I agree, there's no really viable scenario for a tiny number of rich people to preserve all their wealth and power while exterminating the rest of the population through some covert scheme. The vast majority of wealth is in any case tied to productive capital, which mass automation of labor sans UBI would destroy in a catastrophic deflationary spiral, meaning most of the rich would lose their wealth too as asset prices fell through the floor.

What is more possible is UBI, but even in such a case people will ask questions about why those who happened to be rich in 2025 get to stay rich forever, while everyone else has to be poor on welfare forever.

There is a misunderstanding here, among the rich, there are also richer and poorer ones.

If they kill the common folks, the very threat that unites them would disappear. So the richest would use AI to kill the less richer.

And on and on it goes untill nobody is left.

Number 6. Of my breakdown in a nutshell.

1% of 8 billion is 80 million.

USA is the richest country in the world, with 330 million people.

It stands to reason the majority of the 80 million will be Americans.

Americans also have the most guns and advanced killing technology in the world, and most don't have a passport.

I think it is very likely the 1% is indeed plotting to kill off the rest of the world.

It turns out the phone call is indeed coming from inside the house.

They, wouldn't use ai and a robot army to do any of this. The logistics of a culling would be quite elementary if you weren't using robots.. There are several viable ways.

A highly transmissable virus, or pathogen with a long dormant phase, and a near 100% death rate. By the time symptoms start popping up from the contamination of say, corn syrup, or any food staple, the overwhelming majority of the world would already have been exposed.

Or one could introduce chemical agents designed to sterilize over long periods of consumption, or to initiate incurable disease early in life. (The long game)

A robot army is infinitely more work, and more complex, and provides significantly less reward.

Ai has already unlocked an unimaginable amount of new proteins and chemicals.. it will soon unlock the downright cornucopia of genetic engineering... Imagine mosquitos that reproduce every time they bite someone. Eggs enter the circulatory system, hatch, and grow inside the body. Nothing is stopping this, except resources and intelligence, both of which will be available aplenty post agi.

You're right that there is little incentive to do this, but you only need it to happen one time. Perhaps 99.9999999% of the elites or people in general won't seek such an outcome, but all it would take is 1.

Hopefully I'm just a negative Nancy, with an overactive imagination.

TLDR

Any dystopian future will be the unfortunate result of too many operating with too much discretion to know that they should ever feel bad. Sadly even Maslows hierarchy is still not enough to limit the damage we may inflict upon eachother.

How much would Elon Musk be worth when 720 million potential customers are dead and only 80 million people, who prefer to be driven in Bentleys, are left.

How rich will the Walmart heirs be when their store customers are rotting in the aisles?

The wealth of the 1% of based on business with the 99%.

I did address how bioweapons would be a far more plausible way this all could go down, though I didn't want to dig into it since this was a focused rebuttal specifically against the sudden influx of people I've been noticing who insist that It'll be the murder bots who do us in.

I would also say that in the example you gave of the one elite doing it, it also stops being 'the rich will cull us!' And becomes 'one psychopath who happened to be rich rldecided to murder us all for the funsies'

In that scenario I would again point out though that, with a population of 8 billion, there would be a hell of alot of one in a million chances swirling around. Heck, in the event of 1 vs the world, you'd get eight one-in-a-billion chances. If nothing else I feel like one of those miracles would lead to people surviving, even if it was just a perfect combination of genes to make them resistant to the bioweapon. And some of whom would probably be rich of government individuals themselves. And hence would have the resources along with motive to give the murderous monster their just desserts.

So while it would still be a doomsday scenario, I don't see it working out for the instigator. And with the help of AGI, whoever was left would be able to rebuild.

>their hard earned resources

As much as I like markets this makes me kek.

Pretty sure public researchers from hundreds of different countries (who are far from being rich) will notice their "long game" scheme before it's too late.

The issue with that is if America gets the military might to kill the world, why wouldn't they just conquer it instead?

Unless your saying it's just the rich/powerful of America, and the lower classes in America will also be getting it.

In which case, while it might not suffer from the logistics, cooperation and government issues, it does however concentrate the issue into one nation for the most part. Meaning any nation with undisclosed/secretive nukes like Israel could impose M.A.D. on America and threatening nuclear war if they just start Mass killing/conquering their way throughout the globe.

Moreover, when it's specifically America, I can't see them making enough headway into specifically China to successfully subvert them enough to render the threat of their nuclear stockpile null and void. Mostly, and ironically, due to this authoritarian construction and the lack of probable willingness for Xi to give up his throne to make his life slightly better, if not stay the same or even cause him to lose some power due to being one of a bunch rather than a sole authoritarian tyrant with his own kingdom.

Of course an AGI might get anti- nukes tech...but I don't see how that could happen without WW3 breaking out shortly after.

Overall, it has better odds in general when concentrated on America, but runs into an even more immovable roadblock than the rich illuminati route.

'Hard earnt' is very much relative here.

Probably should've put it in quotations.

I think the surrounding context serves as quotations enough, honestly.

i dont fully understand the motive behind the rich genociding the poor…

1. poor ppl and rich ppl are biologically the same, one of them just got lucky.

2. cant rich ppl just enjoy their wealth withOUT killing poor ppl?

it feels like a pointless murder

I agree with your idea that the rich will not kill the poor with a robot army.

More likely it would be an asymmetric action of a singular actor via a biological vector.

An action like this could be carried out without contradicting any of your reasons why a class war won't happen.

