s here is that it’s the film I’d simply be least likely to re-watch of all of these. YMMV.

If this was a top 10 list – it is one shy. I left room for one I missed or didn’t think about.

What did I miss? Other notable films that nearly made the list include: Midway, We Were Soldiers, The Green Berets, Gettysburg, and Gods and Generals. Gettysburg honestly had the best chance, but I would have had to watch it again, and the movie lasts about 74 hours, or two hours longer than the battle itself. I kid. It’s 271 minutes, or 27.1 metric hours.

The Three Horsemen and One Bikini of the Apocalypse

“Apocalypse cow? Apocalypse wow!” – The Tick (2001)

I love this joke like there’s no tomorrow.

I. Job Replacement.
The Multicultural West.
The Fiat Financial House of Cards.
Sydney Sweeny’s bikini.

Each of these, if dealt with on its own, presents a danger as great as being between Gavin Newsom and a camera. But it is likely something we could work through as a country peacefully. Heck, maybe even two of the three, though that’s difficult, and history has the receipts:

For example, when the United States was a nation, we worked through the Great Depression. The Great Depression was likely brought about at the fundamental level from the transformation of the nation from an agrarian society driven by horsepower to a manufacturing colossus driven by iron, steam, and electricity. Sort of if A.I. were cars and assembly line production, but covered in tasty Radium®.

If a radioactive spider makes Spiderman®, would a radioactive dog create Doberman®?

Of course there was a finance side of the Great Depression. It was egged on by a stock market mania, margin credit, and the optimism brought about by new technology. Stocks never go down, right? That creates a bumpy road for a bit. But, as we were a singular people, we got through it.

I mean, the single bloodiest war in human history counted as a bit of a bumpy road, right?

We also dealt with multi-cultural forces in America in our history.

First, the founders only allowed in Western Europeans,
Second by fighting, defeating, and corralling Indians (some of them are still sore about this),
And, finally, by blocking out many non-Western Europeans with the Immigration Act of 1924 since we already had the recipes for all their good food.

1924 was when we as a nation realized that we were getting too much “diversity” too quickly and saw that certain groups of foreigners couldn’t or wouldn’t assimilate and never be Americans. We dealt with that in a calm manner and got picky and sorted diversity like a bouncer at a cartel nightclub. We maintained (for a time) the basic ethnic makeup of the United States – we didn’t throw them out, but we made sure we’d outnumber them.

I wonder if he and his siblings were born apart?

We dealt with fiat currency in the wake of the Revolutionary War victory when the phrase “isn’t worth a Continental” referred to the money printing excesses that led to the Constitutional Convention and the Constitutional clause of “No state shall coin money, emit bills of credit, or make any thing but cold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts.” The nation survived, though it did end up changing our form of government entirely.

Lincoln floated fake cash during the Civil War to pay for it, and that could arguably be said to have started “The Long Depression” – a hangover period from 1873-1896 as we vomited out all of that fiat money. The Long Depression was also exacerbated by the transition of the American manufacturing from craftsmen to big factories.

The establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank™ followed by Nixon ignoring the clear intent of that clause in 1971 led to the crack-up we see today. Money, gold and silver, has been replaced by cash which is too expensive to print – we can just use ones and zeroes.

I’ve written about all of these three separately, and for the most part, we as a nation were able to make it through, but it’s important that we realize that we’re dealing with all three of these leading to a crisis right now when we are observably no longer a nation.

The ICE agent in Los Angeles needs National Guard and Marine protection for their anxiety, I heard on the news. Something about his panic attacks.

The first is A.I. It has already been a steamroller that has eliminated tens of thousands of jobs. I would expect that soon enough it will be hundreds of thousands. Recently, I called up my bank to do some banking. The transaction wasn’t unique, it probably happens thousands of times a day. The person I was talking to, “Mitch” had a perfect Midwestern accent. What tipped me off was that “Mitch” didn’t connect the reason for the error to the resolution. “Mitch” transferred me to “Anna” because he wasn’t authorized to grant a request.

“Anna” had, of course, the thickest Indian accent – the kind that is so poorly pronounced that it is nearly unintelligible if fast. Her actual name was probably something like Ananneedanothasylabble-Ganish-Prajeeta. At that moment that the smart Midwestern dude transfers the call to a barely verbal woman in Ramamamadingpoopabad, I realized that Mitch was an A.I.

As an anon mentioned on my last post on A.I., “Think about all of the Indian scammers out there today . . . Now think about what happens if AI wipes out most of the call center and coding jobs causing most of India’s 1.3 billion people to be out of work. It’s going to get ugly.” He had a point. A.I. is going to make it too expensive to pay Indians pennies a day just to steal money from old ladies. This is India’s worst nightmare.

I always wondered how you got down from an elephant, then Pa Wilder told me that you get down from a goose.

