The wealthy prefer a dystopian hell hole for 99.9% of the population and extraordinarily god-like opulence for themselves. They want to be able to control who lives and who dies on such a fundamental level that they are like the Pharaohs of old literally exalted to godhood.

You cannot as a regular person comprehend the kind of greed that a man like Elon Musk or Bill Gates experiences as their normal state of being. It is way past just wanting money or yachts or any of that and into the point where they want to be transhuman.

And you need to understand that they do not think of you as a human being. You are not at the same level organically or as a species in their eyes. You aren't even at the level that you for example perceive a chimpanzee as in their eyes. To a guy like Elon Musk you're more like a slime mold. An utterly alien existence that might occasionally be useful.

I mean you could stop voting for right-wing politicians because you don't like queer people or brown people or whoever the fuck it is you don't like (in Japan it's certain job descriptions because the Japanese can't tell each other apart well enough to create racism).

You could also get over that stupid 12-year-old feeling of it's not fair when you see somebody having food and shelter without being miserable 40 hours or more per week.

But you're not going to do that. Or if you do your friends and family aren't. So like crabs in a bucket we are going to destroy ourselves.

I'm not acting like there's anything that can be done about it I'm just venting. Flaws in human reasoning and emotions mean our species is doomed and it is incredibly frustrating that we're all going to die for such a stupid and idiotic reason.

Who knows maybe one of the other species will take over after we kill ourselves. Smart money is on raccoons. A few more mutations and they'll have opposable thumbs. Beavers are also in the running.

The population decline from low birth rates isn't drastic enough. You can look up how the math works out but there is a long tail of increased population growth before you see the crash. It has to do with how you already have all these people of childbearing age going through their lives.

So long before our population could adjust we're going to get hit with huge amounts of layoffs that will cause massive amounts of social strife. There's no getting away from it.

There won't be much of an experiment per se. In practice it will quickly devolve into a few big players that control platforms people use so that they can continuously access new training material.

So microsoft, Apple maybe and Facebook and possibly but probably not Twitter (since we just learned 80% of the accounts on Twitter are Russians and bangladeshies pretending to be American conservatives) will continue to thrive because they will be able to tell the difference between a bot and a human being thanks to their control of the platform.

Everyone else was just accessing free training data goes tits up soon. Some of them will be bought out.

In addition to devastating the job market and devouring electricity and water AI is also going to result in huge monopolies because it's a technology that lends itself to monopolies inherently.

It's supposed to be the answer to the question "if nobody buys the wealthy's products how are they going to stay rich?"

The goal here is to replace as many workers as possible and eliminate the dependency on consumers.

The ultra wealthy want to go back to being like kings. Basically feudalism.

They will have a very tiny number of guildsman and scribes and a handful of knights to keep them in line.

Everyone else has a lifestyle below that of a medieval peasant because you're not even needed to tend the land anymore, they will have machines for that.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people don't realize what's happening here. Even more so there are the people who realize it but just kind of put it out of their mind because the idea of the ultra wealthy dismantling capitalism is so far outside what people view as possible that they can't emotionally comprehend it even if they can understand it intellectually.

And of course there are the numb skulls who think that they are somehow going to profit from the collapse of modern civilization. It's a big club boys and you ain't in it.

Don't mistake intelligence or education for wisdom. Certainly, don't mistake the pretense of intellect for wisdom. We have had too many "smartest people in the room" presenting complex technocratic solutions that are ultimately just houses of cards. The fruits born by technocrats are rotten. Latin America is awash in examples of it, as are we. The ACA is a prime example of a technocratic solution that was entirely unwise despite having been created by experts from MIT and Harvard. Extraordinarily complex with a number of shifting parts that break at the slightest touch.

Don't get me wrong - intellect and education are vital. Intellectualism, however, is just pretense and pomposity expressed through academic jargon.

Europe like America gives too much money to its 1%. The only way to maintain their economies is with cheap goods made by slave labor in China. That's the only way to offset increasingly large amounts of money being moved from the bottom to the top.

If you want to fix that you have to cut off the flow of money to the top and we're not going to do that. There's a variety of terrible reasons why that is the case but it just is.

I honestly do not know a solution to prevent human civilization from collapsing. I suspect that within 10 or 20 years we are going to hand nuclear launch codes over to religious lunatics and that's going to be gave over for humanity.

I definitely do not know how we avoid regressing back into feudalism even if we don't destroy our species. People just like worshiping rulers and kings and the ones that don't don't have the tendencies towards violence that the ones that do have. If it's one thing Afghanistan taught us it's that a very small number of idiots willing to use terrible violence can install a very very small number of people as absolute rulers.

We could counter this with education and critical thinking but even among people who should be well educated all I'm hearing is how we should all go into the trades and be plumbers or whatever. Anti-intellectualism and a hatred and disdain for experts dominates discourse now. That overpowering 12-year-old urge to not be told what to do has completely overwhelmed society and I do not know how you push back against that.

Basically don't tell me what to do.

I'm trying to figure out why anyone looks at this as water being used up. The water comes from the municipality's source and runs through pipes to get to your home or place of business. Who cares if some of those pipes are in a datacenter? What could it possibly be picking up from those pipes that would make it unsafe to drink straight from the data center's outflow? Temperature?

Please, someone tell me why the water used by a data center can't go back into the potable water supply.

Are they evaporating it? That would seem to be unnecessarily wasteful. I have a water cooler on my PC, and it just circulates water through a radiator.
No, I'm not saying the centers can use closed loops, but they sure don't need to waste clean water by boiling it off.

Here's where this ceases to make any sense - why does anyone think the water comes out dirty? Clean water goes in, warm clean water comes out. It just went through a bunch of pipes. Just like it does in everyone's house, and the mains, etc. If it's so hot that it evaporates, great! Put a cover over the evaporator and get even cleaner distilled water out (not that it got dirty).

Why are we making this an issue?

When temples (really entire cities) have been overtaken by jungle, it was usually because everyone died or fled due to war, famine or disease. Not because of religious obligations.

I'm not familiar with any historical example that supports this "theocratic sunk cost" argument. I can think of counter-examples, like the 18th Egyptian dynasty, or the bulk of Jewish history, but none where the people allowed a state religion's rituals to consume the economy. That usually brings revolutions, not continued devotion.

You're describing a collapse process with which I am unfamiliar. In what societies has this happened?

Except that story doesn't describe a county-wide water crisis, it describes one household whose well needs to be re-dug, and then says there's a potential problem in the future. That's not much to base conclusions on, let alone public policy.

I still don't see where there's a problem. It's not like a mine or chemical plant. Clean water in, warmer clean water out. Just put it back in the potable water supply.

You say that like it's anything other than warm water. What's dystopian about swimming in comfortably warm water?

Another massive round of layoffs.

I haven't heard of here. Where am I?