Brace yourself for 2027… Or 2030. There are lots of predictions that something big is coming, and it is likely not good. I, unfortunately, believe it. There are simply too many independent, massive things that are simultaneously happening now that alone could spell some real downturns for human well-being. All of those things seem to be set to peak in the next 5 years.
AI is the culprit most of these predictions point to. Of course, it is one of the things that could spell doom, but on its own has never particularly scared me. The technology is cool, advanced, and holds a lot of potential, but the way we are using it is what is holding the entire project back. If AI is the most advanced hammer ever made, we are trying to use it for everything from glass repair to brain surgery, and not much for driving nails.
The disruption AI is causing is not because of the tech, but the motives behind its promise. We could have built this tech with the intent to improve life for the human population, but we didn’t. We went straight for dystopian science fiction and never looked back.
The plot is now this: AI only becomes profitable if it replaces humans. That is what everyone invested money towards and it has become a bet that is too big to lose.
AI didn’t actually create this environment. It was just the perfect catalyst for things that a lot of people have been working on and unknowingly voting for for decades. For the most part, that is creating a type of absolute power and consolidating it. As part of this, there have been two wars being waged far away from each other: one at the very top and one at the very bottom. These wars feel like they have crossover in everyday life, but they are completely independent. Still, the victors have a real investment in partnering. I am getting ahead of myself, though.
Many of these crises are manufactured. We built them, and we could still stop, but we won’t. We won’t because of special interests and bandwidth. We won’t tend to the crises because they are big things to tackle, and we have distracted ourselves with trivialities in comparison. We won’t stand in the way of the growing threats because lots of advertising dollars have gone into branding these things as progress. AI is a single, namable target that thrives in an ecosystem of greed, laziness, and distraction, but it will not be the cause of the collapse. AI will be a vehicle at best. So let’s go through some crises that are much more likely to cause collapse than AI.
Endless Growth Models
Our system is built with one Key Performance Indicator: Growth. It drives the stock market, our monetary policy, our politics, our corporate targets, our personal goals, and our ego as people and nations. GDP, earnings, profits, quality of life, and processing power all have to increase to keep the current system going. Stagnation or retraction can spell doom across many segments.
It has to grow for two simple reasons: Debt and greed. I don’t need to remind you of the national debt, but it is only one piece of this. Arguably more dangerous than government borrowing is the fact that everything in our modern economy is bought on credit. Credit has interest, and to pay this off, we either have to accept an elevated cost or make what we borrowed to buy grow faster than the interest. Everything is seen through the lens of Return on Investment (ROI). These returns aren’t from creation or value-add; they are returns from rising costs. We have officially created a system that only grows by making things more expensive.
On the corporate side, with the proliferation of Private Equity, maximizing profit and growth are the only goals. I am not naive enough to suggest that the purpose of starting a business is to make money; I am simply suggesting that the concept of maximizing returns is cannibalistic to that mission at some point. We are at that point. There is no way to grow endlessly and ethically. It takes significant exploitation, aggression, regulatory support, and degradation of products to make this happen.
While some would argue with me based on these facts of our reality, a business can survive on modest profits and no debt. There are many industries and thousands of businesses that operate on a 2–5% margin and have well-paid employee bases (including executives) and survive decades without any real growth. They could charge more, borrow to expand, and decrease quality to increase revenue, but don’t.
This all stems from the same place as the human, personal need for growth. We deserve some level of progression in life. Investing in our work should yield higher wages; we should aim to live comfortably, and we should be able to support the growth of our families. There is nothing wrong with that concept. Unless, that is, you remove limits, which we have. We have increased the number of things we can buy and set endless tiers of luxury, all while increasing the visibility of it through advertisements or social posting. This leaves everyone with a certain level of growth that is expected of them to demonstrate competence and gain acceptance. If you have a good career because you are good at your work, you should have these things. Opt out, and something feels off. As a result, we make a lot of judgements based on these signals. This creates greed, because we are no longer buying just a house, car, or clothes; we are buying acceptance.
If collectively we cannot agree that not all growth is good, we will continue to sacrifice everything to maintain this cycle. We will continue to borrow money we don’t have to enable growth we could not earn and support a system that is generating artificial value. This means layoffs and a devaluation of labor to show more profits, worse services for higher prices, and most of all, an increase in volatility of our lives, economies, and government as they serve the invisible monster that is endless growth of fiat-based resources, unchecked and untethered from the reality of the tangible world.
Corruption Of Aging Leadership
The world is moving faster than ever, and our leadership clearly cannot keep up. Those in charge lack critical understanding of the issues that are in front of them, and the systems of old are too slow and antiquated to quickly react to a new, technology-first world. The result of this inaptitude is delegation, which introduces outside interests by default.