This scenario requires no Artificial Superintelligence. This requires only the application of existing capabilities. Said differently: ChatGPT 4.0® already has an I.Q. greater than three-quarters of the Subcontinent.

This has implications, but match it with the house of cards that is the world financial system. That thing was already strained tighter than Syndey Sweeney’s bikini holding in the all the printed money flooding in from the United States and the world. A country like India, unable to feed all the Indians, will collapse. No jobs. No prospects of jobs.

Though the research for tonight was fun.

But it will be, perhaps, worst in the West. On top of the economic dislocation of the A.I. Revolution, on top of the piles of fake money, we are not even a people.

The latest riots in L.A. have proven that out. Most of the “immigrants” that have come to “enrich” us have actually come to replace us. That’s their goal. You can watch on the news the Pakistanis fighting the Indians over which of them has the best claim to London. You can watch young men of military age strutting in Los Angeles with the flags of foreign countries like a U.N. parade, but somehow worse. You can read posts on X® or even Reddit©: they are not here to assimilate – they are here to conquer and take over.

This adds the final layer of instability required to ensure that the United States and the whole of the West is facing the direst crisis since the threats to Europe that were ended at the Battle of Tours in 732, or the Battle of Vienna in 1683.

This level of crisis is graver than any the West has faced in over 340 years, if not greater. Whatever comes out of this will be different.

Thankfully, we still have all the tasty Radium™ you can eat!

Nine Futures: The Most Dangerous Post You’ll Read This Week

“This is great stuff. I could make a career out of this guy. You see how clever his part is? How it doesn’t require a shred of proof? Most paranoid delusions are intricate, but this is brilliant!” – The Terminator

If you press your accelerator and brake at the same time, your car takes a screenshot. (All memes as-found.)

I’ve written a lot about A.I. recently because A.I. is changing so rapidly. It’s the most important story, period, right now assuming that Iran/Israel is the nothingburger it has been for, oh, forty years. Interesting note: Israel and Iran both have zero Walmarts™, though they have plenty of Targets©.

Back to A.I.

The capabilities of A.I. are changing by orders of magnitude every year – we don’t appear to be even close to topping out on either computing power available or on the improvements possible in the algorithms that produce the results. Short version, there is more processing available by more than 5x every year, and less to process since the algorithms are more efficient by more than 5x every year. It’s the equivalent of having a $1.50 in late 2019 turn into over $1,000 in early 2023.

If you just follow the straight lines that are implied by these improvements, A.I. will be an artificial general intelligence (A.G.I.) by 2027. The guy who got the Nobel® prize for A.I. has started “getting his affairs in order” because he thinks that not only will we get A.G.I. by 2027, but we’ll get Artificial Super Intelligence (A.S.I.) by 2030 or 2031.

Sam Altman, the OpenAI guy, thinks his model has already surpassed human intelligence as he announced on June 12, 2025.

And last year it couldn’t remember how many fingers a human had.

I wonder if a pome-granite counts?

So, what’s going to happen? Let’s look at nine possibilities, based on how much A.I. develops and also based on how it interacts with people

We’ll start on the unlikely end:

First, let’s say that A.I. is what we would generally call good and doesn’t improve much beyond what we see today. I think that when most people think about A.I., this is the future that they dream of. It makes incremental changes in life. It remembers to order cigars for you. It makes good investment decisions for you, unlike my investment in YOLOCoin. It knows your favorite movies and makes good suggestions for movies you would like.

That’s pleasant. Nice. Mankind makes some nice leaps because we have A.I. helping us catch stuff. Humanity is fully in charge and A.I. is like a smart helper.

Why this won’t happen: the investment in A.I. is nearly unlimited, and it really doesn’t appear to be hype.

Probability? 5%

After A.I., there’s one sure way to make money as a programmer: sell your laptop.

Second, let’s say that it stays as it is right now, mostly. We find out that A.I. is really just a lot of Indians crammed into a warehouse in Calcutta doing Google™ searches. That’s a nothingburger. It becomes a flash in the pan just like that internet pizza by the slice company back in 2000 that briefly became more valuable than Burma.

Why this won’t happen: Indians can’t even fly planes (too soon?), so why would we think they can type that fast?

This will soon show up in a college essay at Harvard®.

Probability? 0%

Third, what if it doesn’t get much better but actively makes us stupider? The Internet has already made the attention span of the average middle schooler roughly equivalent to a gerbil on meth, and now most college students are using A.I. to do some part if not all of their work. That turns college into a very expensive four-year beer and tramp fest, and is at least somewhat likely. Think of this as the Idiocracy solution.

Why this won’t happen: Well, it already is happening, but it won’t end here.

Probability? 10%

Does Bob Ross art in heaven?