What about a scenario when one/small group of evil rich obtain ASI first (assuming it is easy to go from AGI to ASI by i.e. just scaling it up) and then uses it to kill everyone else? The probability of this is small*,* but it still seems a bit too high for comfort

Point 5. In a Nutshell.

There's a difference between monsterous selfishness, thoughtlessness and negligence, and actively plotting out a supervising scheme to destroy 99% of humanity.

If ultra elites got killbots they would be turning them on rivals.

"I'll unite the plebs to use them against you" would be at least one super richguy's strategy.

If the machine is of superhuman intelligence then it's not going to be bound by human instructions, it's not a soldier because it can't be commanded.

I appreciate that you even tried, OP, but doomers are gonna doom and conspiracy nuts will just find some other piece of “secret knowledge” to cling onto.

What is wealth?

Ownership of land, many luxury houses, cars, gold, Jewellery, entertainment, good food and drink, tags l yachts, the best healthcare.

And all of these in greater amounts than the less wealthy.

Why do you need the 99% to provide these when a robot can?

I've addressed another comment or regarding that scenario.

Basically, a singular actor turns it from 'the rich will will us all' to 'a madman who happens to be rich/powerful will murder us all'.

While the odds of it succeeding and devastating humanity go up by an order of magnitude compare to most other scenarios, there are eight billion humans, which means there's 8 billion-in-one scenarios, 8000 million-in-one scenarios, and 8,000,000 one-in-a-thousand scenarios between us and our potential killer.

And I mean that as in 'between them and the number 0'.

Statistically speaking, something is bound to happen that would see a good chunk of humanity survive their attempt, and more than likely kill them in retribution, or just outlive them.

Still an apocalyptic scenario, but not an extinction scenario, and our species could well rebuild via AGI after all was said and done.

I'm not going to pretend that that outcome is a certainty though. I just side with statistical probability and Murphy's law for it.

Some of those are intrinsic (like health) but most other things depend on society to give them value.

Say for example you are a property tycoon with numerous skyscrapers in New York. When most of Manhatten is dead, your property is worthless.

Or say you have a mega-yacht like Bezos, you sail it to Tahiti, but when you get there the local population and tourist attractions are empty, because everyone is dead.

And who are you impressing with your gigantic yatch when 99% of people are dead, and the other 1% can just get their robots to build a similarly sized boat?

A small group trying this plan, while making the secretive issues easier and increasing the likelihood of functional cooperatikn between the parties, magnifies the logistics issues to ludicrous levels, and would make it impossible for them to completely saturate all world governments to ensure they don't suffer nuclear retaliation.

Moreover, if the time between them getting their AGI and enacting their plan is inferior to the time it would take, say, the American military to crack ASI then AGI, then they'd be staring down the sights of an equally deadly beast to theirs with far more resources with which to counteract their own plans.

If they were to try and speed run a bio weapon, for example, and the Government managed to hole up in the Pentagon and finish this counter-AGI, a cure could be created for their bioweapon and the culprits subsequently nuked from existence.

It's all fun and games until your AGI starts quoting Bane from The Dark Knight Rises.

Rich: I paid a small fortune to make you

AGI: And you think this gives you power over me?

Thanks for the appreciation.

If nothing else, you and me and any other sensible folk now have a mini-essay to throw at them on why they're wrong, meaning we can all save that much more of our precious time in any future interactions with them.

This is definitely within that capacity of humans and could happen. Imagine if Robot armies existed in the 1930s. The Nazis literally set about killing millions of people who they thought weren't beneficial to society. They killed gypsies, Jews, gays, the disabled etc.

Jews were biologically the same as Nazi Germans but it didn't stop them killing them. Poor people become a problem if they're consuming too many resources. The wealth of the rich has to feed and clothe the poor if the poor aren't able to work.

This happened less than a hundred years ago, we haven't evolved since then and as a species are more than capable of doing the same again. Also what happened in the 30's and 40's isn't an anomaly in human history, humans have continually treated one another like this. Look at slavery in the US, apartheid in South Africa, the British empire ruling one 1/5 of the globe. The fact that we have a special word for genocide give a clue about how ubiquitous it's been in our history

Pretty much agree, though I am still not sure if it is impossible for an organisation with ASI to hide long enough.

>there's no really viable scenario for a tiny number of rich people to preserve all their wealth and power while exterminating the rest of the population through some covert scheme

Sounds like a failure of imagination.

Let’s err on the side of generosity and assume that countries won’t be building gas chambers to solve the problem of unwanted former labor, whether due to the exigencies of realpolitik or for first-order moral reasons. There are many ways to accomplish the same result without the burdens associated with such deliberate actions.

What would happen to the birth rate if the state provided a free unlimited supply of birria nachos, VR video games, three kinds of double IPA and 12 kinds of drugs?

>Dr. Yuval Noah Harari

>those who happened to be rich in 2025 get to stay rich forever

It always struck me as a kind of trap that you'll never be able to escape if you're poor due to the dynamics, the only off ramp is extinction.

Rich won't kill the poor. They will live a comfortable life in gated communities(city or enclave), fortified and secured by cops paid for by taxes.

The poor will be only used to do work where robotics is expensive. They will be allowed to exist outside the gated cities and plan their life around nature.

Who cares if people stop breeding? All we need to do is invent longevity medicine and we can perpetuate human civilization with the humans alive now, no inherent reason for spawning more babies.

If your ideology is built upon the goal of exterminating the out-group, you don't hold hands and sing Kumbaya after you're done. You define another out-group.

[deleted]

I agree. It also doesn't make sense why the rich would want that power in the first place. The most likely thing they could want is a bunker with full dive VR to live out any existence they want.