How that expertise is outsourced today is via lobbying, and it is pay-to-play. I am not talking about campaign contributions… yet, just expertise. When a politician does not understand an issue, they turn to the experts. That sounds like a great idea, until you realize the depth of the support they are seeking. Politicians are reaching out to the industry leaders, who control significant portions of the market, to help educate, advise, and even create drafts related to new legislation. Baked into these services are the pieces that facilitate real consolidation of power amongst the major players, and being chosen to provide these services comes with some real benefits to the government officials. On record, more lobbying dollars were spent last year than ever before, and I don’t think anyone is under the illusion that all dollars spent are captured.
The general population is rarely the constituents being thought of in the work of these leaders. Sure, the votes are great, but votes are bought. Campaign spending has a direct correlation to success in most cases, and the general population is not funding these campaigns; it is businesses, and they win at every turn. Campaign contributions aren’t necessarily tax-deductible, but they do count as an expense that lowers their taxable income. Furthermore, corporate campaign contributions can see a 700% return on investment. That level of return feels a lot like corruption to me, even if it is legal on paper. You can tell me what you think in the comments.
Harkening back to the point of endless growth, when deficits and GDP are at stake, elected officials have a massive incentive to make sure that things keep growing, because that is the only metric of success: Not safety, well-being, public health, education — Growth. When growth is the only metric that they are graded on, all those more important things lose priority. The metric defines the means.
But all this moves painfully slow. Where new types of crises are becoming commonplace online and on an almost daily basis, it takes a significant amount of damage to get escalated, a long time to debate, and an impossible amount of consensus to get effective new laws in place. We should take new regulations very seriously and watch out for unintended side effects, but we have the tools, but we lack the patience.
As ageist as it may sound, the average age of leadership in the US is around 60. With the concentration of Boomers, there is a very real sense of “Fuck-You-Got-Mine.” With age comes experience and hopefully some wisdom, but the reality I see more of is a dissociation from the future. Why bother building a better future if you aren’t around to see it feels like the theme. As an aging population takes advantage of the miracles of modern medicine, the ability to delay retirement has been taken to the extreme. Watching so many of our should-be leaders dying of old age in their held seats not only calls into question their focus and competency, but also their dedication to the future, given the volatility they introduce into the overall system.
Leadership always has and always will seek to grow power and be reluctant to give it up. It is pretty natural to think that with more power, you can accomplish your goals more easily, and giving up your seat could undo everything you have worked for, or it won’t be done as well. Ego, fear, and paranoia go hand-in-hand with being a leader of any scale. Normally, though, life has a way of removing even the most embedded tyrants. They die, and change is ushered in, or they are ousted for lack of mental ability. A modern miracle of medicine indeed.
Wealth Consolidation and Rising Inequality
Some level of inequality is preferable in any economy, even to a significant level. However, an exponentially growing rate of inequality is highlighted by extreme levels on each end, and a disproportionate number of people pooled at the bottom is not healthy.
In a vacuum, I have no problem with the existence or total number of billionaires. What someone else has does not subtract from what I have in any meaningful way. I probably wouldn’t be willing to trade what they did to get there anyway. We don’t live in a vacuum, though. We live in a country (the US) that has about 1,000 billionaires and 750,000 homeless people. That ratio is not too far off from the other countries with the highest rates of homelessness (UK, France, Germany, and Canada).
It isn’t just the wealthy that creates a problem for the majority of the population; it is the power they now wield. The wealthiest people and the largest companies have amassed a level of control that I once believed extinct in democratic governments. It could be because these people and corporations have created so much value that we have collectively accepted that they deserve a seat at the ruling table. Maybe they just control too much of the infrastructure to deny them preferential treatment. It may simply be that we are afraid of a world without their products and ingenuity. Regardless, we have shifted significant amounts of authority to a small group of industry leaders to dictate what life looks like for the population.
What can’t be ignored is the fact that corporations now have all the freedoms of individuals (speech, religion, and other rights), but little of the consequences individuals would face as a result (imprisonment, etc.). In fact, we have shown that after a threshold of wealth, corporations are spared from the consequences of particularly harmful behavior, and their rehabilitation is funded and rewarded. The concept of failing up is the new playbook for anyone not willing to operate within the confines of the law or accepted rules of established industries.
When there is an obvious two-tier system with different rules and punishments, the entire identity of a civilization comes into question and destabilizes its existence. Corruption is always present, but when discovered, as long as it is met with punishment and correction, the integrity of the system can stand. When it becomes clear some are more equal than others, the system crumbles. When anarchy starts at the top, stopping it at the bottom, where actions are more crude and tangible, becomes impossible.