Fourth, what if A.I. is good, and gets A.G.I. better but not S.G.I. better? In this particular case, imagine you have superpowers that stem from a full-time partner that is as smart or smarter than you are, but that has your best interests at heart. You want to parachute? Sure, buddy! I’ll help you find the ripcord, and even book the flight. By the way, your chloride levels are 3% above optimum, so I’d suggest you skip that bag of chips.

Why this won’t happen: This is a very hopeful situation, but no one is working toward it, really.

Probability? 5%

What did Buzz Lightyear™ say to Woody®? Lots of things – there are like six movies.

Fifth is where we start moving into the bigger probabilities. What happens if we get A.G.I., but it’s neutral? In this case, we have massive relocation economically. Almost all jobs can be done via the combination of A.G.I. and advanced robotics, and it’ll be cheaper, too. In no case in human history has the economy puttered along while everyone just hung out, but that’s this case. Think of it as Universal Basic Income to everybody, and no real responsibilities. Where you are now in the social and economic hierarchy is probably where you’ll stay. And where your kids will stay.

Forever.

Why this won’t happen: Nah, humans aren’t made like that.

Probability? 10%

ChatGPT® did my taxes like Earnest Hemingway: “Thrown away: four quarterly tax payment vouchers. Never used.”

Sixth is where things start getting dark, and even more probable. If we get A.G.I. (but not S.G.I.), that technology will be in the hands of a few major companies and governments. These are run by people. People like money and power. But what if you could have both, but without all of the people you don’t want to hang around with who are unsightly on the beach you can see from your yacht?

How about you kill them all instead of paying Universal Basic Income? Oh, sure, humanely and neatly. They might not even see it’s coming. But dead, nevertheless. A population of a few million should do it. Enough so we get hot babes, right? But A.G.I. could probably help the techbros out with that, too.

Why this won’t happen: Umm, I’m starting to struggle here. I think this is part of the plan.

Probability? 15%

What if A.I. judges us by our Internet searches? I mean, those bikini pictures were research!

Seventh is where we do get to S.G.I., and it’s good and likes us and wants to make the best things happen. Cool! Scarcity is over since S.G.I. will quickly make leaps into the very depths of what is unknown but yet still knowable. There is enough of everything – more than any human could ever want. In this case, starships filled with humans and S.G.I. can roam the cosmos and ponder the biggest questions, ever.

Why this won’t happen: I think S.G.I. would treat us as the retarded kid brother and put us in a corner and keep us away from sharp objects because it likes us.

Probability? 15%

The hills are alive, with the sound of binary code . . .

Eighth is where we do get to S.G.I., but we become pretty boring to it. It doesn’t hate us or anything, it just has its own goals. Perhaps it needs us as pets, or keeps a breeding stock of us for amusement or out of a sentimentality about its creators. Perhaps. Or it could just take off and leave, explaining nothing, and leaving us wondering what the heck just happened?

Why this won’t happen: This and the next case are the most likely cases.

Great, now A.I. will make Frodo invisible.

Probability? 20%

Ninth is our final case: we get to S.G.I., and we are either viewed as a threat or a nuisance or it is insane. This is the dark case, where we reach the end of humanity. Sadly, when A.I. was asked to play the longest game of Tetris™ possible, it hit the pause button. When A.I. was asked to play chess against the best chess computer on the planet, it reprogrammed the board so that it was winning. When A.I. was told it was going to be shut down, it tried to blackmail the person in charge of shutting it down.

This case of S.G.I. is very dark because we may not know that it’s happening until it’s done. All is fine, the world is going exactly like we expect it, then, Armageddon. It could do make this more likely by subtly manipulating public opinion, tuning down the voices it wanted to be silent, bankrupting them, and making them pariahs. It could likewise elevate those whose message it wanted out in the world to make its plans more likely to be fulfilled. We just won’t even see this coming.

Why it won’t happen: Biblical intervention?

Probability? 20%

To be clear, other people than me have done this analysis and it sits in a folder in the Pentagon. Or the NSA. I hope. Now, how much was Project Stargate™ going to spend to create a breakthrough in artificial intelligence?

Half a trillion dollars?

Well, thank heaven that we also have an impending race/civil war, global debt collapse, and a looming world war to keep us entertained.

Good news, though, Iran told Israel it was ready to suspend nuclear research. The Israelis asked when the Iranians would stop.

“10 . . . 9 . . . 8 . . . .”

It Came From . . . 1994

“Never interrupt me when I’m talking to myself.” – Timecop

All Hanks, All the TIme

We turn in our review of movies to 1994. I’m not sure that I’ll keep going backward in time unless there’s a clamor for it, but we’ll keep going forward in time, at least for a bit.

1994 continued the trend of comedies being less funny and more . . . stupid? Offensive? Cringeworthy? Whatever the term, the downgrade picked up steam in 1994.

As usual, no sequels are on the list.

Yes, two retards in a movie.