I don't think it will happen either, but you are missing an obvious route to carnage; the route of accident, circumstance, deceit, incompetence and failure. In that scenario, it starts out with 'reasonable measures', 'law and order', 'supporting the military' and so on. Over time the frog gets boiled as none of the individual steps seem so terrible, or at least are terrible but happening to other, 'bad' people. Then one day we wake up to find we've handed over all the power and control to a small group of people that no longer need anything from the rest of us AND we've actually paid to build up the systems of control and management that allow it.

So I agree a deliberate plan to reach this outcome would probably fail for some of the reasons you have outlined, but an accidental, paved-with-good-intentions route? Yeah, that's totally believable.

1. What happens when "the richest person" doesn't care about killing all of humanity for no worthwhile reason whatsoever.

2. How is this richest person enacting this "join or die" plan going to be enforcing the "die" part of his offer? If he needs them to join then they need the assets of these other people. Meaning they don't yet have the assets for a giant army of doom. Meaning they'd need the help of human mercenaries and assasins. Whom I'm pretty sure would have enough critical thinking to realize that someone planning on wiping out most of humanity wouldn't be the type to let them so much as live just because they did their employer's bidding.

3. How do they plan on getting the world's governments on board? Since, yoy know, nukes still beat Doom robots. And head's of state are not generally know to cave into the demands of wannabe supervillains.

This possibility is even worse than most others sinceeven the other rich people don't want it, meaning their is literally nothing getting in the way of these highly affluent well connected people from going on live TV and saying "hey, I'm being targeted by assassins and need 24/7 CIA protection. This is the person doing it."

Or any other myriad of ways things get leaked. Maybe the lesser rich person offers more than the big rich is paying their mercy and turns the tables with an assassination of their own.

The only way a conspiracy like this works is if everyone is on the same page. When people who actively do not want to kill off humanity are included, it just increases the odds of word getting out.

Honestly, the accidental route is more than plausible, small scale.

Issue is, when we see a culling happening in one country due to the course of events you point out, no sane person is going to stay complacent and wait for it to happen to them too.

It has to happen 'everywhere' and 'all at once' for the the organic route to occur globally for a successful poor people genocide. Maybe when they're in power they'd coordinate to make it so after the fact, but power hungry megalomaniac are enot known for their cooperation, and are very much known for having a 'fuck you got mine' mindset.

And it would still require the group with power to unanimously want us all dead. Lots of rich and powerful folk are egomaniacs who need throngs of brain dead supporters to stock their egos. Maybe they're th eonly ones who live, but it still means the lower classes get to survive.

One way I'd put it is your scenario is as likely to happen sometime this century as an organic worldwide communist revolution would have been last century. All the pieces in play, right motivations, means are available, so on and so forth.

Reason communist revolution never happened is in alot of places people just couldn't be bothered to seize the means of production.

In this scenario, I really think that the rich just wouldn't care about putting in the effort. If they've basically won, why bother doing a coup de grace when you can instead parade your victory to the starving masses for the rest of time (if their AGI doesn't kill them all off at some point).

Anyways, I sent see America, Britain, China, Australia, Japan, Israel, France, Germany, and so on all suffering this exact centric amongst them, sl again, it's not really feasible in scale to begin with.

All it takes is one nation with undisclosed nukes or the will and means to aquire them to secure their continued existences and that of their allies via M.A.D., if not risk using them to get rid of the problem at the source.

They won't use a blunt instrument like a "robot army". An engineered virus for which only they are vaccinated, nanobots the clog arteries or a poison for which they only have the antidote are far more likely scenarios. I read a novel recently where robots poisoned all the fresh water with lead.

And the Fermi Paradox is solved.

If the poor are trying to kill the rich, then that will be all the motivation they need.

Given how most tech billionaires seem to be sci fi nerds, it seems more likely that the rich would incentivize is to move to Mars or something rather than just kill everyone

OP have you been living under the rock for past 2 years ?? Kill jab is exactly how they start curling people en mass!

1. I already addressed them using Nanobots or Bioweapons as a more likely scenario.

2. This post was made specifically in response to the weird uptick of people on this very sub who insist that, no, it's totally going to be a robot army straight out of a Terminator movie.

Then you missed the initial rise of the eugenicist political movement. Don’t worry, none of us were alive, but in its earliest incarnations in England it was about tying specific families to criminality and poverty in England, and called for the slow systematic eradication of the poor. In this process and as it was exported elsewhere it became racialized, but make no mistake, initially it was class war.

This post is SPECIFICALLY for the robot army doomsday scenario. With some touch up on bioweapons and nanotechnology since those are the other two frontrunner.

It took me over an hour to write this mini essay. No way am I going to try and cover EVERY potential cause for apocalypse in one post with equal attention to detail.

This post also does not entertain supervillain or illuminati levels of ridiculously complex/convoluted schemes. Simply that it would open the discussion up to equally far out rebuttals (I.E. We don't need to worry since aliens/Jesus will show up and save us if things get too bad.)

If anyone can show me proof for such a level of scheme, maybe I'll make a post about it.

For now though, considering the time frame postulated and the means describe, I'm assuming your either talking about some flavourful of lethal vaccine scheme or insectoid nanodrones with lethal injection payloads.

Neither of which I find particularly likely for a global cull. The latter is too overly elaborate, and necessitates complex technology that, if achieved, would be better spent on the nanobot kill plan.

