The Deep Dark · Rebel Economist (Free)

The Deep Dark

By nature I’m an optimist, yet I’m writing now about a nightmare and I hardly know how to title this Post. It’s an appaling nightmare, triggered by a ‘Long Read’ article from the Guardian.

See https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/aug/18/the-long-read-democracy-v-the-machine-digital-age-warnings-computer-history-technology

I’ve always been interested in ‘What If?’ questions, in a positive or improving sense. But this ‘What If?’ goes the other way. What if humanity’s future is a new Slave Age, where say 10 million of the very wealthy are supported in opulent lifestyle by an host of AI-machines and robots - a host with capabilities that are fully the equal of 10 billion people, who are now superfluous. Of course I don’t believe this nightmare, yet I feel fear.

Do the very rich TechBros, and their associates, think there could be a future in which they don’t need the rest of us? If fire and flood should consume most cities and towns, wouldn’t that just be an efficient way to reduce the surplus population?

I never thought I’d see that phrase Charles Dickens gave to a fictional character in quite such a new light. The real nightmare is that this scanario doesn’t have to be true in order to happen. It only needs enough of the very rich to believe that it’s likely. A false dawn of machine slaves would, after an attempted dawning, be no comfort.

And I’ve not been smoking or swallowing anything ‘interesting’.

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The Deep Dark