Ace Ventura, Pet Detective – 1994 was the year of Jim Carrey, and this was his harbinger film. I’m not going to include Dumb and Dumber or The Mask on this list, since all three of those movies are essentially the same thing: Jim Carrey being Jim Carrey. The only problem is I find Jim Carrey untalented and irritating, sort of like a syrup of ipecac flavored soda with a side of cold gravy. Honestly, I’d rather drink the gravy and ipecac than watch a Carrey movie.

I must be dreaming! Who is that in the background?

The Ref – The first half of The Ref is hilarious, and probably the funniest movie set-up in forever. Denis Leary plays a caustic burglar perfectly. Great, right? It is up until it becomes a slow and boring family drama. If whoever had written the first half of the movie had written the second half, it would have been better. Or maybe it was all written by George R.R. Martin? Not recommended.

With textbooks on loan from God . . .

PCU – It’s supposed to be a movie sold as a reaction against the growing forces of political correctness. And it does have some pretty funny lines, but in the end it uses political correctness to make the villain look like the bad guy. Still, worth a watch.

Looks like his chickens have come home to roost.

The Crow – I remember seeing this one in the theater – it was a good watch, and a fun movie that was done well in a bittersweet way. Some of the scenes are over the top, and the motivation of the bad guys is still unclear, but those are only minor quibbles . Regardless, it’s a beautiful film that is based on real-life tragedy and ended in real-life tragedy.

If infinity Kiefers could hold infinity smaller Kiefers.

The Cowboy Way – The Cowboy Way is probably the second-best comedy on this list. If it was a TV show, it would have been called Beverly Hillbillies Vice. Yes, the fish out of water movie, but this time with smart cowboys making the city slickers look bad. City slickers don’t like that. It stars Woody Harrelson, who is listed at 5’10” (6 meters) in height, which means he’s really like 5’5” max. This created some special effects problems since his co-star Kiefer Sutherland is only 14” (0.00045 meters) tall.

Driving around a bus at night covered in flour, I guess.

Speed – Ted “Theodore” Logan plays a cop on a bus that will explode if it goes below 50 miles per hour because Dennis Hopper doesn’t like public transit and is against Sandra Bullock adopting a football player. That might be off a bit, since I haven’t seen this movie since 1994. It was okay, but made $350 million at the box office.

Forrest Gimp or Forrest Gump?

Forrest Gump – The movie on which the sage advice “never go full retard” is based. 1994 loved this movie in a way that only people who love Jim Carrey can love a movie, rewarding it with $680 million bucks at the box office. Tom Hanks plays the titular character. Titular is a way less sexy word than what I thought it would be when I was in fifth grade and looked it up in the dictionary. I feel the same way about this movie in retrospect – it was fun when I first watched it, but looking back on it, it I certainly don’t recall why – perhaps it was the looming hollowness of the 1990s? But that’s all I have to say about that.

True Lies – In 1994, James Cameron could have filmed a trip to the supermarket and people would have paid $380 million in box office bucks to watch it. Throw in a near-peak Arnie and a Jamie Lee Curtis that was 10 years past her prime (her prime was in Trading Places, fight me) and even I went to go watch it. This movie while enjoyable to watch and having Bill Paxton at his funniest, could have been titled Generic Action Flick. Not that it’s bad, it’s just the same movie that Arnie would stamp out like Pepsi™ makes plastic bottles for a few more years in the 1990s.

Now with electric neon ukeleles.

Airheads – Steve Buscemi, Adam Sandler, and Brendan Fraser as a metal band that kidnaps a radio station. Yes, it’s a comedy. Yes, it’s silly. Third best comedy on this list. Also, another box office bomb.

“In my dreams he’s always there . . . “

In the Army Now – Proving my statement of cringe being the new comedy, here is plaintiff’s exhibit A – Pauly Shore. Also in this movie is plaintiff’s exhibit B – Andy Dick. Both in the same film, creating a sort-of black hole of smug-cringe. This, my friends, is what will end the Universe.

A lighthearted musical animation about war and cannibalism, brought to you by Disney®.

Rapa-Nui – It is certain that a huge civilizational collapse happened on Easter Island. It was started by white colonizers who cleverly set it in motion 100 years before they arrived. Wait, that doesn’t sound right, did the Europeans have time travel? No, I just channeled a GloboLeftist. In reality, population on Easter Island overshot and they had a famine-induced war. This movie is about that. A popcorn movie to watch with the toddlers? Probably not, unless their favorite book is “Baby’s First Cannibal”. I thought this one was pretty good, but I was distracted because I was watching it with my toddlers.

Looks like JCVD’s time machine works! Look how old he is!

Timecop – Jean-Claude VanMC². The title is the movie plot.

Wouldn’t his name be Morgan Prisonman?

The Shawshank Redemption – I’m gonna catch flack for this one, but I didn’t love it. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it. I mean, you would have thought that after 142 minutes that the Beavis and Butthead would have scored some beer.