The former meanwhile suffers from the same perfect cooperation, timing, logistics, motive, and basically all other points I levied against robots EXCEPR this time it's in a far more mass produce able package that is nonetheless also far easier to avoid.

I'm saying all this from an objective standpoint assuming that what you propose is true.

It ain't killing us all. So feel free to take a breath of relief and go about your day.

Will the rich build a robot army with the goal of genocide? Of course not, I doubt anyone maybe short of some crazy person would do that. (As we’ve seen in history much more likely genocide would revolve around race, religion or ideology)

Would they take all the wealth created and retreat to gate communities defended by kill bots and ignore the suffering outside their gates? Yah we’re already 80% of the way there. That’s the issue, people will demand UBI or higher taxes and help in providing basics and the rich will use their lobbyists and power to shoot down that legislation. Normally you would have a revolt/revolution but that won’t happen because it would be pistols and some ARs vs a robot controlled Abraham tank and robot f35.

There won’t be out right genocide just immoral indifference to suffering.

A possible scenario.

Of course this post only covers the topic of a mass genocidal cull by the rich's robot armies of Doom because, for some reason, there seems to have been an uptick of people proclaiming that such a scenario is fated to happen sooner or later.

Personally, I doubt the gated community scenario will happen, simply because I think AGI will hit us before we've both worked out the tech and created the infrastructure to churn out killbots. After which it either subjugates us or takes the wheel for our species and helps us along our evolutionary path and avoid doomsday of our own making.

Yah i guess i think it depends on timeline of AGI vs ASI and who controls the keys to AGI.

If we hit ASI in the next say, 20 years, i agree with your point of were at the whims of the new superintelligence (this also assumes it is free/others develop it that allow it to be free, if the US govt gets ASI but keeps it on a tight air gapped leash then that doesnt help) if ASI is alot harder than people think and instead we just have extremely advanced protoAGI/AGI thats controlled by specific groups i can see the massive labor layoffs happen and then society in large will be at the mercy of what UBI/social welfare laws are passed (or not)

Now that’s a Bing-0 and I don’t even have to read it all

Cool now do AI engineered communicable pathogens, virii and infectious agents.

Not saying this would happen but I find most of your arguments to be either wildly ahistorical or childish. First of all, the social murder of the poor is not an all or nothing game. And it does not require the most cartoonishly evil murder weapon possible to be done. We’ve seen it happen multiple times in history without Boston dynamics dogs strapped with guns executing order 66 for your Reddit epic awards.

>rich people do not see themselves as a collective in group

(Citation needed)- hundreds of years of history in everything from self consciously bourgeois revolutions to collective action within political parties to squash “populism,” even into personal lives in where the extremely wealthy are educated (in a place like England for example, they’re all largely together in a group of schools from the time they can read, and continue onto one of a handful of elite universities), even just to the modern intermingling of celebrity, business, and political culture all coalesce to tell me you already have no idea what you’re talking about.

The rich do in fact have a sense of class solidarity, that’s why in almost every western country, income is the most accurate predictor of voting outcome. Not race, gender, or social sensibility. Of course there’s infighting within the upper classes, that’s why you have (in America) democratic billionaires who recommend austerity and deregulation, and republican billionaires who recommend the same. The base of the parties are different, but as you climb the ladder of wealth it becomes increasingly easy to hop back and forth with cultural affect as it suits you. This is why someone like Elon could be a darling of the Democratic Party one year, because they’re more likely to pass policy benefiting an electric car baron, and republican the next, for some nice tax cuts, and an “Antiwoke” affect amongst other things.

Of course there are internal lines within an income bracket, a shopkeeper and a lawyer or doctor will have different interests, and these interests have interesting consequences within politics… but we won’t get into that, the fact is you start off your argument by saying “class politics don’t exist”

Laughable. Truly laughable. I don’t even feel the need to continue. But I will. Just a little while.

Any moral argument can be dismissed because of historical precedent. The Eugenicist political movement did not start (entirely) as a fight for racial purity but as class war coming from the upper class of England. See, Malthus popularized the idea that overpopulation was a serious problem and subsequently academics argued that things like poverty and criminality were familial, heritable traits. I can link some papers if you’d like, or some modern academics writing about it, or even a fun podcast about it.

The rich sought to, and enacted in government and private industry, policies to purposefully and systematically kill the poor through what would come to be called “social murder.” It’s from the social movement that brought us the workhouse that we still get a lot of our talking points about overpopulation today, even if “heritability” has at least partially been stripped out, but that’s neither here nor there.

Only later, did this expand from familial and class based thinking into racialized thinking, specifically when these ideologies were exported to the United States (especially the south, although a majority of states would enact at least a handful of directly eugenics-based laws), and then from there back to Europe again.

If you don’t think such a thing is at least possible to rise again as a method of class war under say, unprecedented and worsening climate crisis leading to lower crop yields and heightening social tensions, i really don’t know what to tell you.

As for the idea that the rich are slow to build up mass killing machines powered by robots, what do you call the massive expansion of drone warfare? They may not be autonomous, but since the great War liberal internationalists have written about and theorized a “humane War” to be fought without soldiers, or waged on enemy combatants without putting a soldier in harms way. That’s not to say that all the poor and wretched of the world will be killed in one fell swoop or anything like that, just to point out that between surveillance capitalism and automation within the military (and eventually the police), we could be headed for a more brutal world for the underclasses.

The idea that the rich would have any trouble investing in violence rather than practical solutions that could be cheaper is laughable if you take even one look at even local politics, and how much money can be demonstrably saved by housing the homeless for free. Costs on policing, costs on hospitals, costs on social services, all around, could be saved several times over, and it’s been done before. But where does money in the largest cities tend to go instead? Directly into police budgets.

