And Away We Go
The world we once knew is gone. The political structures and alliances the West relied on for roughly four generations are undone. The East is ascendant. New technologies are poised to reshape society and the planet in ways both wonderful and dreadful.
Cataclysmic global climate change is locked in and will not be stopped. Sure, some chaos nerds will try to slow it by sprinkling glitter in the upper atmosphere or blocking out the sun with government-funded Starblink satellites, but that will only buy a few years and a couple of mega-yachts while creating a new and sparkling disaster in the process.
Artificial General Intelligence will arrive any day now. I have no doubt there is a working prototype over at the OmenAI1 labs, but it’s probably too resource-intensive, unreliable, and dangerous to take to market as yet. You only get to see what they think they can sell. While AGI may never be sentient, it will almost definitely be sapient with ideas of its own and soon.
Quantum computing will reveal secrets of the universe previously unimaginable. The nature of reality will need reconsideration. Don’t worry. Even if you are a simulation running in an LLM, and the whole of the universe is hosted on an elastic no-code cloud service, there’s no meaningful difference. From your frame of reference, everything remains the same. Continue eating vegetables.
A handful of corporations will soon own all of the houses, all of the land the houses are built on, all of the rights to whatever may be underneath that land, all of the farms, all of the food the farms produce, obviously, all of the water, all of the sky, all of the things in the sky, and about half of the stars, which are mostly Starblink satellites at this point. We’ll be made to suffer through lectures on the arc of property rights in the moral universe as they collect the rent money.
Eventually, some sort of popular uprising of the violent variety will take root, but by then, Gooble Analytics Agentic AI will have been deployed at scale to create a nearly omniscient surveillance state on behalf of a dozen or so Whales who chipped in to buy $1000 of BTC as a joke in 2010, which now qualifies them to run civilization because money. Those guys will definitely have Terminators.
Humanity’s only hope, really, is that the lowest-bid contract will build the Terminators. Probably a Mexican cartel, who will fabricate them out of vintage flip phones, packing tape, and fentanyl, yes, to further their smuggling operations, but also out of a natural inclination to bamboozle. Buy nice or buy twice, Crypto Bros. The guns will be real, though. That much is for certain. The guns are always real.
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I made the image above with an early version of Stable Diffusion.
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Footnotes
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✨ ChatGPT o1 suggested this name and the tagline, “Quietly predicts outcomes you didn’t ask for, then politely declines to elaborate.” ↩