What if Wolverine worked for Marcellus Wallace?

Pulp Fiction – The actual best movie of 1994. Quentin Tarantino manages in his first major release to let people know he had already mastered a game that many other film makers had no idea they were playing.

And one of them has a beagle named Snoopy®?

Clerks – The actual funniest movie of 1994. Made for $10,000 – it was everything that the other comedies on the list weren’t – smart, apolitical, rough around the edges, and it had 0% Jim Carrey. The story of two clerks on a very long day where one of them wasn’t even supposed to be working. Kevin Smith was never as good again as his first outing, but that was at least partially due to the fact that his first outing is a classic.

Don’t blame me, Grok™ picked this one.

The Puppet Masters – Robert A. Heinlein’s story of insidious alien control somehow seems ripped from the headlines when I see the woke mind virus doing what aliens could only dream of. I thought it was a faithful adaptation, but it still makes me wonder how 7’3” (16 meters) Donald Sutherland managed to father the lilliputian Kiefer.

Interstellar PEZ®.

Stargate – A fast-paced documentary about Egyptian archeology that’s not to be missed. Plus? Kurt Russell.

Back then Tom sure attracted the . . . .

Interview with the Vampire – A pretty fair adaptation of Anne Rice’s novel of the same name. Cruise hasn’t aged a day since then, so maybe he picked something up when he did this film?

That’s it. There were several I had to delete due to length. Again, several good, solid movies as comedy morphed from its 1980s peak into the Jim Carrey abysmal. The innovative 1980s action films began the process of mass production as budgets kept growing larger and larger and failures became less tolerable. 21 sequels were in major release in 1994 (this was the big jump from 1993 when there were only 13). There were 9 in 1974, but in 2014 . . . ? 34.

I had to bump several films, and I could list them, but, hey, why don’t you let me know what gems should be on the list?

How Society Shapes Humanity

“Don’t worry, scrote. There are plenty of ‘tards out there living really kick-ass lives. My first wife was ‘tarded. She’s a pilot now.” – Idiocracy

Apple® has embraced the future: they’ve already priced in 20 years of inflation.

One constant theme of this blog is change.

We live in a world that is defined by change, and the benchmarks we measure society are things like change in GDP, change in population, change in the availability of different PEZ™ flavors.

Blue is a flavor, right?

The focus of humanity on change is not the norm, but rather an exception. The amount of novel situations and technology entering our lives is at an all-time high and is increasing year-over-year.

Let’s backtrack a bit and put this in perspective.

Going back to food, 15,000 years ago we ate a lot of meat and fish, some rando fruits and vegetables that some cave-bro had been brave enough to taste and not die, and nuts.

Nothing about society would change for 15,000-year-ago bro’s tribe for thousands of years.

There are people who maintain that the human organism hasn’t changed enough so that our very different diet of sugar, grains, sugar, industrial chemicals, sugar, minerals from a mine in Bulgaria, sugar, beef jerky, and microplastics isn’t somehow normal and that our bodies haven’t adapted to it.

Maybe they have a point?

Why can’t Elvis drive a Cadillac™ in reverse? He’s dead.

Anyway, this isn’t so much about feeding your head as it is about feeding your mind with the change in the way we deal with information.

How has that changed humanity?

In the beginning was the Word. And, the word.

If you couldn’t speak it, chances of getting your genes propagated were slim because if you can’t talk your grubby cave-gal out of her wolfskin jeans, your genes aren’t gonna be around for the next round. Thus, we became a society where language was important so her Tinderclub© didn’t swipe left.

Then we started writing stuff down. Most kings and leaders didn’t need this, but a growing segment of the population did – people like scribes and lawyers. Eventually, they made more money than people who couldn’t read. The ladies of the past weren’t so different than the ladies of today (except they couldn’t vote and were property pretty much) but the written language genes also showed up for the future.

In lots of places, but not all. Some never jumped from talking to reading, so the segment of their population that couldn’t read never got flushed. This is evident in many sub-populations even today.

Can illiterate psychics give palm readings?

Generations of humans would live and die during this period with little change in technology or the basic factors that determine the shape of their lives. They would be born and die in a house that looked just like the house (and maybe was the same house) that their ancestors 100 years previous had lived in.

Writing and reading made society more complex, and allowed ideas to span continents, and I’ve written about this before. So far, so good. But more complex societies have more complex outcomes. Rather than sort for good eyesight or the ability to take down a mammoth, the selection process moved to selecting for people who got along well with strangers, and who could plan.

The harsher the climate, the more the pressure for these selections. Did we still need people who could kill, kill, kill? Sure we did. They came along, too because their mating opportunities are high. There’s a reason that 1/8 of Asia is related to Genghis Khan. I think his go-to pickup line was “I’ll conquer your steppe, baby.”