Now as to any action like this requiring a United front, I think this misunderstands collective action as well. We’d much more likely see the return of poor houses accompanied by lower wages and harsher policing as a means to accomplish the social murder of the poor than some single mass culling of the poor like you’d see in a science fiction movie. This seems to be where most of your problem comes from. You’ve already picked the method, and decided that intent is necessary. But the Victorian bourgeois didn’t need everyone to be on board. Only the ones with political power. Hell, most of them didn’t need to be conscious of what was happening on the ground for the impoverished. Their own world was segregated enough that they could dismiss it as inevitable or unfortunate.

So what do I think is likely to happen as a worst case scenario if not exactly the “mass culling” you imagine?

A slow, grinding reduction of quality of life amongst the middle and lower classes, a collapse of the middle class altogether back into the working class they arose from, a steep increase in deaths by preventable causes, continued and steepening asset price inflation preventing the lower classes from building wealth, consolidation amongst corporations and property owners, increased wealth inequality, the return of the company town, increased police militarization, the criminalization of parts of life previously untouched by a police presence, increased surveillance, harsher penalties for deviance or delinquency, and violent crackdowns on social unrest, the return of great power conflict and proxy wars. Anything sound familiar with processes already historically under way?

Much more akin to the conversion of parts of the world into an open air prison than the machine war from terminator.

Done a bit of it in replies to comments in this post.

Might do a breakdown on it depending on if I see it getting brought up as often as I did the murderbots.

If y’all don’t want this all over insta I suggest you unban me in cybersecurity who is your awww friend?

You honestly can't envision a scenario where people who naturally feel that they're the pinnacle of the human hierarchy thin the herd of all the rabble and enjoy an unstressed planet with half the people and therefore double the resources? Your imagination is limited.

This man said it in 1891.

https://www.quotes.net/quote/20383

Firstly, I made this post to deliver a rebuttal SPECIFICALLY to the people who keep on INSISTING that the scenario I addressed with my post will happen to a T.

I did not make this post as a general address of ALL rich people doomsday scenarios.

The whole purpose of this was to point out how ludicrous the idea is. And I did it because people keep bringing it up and it kept driving me crazy every time that I was reminded that people actually, genuinely believe it will happen 100% guaranteed.

I'm talking full "they WILL make a robot army and they WILL gun down every last man woman and child in the streets".

You make fair points, and I'm not going to argue about me needing citations for my statement on rich people not being a collective in-group. Though I would maintain that they aren't to the point of being up for collectively deciding to kill everyone who isn't above some arbitrary standard of wealth (and also enough not to turn on each other to 'win more' once any rich folk culling scenario was concluded).

The fact I felt I needed to make this post to correct people with this bad take makes me want to drink.

It’d be a lot easier to quell an uprising than committing genocide on a scale never before seen

I've got a creative writing degree mate. Believe me, I can think of a million different scenarios if I wanted to.

I can just tell where plausibility ends and fiction begins.

The fact is that nuclear weapons exist, along with governments that would rather have power than a bunch of rich psychopaths.

There is no functional collection of rich people who are actively pursuing the eradication of even half of humanity, Thanos Style, who could aquire the means to do so before the United States or China could.

They don't have an auto sense for like mindedness, and while they have a disproportionate amount of madmen amongst them, most rich people are just selfish assholes, not genocidal monsters.

It's like expecting a high-school bully who steals your lunch money and breaks your toys to grab an AK47 and start mowing down people the moment they graduate.

It'll just be more of the same, writ large, at worst.

They aren't nearly creative enough, or motivated enough, to end the world.

Starting to mentally fatigue after so many responses so I'm probably going to dial back on posting them.

It’s comical and somewhat frightening what reddioters think of rich people. Basically exactly what the nazis thought of the Jews

Fair enough. It’s amazing how something at least a little founded in reality like “the upper classes don’t have our best interests at heart” or “in an emergency, the rich don’t tend to protect the poor first” comes to just cartoonish positions like “the rich will gun everyone who doesn’t own enough property down in a giant reverse-Passover type of situation”

Literally the last person I responded to

"You honestly can't envision a scenario where people who naturally feel that they're the pinnacle of the human hierarchy thin the herd of all the rabble and enjoy an unstressed planet with half the people and therefore double the resources? Your imagination is limited."

Honestly feels like some are just tprojecting what they would do if they were the rich ones.

Actually, scratch that. By implying that ALL rich people are genocidal monster by default, no exceptions, they're basically admitting that they'd start working on gas chambers if they happened to stumble into excessive wealth.

I agree with your general point here and I think it does a good job of addressing the really hyperbolic argument people have.

However i think you're focusing too much on one specific scenario to notice all the other really bad options. We as a species tend to revile the very idea of tolerating or being active evil but are generally alright with passive or apathetic evil. While active evil requires much rarer emotions like hatred or constant fear, passive evil is something that everyone participates in one time or the other and is extremely easy to take to great lengths just because it supports one's own convenience.

I think that while some kind of active genocide of the poor is very unlikely there is a genuine chance of the rich just not caring and letting "nature take its course" so to speak. Giving just enough to avoid some kind of mass violent movement as the average person slowly gets overtaken by hopelessness and depression. Another is the creation of entirely useless but highly demanding jobs to continue an undead version of today's economy just to keep people too tired to ask for more.

These options are all generalised, but my point is that there's a lot of extremely awful outcomes that do not require some kind of reverse Leninist "kill all the poor" stance.