Complete Erosion of Trust
This is where it all comes to a head. All the factors discussed, and similar ones that weren’t, thrive in a system of distrust and generate more of it, symbiotically. That distrust isn’t just pointed at the systems causing the problems; it works its way into absolutely every aspect of the lives of the entire population. That mass distrust fractures populations and burns any bridge of possible cooperation while completely demotivating new initiatives of change.
Distrust of government and industry is pretty much table stakes for human civilization, but we have taken it much farther. We no longer trust each other. Neighbors, family members, romantic partners, parents, religious leaders, friends, and coworkers are all treated with a new level of distrust fueled by the issues viewed as systemic. It’s branded as self-interest; whether it is related to spotting narcissists, adversarial coworkers, controlling parents, or the evils of the other political party, we are trained to put up walls, avoid friction, and quickly cut off any potential threat of discomfort as soon as the possibility arises.
It isn’t that danger doesn’t exist in any of these areas, but none alone is nearly as dangerous as the entire population’s inability to identify common needs and address them for the good of everyone. The siloed and intolerant nature of our modern life has seemed to render us incapable of addressing any real problems, not because they aren’t problems everyone agrees exist, but because they don’t represent our personal, most important concerns or the solution won’t disproportionately benefit us individually. That, and solving problems is uncomfortable and can often require some sacrifice or concession- things that no one will tolerate, least of all because their AI therapist said they should “focus more on their needs and boundaries.”
There is a quote of unknown origin that rings more true every day, and it goes like this: “They got you fighting a culture war to stop you from fighting a class war.” It is becoming painfully obvious that squabbles at the bottom, as serious as they can be, distract from the larger causes and the actual solutions. The harsh truth is that the bottom 99% of people have so much more in common with each other than they ever could with the top 1%. If the collective power of that population could come together in support of a better future, those at the very top would not be able to stand effectively against it. However, the issues of the day focus on symptoms and not causes, because symptoms hurt. We have come to accept the disease as long as the symptoms are managed.
This trust is the hardest thing to overcome, because it requires risk. There is very little risk in accepting the world the way it is and doing what is necessary to operate in it. There is very little discomfort in finding a group of like-minded people who look like you to share your life with, commiserating about the unaccepting world. Leading with trust, however, takes risk. You never know who will open doors for you and who will close them in your face. You never know who will hurt you or heal you. There is no way of knowing if someone is on your side, against you, or completely neutral to your cause. Others also have those same concerns about you.
The real thing we have to overcome to start to rebuild trust is to give up a bit of our self-interest. Many of the best things life has to offer only come when we do things, not expecting any return, but trusting we are making things better for someone else. It starts with us. Small gestures that show our humanity to others while acknowledging theirs. Nurturing the human experience outside of technology, capitalism, and group identities. Tearing down walls instead of building them.
AI Cannot Collapse This Thing Alone
AI will certainly continue to change our world, but it cannot act alone. It needs hosts and goals to cause such massive change. The level of its disruption will be greatly determined by the systems it is implemented in and the motivations it is given.
If we aim it at profit and give it the levers of a corrupt system, it will profit us into oblivion with no consideration for human well-being. We won’t even give it the chance to logically come to the conclusion that profit does not make life better for people. If we are only building AI to return a profit, then the only way it wins is to replace paying and employing people, which has some grim second and third-level consequences.
AI loses significant levels of disruption if we simply move a step away from the systems that are already causing so many issues in our world. We could be using it to help us build better systems for all the world’s inhabitants. We could just as easily be aiming its power at sustaining our systems rather than amplifying the current system’s destructive nature. We could use it for good, if only we could agree that not destroying everything was inherently good.
I don’t know if a better path is still possible for AI or our world; we may be past a point of recalibration. Worse, there is little I can do to protect myself at this point, much less the world, from any of these corrosive forces. As individuals, we are just along for the ride, for the most part.
What I can do is try to lead with trust, try to call out corruption and not add to it, and try to live in a way that does more good than harm. Really, that is all any of us can do, including the 1%. That is why it is important to see it and simply try to make the world a better place.
We cannot afford to ignore this technology. We all have to learn to work with it. We do not have to let it replace us, though. The ability to think critically and empathetically will be the tools needed as AI becomes smarter. That will be what differentiates your work and impact from that of machines. Your ability to function without technology will be your greatest asset in a future that everyone else cannot. Humanity will be a luxury among machines.
Leave a Reply