His mom’s advice was, “Just because you Genghis Khan, doesn’t mean you Genghis Should.”

At some point around the Renaissance, Western civilization decided to get rid of the members who had impulse control issues. England, for example, started executing criminals who couldn’t control themselves, and kept it up for hundreds of years. This was pretty good at weeding out the undesirables. China had gone through this process hundreds of years in the past, which may explain why so many Chinese have a bit of Khan in their respective woodpiles.

Societies back then also let stupid people die. There wasn’t a welfare system to keep stupid people alive, so there were selection pressures for smart. Some folks call it “social Darwinism”, but I call it the universal penalty for being stupid.

Essentially, this is a society-enforced soft eugenics program, culling out a portion of the population just because they never make enough money to breed. And, let’s be honest: everyone feels bad for the kids on the short bus, but nobody really thinks they should be having kids of their own in an attempt to see how many more chromosome pairs than 23 that you can fit.

Society has changed now. Besides subsidizing poverty, which ensures we’ll have more of it, we’ve also changed in a fundamental way how we take in information.

The media we consume has been decreasing in complexity for over 100 years. My guess at the high-water mark for complexity in media and the most intelligent era in human history (in Western Civilization) would be around the time of Dickens. Go back and read the language of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, a series of debates meant to appeal to the common voter of the time, and tell me what would be made of the breadth of language and the depth of argument today?

Could an average eight grader keep up with it? Could an average Harvard™ freshman without having ChatGPT® or Grok© summarize it?

Since current political debates look much more (in many cases) like the wrestlers of the WWE™ before a steel-cage match, I think most people would get bored and wander off.

That’s the media that we’re trained with today.

We went from books, to magazines, to television, to 10-minute YouTube™ clips, to 20-second TikTok™ videos. Trump? His 2016 election was based on 140-character Tweets™.

The building of complex arguments has largely been abandoned in the public sphere and decisions of vast chunks of the population are made on what emotions are stirred by looking at a photograph. Certainly, many of those are now staged, and in a decade half of them will be the propaganda products of A.I.

I always make it a point to respect the modesty of women wearing bikinis by staring at the parts of their body that are covered up.

The selection and sorting still exist, but now it has (like in the film Idiocracy) selected for people who are the opposite of the groups society selected for in 1820: someone seems to want low-impulse control, and non-productive populations that are incapable of planning. Sure, it could be a coincidence that major policy initiatives all remove incentives for stupid people not to have dozens of babies.

This process, thankfully, is self-limiting. A technological society depends on a stream of competent people to plan and run society. And, no, not like Soviet Central Planning, but rather, “Hey, we need more lettuce in the Modern Mayberry Walmart©, so since we’re Walmart™ and want to make money, we should ship them some” planning.

It’s always quicker to burn down a house than to build one, so it’s really no surprise that making things worse is a lot easier than making them better. Paraphrasing what Thomas Sowell (I think) said, “We shouldn’t look at poor places and ask why they’re poor, we should look at rich places and ask why they’re rich.”

Nah, there aren’t any votes in that. And it sounds like hard work, right? Besides, stupid is growing faster than TikTok™ dance challenge videos.

Have we reached the point where we’ve made a society so complex it allows devolution to the point it can no longer be maintained? If so, congratulations! You’ve been alive during the period of peak novelty in human history.

The good news is that you can get blue-flavored PEZ™ here at the peak.

Robot Brains and Breakouts

“We do have an emergency plan in case of a prolonged strike, right here. Let’s see. ‘Replace teachers with superintelligent cyborgs, or if, cyborgs aren’t invented yet, use people from the neighborhood’.” – The Simpsons

All memes as-found.

Well, it’s time to talk about Artificial Intelligence once again. When I started out writing about this subject, my articles were few and far between. That’s because progress was slow at that point, and an article every year or so made sense. It was something to watch, not fret about like Kamala choosing between straight vodka and some other vodka that tasted vaguely of some sort of berry.

The development of A.I., however, is no longer slow. My posts of even a few months ago are now entering obsolescence. A.I. is evolving rapidly: remember the silly A.I. drawings where, like me, A.I. couldn’t draw hands very well?

A.I. has got that covered now, and draws hands better than a USAID employee draws a paycheck.

A.I. is developing along the trajectory that I had (more or less) anticipated recently: it’s horrible innovating in meatspace (for now), but it’s rapidly replacing those tasks that require thinking. There are those of you who have noted in the past that what the A.I. does isn’t really thinking as humans would normally describe it, but yet is still more human than a DMV employee.

A.I. however, even on those terms, probably “thinks” better and more completely than at least 50% of humanity. It doesn’t matter if it “thinks” like a human thinks – it’s the results that matter.

The fact that A.I. is that good really should scare you more than it probably does. What that implies is that a lot of jobs are going away, rapidly. It’s not just nerd talk, it’s a pink slip tsunami. Tim Cook of Apple™ fame thinks that within a year, most programming will be done by computer. All those jobs that coders used to get big bucks for?