Now, do i think that this is guaranteed or even likely? No. But the problem with discourse on this sub is that either side of the argument seems to consider it a strange binary and rarely ever admit any possibility but their own specific doom fantasy or regular fantasy.

I think extremely negative scenarios need to be discussed at length because we cannot afford them to occur, even if everyone thinks the chances are small. I'm all for discussing the positive effects of ai but there's a lot less benefit in my mind to discussing vaguely good scenarios rather than analysing the worst cases and possible ways to prevent them, no matter how likely one thinks they are to occur.

Doomerism is bad but extreme optimism is outright dangerous before we get to a good scenario.

They could roll out next-gen LLM-powered disinformation/agitation bots and rapidly turn people across the world against their neighbors over all sorts of locally-contentious topics—and LLMs are capable of accounting for that context.

Why do most of the dirty work with physical (autonomous) weapons when you can just get your “enemies” (us) to kill each other? Then it’s just a matter of mopping up. This doesn’t even necessarily take a massive conspiracy, either, as it’s a lot easier to covertly “stockpile” computing power + bandwidth than to stockpile drones or other autonomous weapons.

Culling the normies only needs one rich person with the necessary resources. I nominate Elon Musk. He will have the resources and there is a good chance he has the mindset.

Another example: Rome under Julius Caesar killed something like 2/3 of the population of Gaul. They had well and truly won well before that, but they Just. Kept. Going. It wasn’t just war, it was systemic slaughter.

Particularly if they convince people it’s not AGI and then consult the AGI for assistance in keeping it under wraps.

> “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” — Jay Gould

For those curious

It just takes one rich guy right?

With the right connection they can develop a virus.

With the right amount of money they can buy a massive robot army.

Climate change would be the main reason to cull the global population. If you were infinitely wealthy and humans were infesting your only planet, you might be inclined to deal with the infestation.

And America is presently suffering from outbreaks of eugenicist rhetoric, actual neonazi movements, kleptocracy.

And America is home to by the three most successful AI-development teams (Google, OpenAI, Microsoft).

And America is already working on enormous offensive drone swarms

Not that drone swarms are by any means the only tool they could use.

You're thinking about things in terms of a movie, not in terms of reality. Things don't happen in one big climatic event, they're a chain of smaller events. The unthinkable is unthinkable until it isn't. It's a process, not an event, as they say.

So in this case the murder dogs and venom bees don't show up on the front end of the apocalypse. They're cleanup on the back end. Of a disastrously bad timeline where an Epstein or fascist cult manages to maneuver themselves into a dominant position.

At the end of the day, everything is about power. Being able to replace people with robots obviously dramatically tilts the scale even further in favor of capital over labor.

As you say, "why would they want to get rid of people" can just as easily be flipped to "why would they want to help people."

We live in a happy world where "let them die" is a common attitude towards healthcare and the homeless, and those in positions in power are 100% happy to keep things that way, or make it even worse.

Technology has made things better than the past and I believe it's the only way to avoid dooooom for the future, but I understand nothing is a guarantee.

Malice and neglect, the yin-yang vital essence of the conservatives and liberals, will be the start of social change. How it will end, no one knows. Not me, not you. Even Ray Kurzweil thinks SGI has a 50/50 shot of being "good" for humanity as a whole, and he always notes that he's considered by many as something of an optimist.

Always remember the spirit of the anthropic principle and survivor's bias: things only worked out so incredibly well in the past only because they had to for you to be here to see it. The dead and those without the leisure and means to casually chat on internet forums, might have other opinions.

>Like, what do the actually gain from it?

> More land?

> More resources?

> They can get infinite of both. And could kick anyone they wanted dout of their land at a moment's notice.

Uh... yeah? They could have all the atoms by kicking everyone off of their planet?

Here's the rules for rulers video so you can learn more about how power structures work, and how the elites do very much think of themselves as a collective in-group. tldr: They're pirate ships that need to constantly acquire more loot and rents to feed themselves. If you're not expanding, you're shrinking.

As I've said in many other places

This is not me giving a scenario

This post was not me failing to acknowledge other potential ways things could go sideways.

This was me SPECIFICALLY addressing one scenario that a small minority of people on this sub KEEP INSISTING WILL HAPPEN.

And exists basically to refute them in full.

I'm not going to pretend it was perfect. But that was not my intent. I gave six reasons why it wouldn't, some better than others, and that's basically all I intended.

Look at the length of this post and ask yourself "how long would it have been if it'd covered EVERY possible scenario and angle" and you'll see why it's scope is so limited.

I feel like I just wrote a Sci fi story and yet people are asking where the elves and dragons are.

I apologize if I come off as a bit aggravated. I just thought my post was sufficiently self evident, and am just a bit frustrated that people keep thinking I've ignored other scenarios or misunderstood/don't understand something or other.

1. So can literally any world government. Except they have bioweapons facilities and top tier scientific minds in hand in addition to fuck you money.

2. No they can't because this isn't an RTS game where you spend money in one place and robots appear at your army base. You need logistics, supplies, factories, ecetera. You need places to store them, auxiliary facilities to power them and do maintenance. You need to aquire weaponry and ammo for them. All of this is EXTREMWLY conspicuous ans ther isn't a government alive which would let one rich person aquire enough military might to potentially stage an internal coup, much less wipe out humanity.

3. Culling people wouldn't do jack for climate change, leatively speak. We're already on track for things to get bad if we dropped now, and I don't see us getting to murderbot territory next year simply because, even if we cracked the coding tommorw, you need infrastructure built and suppline lines arranged to actually start building the damn things.