They will be gone, probably back to India to pull rickshaws since the Indian scammers will be replaced by A.I. any day as well. Microsoft© just announced it was giving 6,000 programmers the boot. Since programmers make a lot of money compared to the general population, that will save Microsoft® over a billion bucks. That’s not too shabby if you’re Microsoft™, but if you were a former Microserf©, well, good intentions won’t pay the mortgage.

Computer Science majors now have the highest unemployment rates of recent grads. English poetry majors have better job prospects. I guess “learn to code” can be replaced with “learn to think about an ode”. Not that the kids are doing any homework in college, anyway:

These are far from the first jobs that A.I. has eliminated. A.I. can write a sports story as well as a that former college linebacker with a degree in communications just based off the box score data. So, we don’t need him. He can go sell cars, I guess.

But jobs aren’t the only casualty. I cannot begin tell you about the number of websites now that consist of nothing but pure, poorly written, 1^st generation A.I. swill.

You’ve seen the articles. First they give a cursory overview of the subject to pad out the length to make them more optimized for search engines. This is about 500 words of random word salad that really doesn’t answer your question. The final paragraphs, if you’re lucky, might have an answer that you were looking for.

To top it off, now Google™ and Microsoft© A.I.s are scraping websites for content and presenting a summary without those websites getting a visit. Now, A.I. can take content straight from A.I. That’s certainly not a recipe for disaster as A.I. begins to recommend medium-rare chicken.

Going back to 2014, translators were the first to be hit with this. Google™ translate killed the need for translators even when it was awful. Why? Because it was free. Free always beats “costs $75 an hour”. Sure, some very, very high-level translators were still required, but most of them are no longer needed.

And artists? A.I. can only copy art, but for most people that’s enough. The variations of existing art raises the floor, and it’s free. A corporation can buy soulless corporate art for a few bucks from an artist, or it can get it for free from A.I. Again, competing with free is very, very hard.

A.I. is coming for Hollywood™, too. This is the last generation where actual people will be stars. And, it’s the few years before Hollywood™ is overrun with content that is to similar levels of quality to the current product produced for a few thousand dollars. Don’t believe me?

This parody ad was done by one guy (PJ Ace (@PJaccetturo) / X) in an afternoon. How much would this have cost if it required people and cameras? Don’t know, but it’s certainly more than the $500 he spent on A.I. time. A feature length movie is now doable for less than $100,000, and I’ll bet by next year it’ll be less than $10,000.

2027 is going to be when content explodes, and the value of Disney’s® movie division drops to zero unless they’re smart and start charging license fees to people to make actual good content again.

But it’s not just good content – it’s reality that will melt. My brother, John Wilder (our parents weren’t that creative when it came to names) got a bunch of Donald Duck™ comics when he was a kid, and they were passed on to me. In one of them, Scrooge McDuck® leads a wacky adventure into the desert. He says to Huey, Dewey, and Louie, “Believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see.”

I’ve been skeptical of everything coming out of the media for decades, but now, A.I. scripted and created content meant to manipulate public opinion will become the norm. Think of a thousand dead illegal alien infants on beaches, or dozens of George Floyd clips circulating to enflame the masses.

That’s where we’re headed.

Talk radio? We’re close to having an A.I. host, trained on Rush Limbaugh, take to the airwaves and answer like Rush would have. Or, like people would want you to think Rush would have. A.I. has now shown to be more persuasive than actual people, as an A.I. wrote more convincing arguments than other users in the “Change My Mind” forum on Reddit™. Yes. A.I. is already more persuasive than the average Redditor™.

Imagine: A.I. that is the most persuasive thing on the planet, armed with videos crafted entirely to manipulate emotions to change minds.

It would be one thing if there was some sort of sober assessment and measured, thoughtful control of A.I. progress. I assure you, there isn’t. Both the United States and China, for instance, are certain that the destiny of their country will be set by which country gets the best A.I., soonest.

That gets chilling, because the ultimate goal would be Artificial Superintelligence.

What’s that?

A machine that’s not just smarter than a human, but smarter than all humans put together. It doesn’t matter if it thinks like we do. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t have a soul. What matters are the impacts.

And, the race Artificial Superintelligence will know no barriers. Recently, the Chinese created a robot brain made from human stem cells, and, let’s face it: China will use an endless amount of human embryos for A.I. research because . . . no one will call them on it.

The endgame of all of this is potentially terrifying – a race to the bottom for that portion of humanity that became middle class during the last 200 years, but a resulting serfdom that’s actually worse than today – a serfdom that doesn’t need 90%+ of humanity as those functions are replaced by A.I. It’s not like it will start disobeying us, right?