Would they start noticing large increases in cancer rates traditionally only found in the elderly, suddenly being found in younger and younger populations? Or a massive decrease in, say, fertility rates?

Lol. You have a lot more hope in humanity than I do. I think that anyone who brought such a scheme to light would be silenced by social pressures.

I don't know much about the politics of science, but I imagine that the individuals who actually did bring such a scheme to light would become a pariah in the community, and they are smart enough to realize it. Most people just go along to get along, they aren't going to take the risk that they're wrong and be known as the crazy conspiracy theorist for the rest of their career.

But maybe you're right. I suppose it depends on whether you think society values truth more than popularity. Many people fear social rejection more than death, sometimes even seeking death as a solution to social rejection... If the social pressure says "keep your mouth shut, and don't question xyz" the extreme majority will not question it and even go out of their way to shut down others who do.

Why?

Because fitting in is human nature.

When our ancestors saw the rest of the tribe running from something, the ones who stayed behind to see whether running was the right decision or not were removed from the gene pool.

I somewhat agree.

But fun fact, CEOs and senior executives are disproportionately more likely to exhibit psychopathic traits.

Also, I agree that not everyone would be killed in such a scenario. Someone would get lucky. There are people who only eat food they grow themselves. An extreme minority, but they would survive. There are also tribes of humans which receive very little contact with the outside world. Plus, plenty of people have bunkers, and are prepared for, at least, some of the scenarios, and some might just be immune.

>And hence would have the resources along with motive to give the murderous monster their just desserts.

This is dependent upon it being just one person. What if it's a large cult? A rogue nation. They don't need to wipe everyone out, if it's anywhere near 90%, and they aren't affected? They just outright win all future conflicts. Just picking up all the bodies would take years.. Let alone getting things like food production and other essentials going. Not to mention the loss of human skills.

Agi could accelerate a recovery dramatically, but the rogue group would also utilize it.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/02/27/were-all-the-1-percent/

There are so many factors no one in this subreddit is considering tbh. For example, its somewhat ironic because American wealth of most citizens is probably and comfortably in the 10% of the world, and at least 10% of Americans likely fit in the 1% of the world. This is a very American or western centric post and also comments. There's nothing wrong with that, except it's totally biased and makes most of the purpose of this discussion null.

Not to mention the fact that for most people in the world, the barrier to entry into wealth is actually authoritarian governments who limit or ban the market approach. Thus never giving any "common person" the opportunity to rise above the poverty line. A lot of countries also never get the opportunity to industrialize properly, and remain agricultural based economies which are understandably poorer than industrialized or service based economies.

Did you know that China's middle class represents more than 50%+ of the population? It's quite ironic again, that people are always shouting "class war" when the majority is the middle class, who represents an in between of rich and poor. In most western countries if not all, the middle class is 50%+. It's not hard to imagine considering that 3% of China grew to 50% in 2018, that this is a global movement, and the rest is likely to happen in other countries such as India and in Africa and Latin America more generally.

https://chinapower.csis.org/china-middle-class/

But you've forgot one element that is most important. Historical wealth. If you jot down a line of today's 8 billion people we would own more than 99% of global historical wealth. Yes today, all 8 billion people are in the historical 1% of history.

Pretty much. The rich will push for the human colonization of the galaxy and they are going to need trillions upon trillions of people just to properly colonize the solar system.

Step one would be disarming the poor to minimize resistance. This has already been done pretty much everywhere on earth with the exception of American, Africa and now Afghanistan. I would expect it to happen in America fairly swiftly over the next decade because of the wealth concentrated in that region.

I would not expect a mass culling based on net worth or skill set, but culling individuals based on behavior analysis is quite likely. When predictive AI is skilled enough to identify individuals with mental health issues early, mandatory treatment will become a thing. It would also make sense if the people that can't be cured with 100% reliability would "disappear".

Well in that case it'd be self defense and they'd be right to. But I don't see that happening. At worst some commies will try to overthrow the business owners, over estimate their public support, and be locked up.

Of course death wouldn't make sense. They want slaves, or near zero-cost labor. Ever hear of sweat shops?

a good enough AI could make them like the Illuminati with full control and little trace to be found

I don't understand the point of #6? Fascism is a death cult. The end result of fascism is the death of all the fascists, too. That's expected.

Edit: Or wait, are you pointing out that fascism is a death cult? I can't tell. It just feels like your pointing out the next step of the fascists' plans.

This is not true at all in America. Income has no predictive value on voting, many billionaires vote left and right, many impoverished people vote left and right.

The stratification is based on educational level, which is why you see highly educated middle class people being extremely left and high school graduate business owners going extremely right

>Rich people do not see themselves as a collective in-group,

No, they totally do. They just try to downplay that when talking to outsiders.

The point is how the rich might be able to get rid of the poor. So presumably not by sharing such medical advancements either. Also, the hypothetical kill-off of the poor could proceed the discovery of any such medical discoveries.

He could sell off his shares to lock in his wealth, then help cull the poor.

Fermi paradox solution?

I like it, a hot take but I like it

AKA we have to meet this fate because we haven't met aliens

(part of the problem I've always had with that interpretation of the Fermi Paradox)

But then the money would be in the bank, and the bank's assets would depreciate in the same way, and he could lose every single cent. Just look at SVB.

Because you are feeling nervous about the popular anti-inequality sentiments of the late 2030's and after that big monopoly crackdown last year you realise that the private wealth of trillionaiers is going to be American's next target.

The nifty thing about AI, automation, and advances in small drone technology is that you might not need the knowing cooperation of any other human to have automated factories making billions off tiny poison carrying drones.

One rich nutter could eliminate everyone or most people or all but a bunch of women in the theory that they will repopulate the world with him.

There was already a post yesterday on why those ideas wouldn’t happen.

It's not really a hot take it's just empirically true. You can look up Thomas Piketty Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right.

>This is not true at all in America. Income has no predictive value on voting,

Also not true. What you are seeing is the post-Reagan Democratic Party making a play for the upper-middle class/petit bourgeoisie at the cost of antagonizing their working class voting base.

But if you drill down into the details, income correlates strongly with voting preference, especially if it's tied to some other factor. Income and gender by themselves don't explain much, but income plus gender says a LOT.

Ultimately, the liberals and the fascists report to the same shared paymasters.

Rich people don't leave their money in banks, or very little of it as a percentage, and SVB's failure was not the result of poor people.

Imagine if earth got twice as much habitable land and resources suddenly, you wouldn't expect this to make rich people lose all their wealth. The discovery of the new world didn't make Europe's Kings get poor.

Neither would reducing the population necessarily do that. Anyway, it doesn't so much matter what would happen as what they expect to happen,

With which everyone agreed, of course.

Well do you have counterarguments? Perhaps many people disagreed but simply didn’t know how to refute the points.

> Rich people don't leave their money in banks

You were suggesting Elon Musk sell all their shares. Where would the liquid money go? Under his bed?

> Imagine if earth got twice as much habitable land and resources suddenly, you wouldn't expect this to make rich people lose all their wealth.

Strangely enough this is the logic of the flat earth movement lol

Lots of people's wealth is tied up in their property, and it is believed that this is why they resist the creation of more housing which would lower their property value.

In a simpler form - say someone presses a button and new land appears next to old land, free to claim - people would not need to buy the old land, they could just claim the new land, which would crash the price of the old land.

Or if we land an astroid, and your wealth was tied up in gold, you may suddenly find yourself much less wealthy.

So yes, if you suddenly increase supply, you will lose wealth.

> The discovery of the new world didn't make Europe's Kings get poor.

That's probably because it made one of them very rich.

Killing people is technologically possible now, but human biological immortality is not. The latter is simply a harder problem than figuring out how to kill even large numbers of people. So probably medical advancements are not relevant to this debate about whether the rich might kill off the poor.

Also, biological immortality wouldn't make poor people un-kill-able. So again, it doesn't seem to be relevant.

If biological immortality becomes possible, it will be more cost efficient to simply make it more widely available than to kill off massive numbers of people who will undoubtedly fight back (and as mentioned before it would lead to a civil war among the rich as well). You didn't address most of the other points though, whether the poor could theoretically be killed or not isn't really relevant.

If Elon Musk couldn't sell his shares off, then he would not be in any sense wealthy. They have value only because he can sell them off.

Anyway, it goes without saying that to kill of poor people would make the rich less rich by definition, since there would be no poor people around for them to be rich in comparison to.

Biological immortality is irrelevant. It won't exist any time soon and we aren't debating if the rich might kill off the poor 150 years from now, but in the near-term future.

Also, you can't fight back if you are dead. This is about advanced AI and robotics. Presumably the responsible party would kill everyone on the same day.

Again you're not responding to the points being made in the post. Also, it could easily exist by like 2050, we really don't know.

[deleted]

I don't have to spend my time responding to all the points in your post.

It's not even my post lol, whoever wrote it is way more knowledgeable than me. My last word is this, if you don't have any counterarguments then stop bitching.

I believe it, myself as an example - was fairly conservative, even though grew up poor. Then went thru university later in life, ended up more liberal - if only after suffering the midwestern conservative deadbeat spawn classmates/roommates of college life

Honestly, the easiest way I see them achieving this is just not using a workforce and letting everyone starve and prepare for when the economy crashes into the literal core of the earth. They could easily have enough food ready as they see the crash coming or in the middle of it, they still would have buying power above others, especially for labor.

Edit: before we get too deep here, i understand their power would go with all that and it would be a lose-lose scenario, but i don't believe the wealthy and powerful would weigh that foresight over cutting labor costs and i see when the process starts they could stonewall any progress to feeding the poor.

Shhh

1 well built robot could kill the entire population if it has enough abilities

Reminds me of the Black Mirror episode with the bees!

Billionaires say that they are humble and caring from their private islands and jets, but democracy gets in the way. People want to hang onto their jobs and way of life. They will vote for the party that would protect them. They will go on strikes. Sounds inconvenient for the billionaires.

Who are these rich monsters you're talking about?

It probably won't happen but if it does, perhaps people who haven't been born yet or who are children now, since societal change is often the province of young people and the technology isn't quite there yet.

TLDR

The author argues that the scenario of a global conspiracy by the rich to kill off the poor is not feasible. The author lists several reasons why this plan is unlikely to happen, including the fact that rich people are not a collective in-group and are not cooperative team players. Additionally, it is impossible to synchronize their actions perfectly, and there will be infighting, incompetence, and resource drain. The author also points out that rich people are not universally evil and some may have moral compasses and be against mass genocide. Furthermore, executing such a plan would require logistics, production, and storage of massive numbers of killer robots, which would be glaringly obvious. Governments would also have to do nothing, and it is more likely that they would develop and use the technology for their own purposes. Finally, even if the rich did succeed in killing off the poor, they would still have to share the spoils and are likely to turn on each other.