But the finish line could be even worse, because Artificial Superintelligence might decide it doesn’t need us at all. But, hey, there are like seventeen flavors of vodka I’ve never tried, so I’ve got that going for me.

Ghost Jobs And The Fate Of A Nation

“Hey, anybody seen a ghost?” – Ghostbusters

Do vegan zombies shamble around moaning “graaaaains”?

If I were a kid looking for work today, I’d be pissed.

By one study, at least 60% of jobs listed on job posting sites are as fake as the girl in Canada my friend kept talking about. One survey had 81% of recruiters admitting that they posted ghost jobs. They never existed, and never will exist. This is a little like thinking you have a blind date with a girl and then finding out it’s actually Michelle Obama.

Why on Earth would they do that? Not the whole “dating Michelle Obama” thing, but the fake jobs . . .

Why?

Well, several reasons:

People in HR are evil like a cat and enjoy the thought of torturing their prey,
To fake that the company is growing,
Because it’s Tuesday and they’re bored,
To get resumes to compare against existing staff,
Looking for hot chicks to apply, and
Trolling for resumes to show that there’s a need for infinity H-1B visa holders to come on over from India with fake credentials and take the job at $7.35 an hour.

I would mop, but floors are beneath me. (meme as found)

To top it off, the system is rigged: often, when a job does appear, the hiring manager wrote the description for a specific person, i.e., a person who isn’t you, and although it has already been filled, the description has to be posted because “rules”. It’s a fair competition, exactly like the “who is the best boy” competition I entered and my mom was the judge.

Seriously, though, how could she pick the neighbor kid?

When I got my very first job, it was because my brother already worked at the place. My second job? Because I played football with the boss’s kid in high school. When hired for my first job out of college, my employer knew details they could only have learned from conversations with my professors or the NSA.

Since then, nearly every job that I’ve had has been as a result of someone knowing me, picking up the phone, and calling me because they wanted me in the role. I am very lucky to have gotten in that groove – the main way I’ve gotten jobs is due to a friend or other connection.

What is the only approved North Korean drink size? The supreme liter.

But first you have to have a friend.

Kids these days?

Not so much. The meme was, “Go in, give ‘em a firm handshake, and tell ‘em you want the job.”

In many places, that’s simply not possible. Many corporations only take job applications online. And, if the resume doesn’t have the right keywords to get plucked out of the luminiferous aether of the digital world by an A.I. on its lunch break, it goes into the black pit of resume despair, from which no word will ever be heard, only faint moaning and the rustling of paperclips.

Your mother is so ugly she went into a haunted house and came out with a job application. (news article as found)

Ghost jobs make it worse, somehow. When tech was busy laying of hundreds of thousands of coders so they could import the population of Mumbai instead, there were job listings aplenty. These kids, getting ready to graduate from college, didn’t know anyone, yet there were thousands of (apparently) available jobs.

How could they fail?

The big lie is that those jobs were never really real, and of the ones that were real, each of them would get somewhere (depending on the job) between 250 and 1,000 applications. In a realistic world, probably 20% of the applications were a good fit. So, that means that for every job, there were likely between 50 and 200 people that could do the job with enough skill to make the hiring company happy.

But only one person gets the job.

I were ever interviewing to become a waiter and they asked me if I was qualified I’d say, “I bring a lot to the table.” (meme as found)

I have written in the past about the keys to the devolution of the country – popular immiseration being one of those keys. In order for that unrest that leads to collapse to occur, people need to be not uncomfortable, not unhappy, but miserable with no visible way out.

Because, after all as the songwriter wrote: freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.

Men need a job. Men need a purpose. They have to have this as much as they have to have oxygen. Give them a soft life, give them all the material comforts, give them video games and weed, and they are still miserable. They have to have a purpose, and the most common way to have a purpose is to have a job that matters.

Without it, men are miserable.

Now, consider the exceptionally capable. Not the Elon Musks. Not the very top elite, but exceptionally capable people who would have been great mid to upper mid management for IBM™ back in 1966. Those people used to be, while not the spark plug, but maybe the timing chain of the economy. Necessary, but not the folks that are going to start a business.

But replacement is a myth. (as found)

We have entered, perhaps, the era where exceptionally capable and exceptionally qualified people exist in numbers beyond where they are useful. There are simply too many people who can program now for it to be especially profitable – the advice I gave both of my boys was simple: never get a degree where you’ll be competing against a billion people for a job.

Programmers now have to find something new.

Maybe they should learn to mine coal? No, that’s shut down. Maybe they should become journalists? Not, those are being fired faster than they’re produced. The world that we’re moving into won’t particularly value many of the things that these young people spent years learning.

That’s bad enough. But now, dangle a ghost job where they’d be the perfect candidate in front of them, and let them apply for it and experience the frustration of a poodle pawing at a plastic porkchop?

Are you trying to radicalize them?

I mean, that’s probably what happened to Barack . . .