Revolution From the Top see YouTube

Revolution From The Top

1. There are revolutions and then there are Revolutions.  Most Political Revolutions hardly dent their underlying Civilizations and their supporting infrastructures.  But the Invention of the Wheel was a Revolution.   Iron Smelting gave us the Iron Age: a Revolution that flipped the entire Ancient World.   Gun Powder, the Printing Press and the Steam Engine all rolled into one to give us the Industrial Revolution.  These major engines for infrastructural change led to the most powerful Globally universal Revolutions, where the character of Societies and Civilizations underwent profound changes, often as destructive as they were creative.    The next Revolution, which may even exceed the scale of most of these others, will be the Machine Intelligence and Robotics Revolution.

 2. Imagine all Human Managers and Workers being swapped out by utility fixtures. People will have nothing to do but to figure out what they really want  to do.  And this may only be 10 years away. We are only waiting on adequate proficiency levels in regards to Artificial Intelligence and Networked Parallel Processing Supercomputing.  Because most of the World’s public and private investments in research and development in AI are going into China, we should expect most of the World’s AI surprises to come out of China.

3.My guess is that some very big AI Robotics debuts will roll out in conjunction with  5G, which the promotional literatures say is custom designed for what they call IoT (the Internet of Things which basically means “Robotics”).  The critical factors that make 5G so pivotal are speed: it’s more than 100 times faster than what we got now, and it has near zero latency which means all the lag time issues disappear, which is a critical parameter for any robot that must react instantly to stimulus in real time, such as self-driving cars.  

4. And then if we can think of AI as having an “IQ”, well, that comes with computer data capacities coupled with high  speeds.   Look at it this way: a Mouse and a Man have the same speeds and effective “AI” Logic controlling the intelligence coming out of their brains.  The only difference is Capacity: Men are smarter because their brains are bigger.  And remember that Moore’s Law hasn’t slowed down (that is: computer speeds doubling and memory prices halving every year and a half), and now we have multicore parallel processing that can  multiply up those effective speeds just by designing in more cores into the basic chips.  

5. Now, from the Worker’s perspective, we are worried most about the Robots taking our jobs.  But perhaps the more significant side of the Revolution will be in the domains of Management and Planning. You see, with large enough truly representative fields of data and sufficient capacities of supercomputer power, we’ll arrive at what we can call Data Rich Supercomputer Predictive Modelling Systems.  Such a Predictive Modelling System will know in specific detail, to a specified uncertainty,  how Society and the Economy will work, down to the mechanical level of plotting all the interactions and behaviors of and between all the various effective and dependent variables.  And then, if supported by enough Economic clout,  the System would be able to manipulate the effective variables in order to change both Society and the Economy depending on whatever the System Parameters call for.

6. Okay, once the technology is in place, then the repercussions will come quickly enough: accurate predictive modelling will decrease the risk of corporations that use it, so they can reduce their profit margins, effectively putting their competition out of business.  Also, larger more inclusive and detailed data fields predict better than small, and so there will be a push for companies to merger and consolidate their proprietary data for mutual advantage, or the smaller corporations might lobby for a One Network for All Data, and that would basically include all companies and Banks within the same predictive model.  But, yes, even if the companies themselves don’t merger, in order to take advantage of economies of scale, the trend will be towards data sharing and the creation of a One Data Network across all Capitalism.

7. Now what we need to understand most about Predictive Modelling, especially in business applications, is that it will always be right, or right enough,  and any suggestions to the contrary will be wrong.  By the time we get to this point, the Business World will have compared a thousand ways how Predictive Modelling would have succeeded where the best CEO’s and Wall Street Hedge Fund Gurus have failed.  To NOT follow a Data Rich Supercomputing Predictive Modelling Plan will seem foolishly irresponsible: a sheer dereliction of fiduciary responsibility.  We will see a trend in which all humans involved in business management will increasingly take the hands off approach. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.  So in the not far future the World’s Economy will be on a kind of effective “autopilot”, being ‘flown’ by the Predictive Modeling Systems.  If you think of Socialism as a Planned Economy, then we will have Socialism, but it will be Socialism from the top and primarily for the top.    

8. Now, what about the Workers in this Bright New World?  Well, in the same way as the CEO’s and the Managers will come to appear as stupid and incompetent compared to the System, so the workers will be seen as incompetent and even as posing dangerous risks when compared to robots.  Remember that in a One Network System, anything one robot learns, they ALL learn.  Robots will get smarter, better, and safer every day, year in and year out.  But human Workers start out as blank slates:  They are trained, at sometimes great expense, to be merely adequate, and  even the best Workers will never arrive fully at what we would call ‘optimum state of the art’ performance,  and then they die or retire to be replaced by the next generation of blank slates. So nothing with Workers ever fundamentally improves.   Human limitations and frailties are baked into the cake.   Yes, now you think you might want to keep your job, but given the perspective we’ll all have in the next few years, you’ll realize that you yourself would not want a human to be performing a service for you, such as car repair, and you would not want a human made product, no, not if you could get it better and cheaper by a Robot.

9. But, yes, there is the big problem about not getting  paid anymore, and, yes, that will be very bad for us personally.  But maybe it will help to look at it philosophically, you know, from the viewpoint of Eternity, and recognize the truly Horizon Shattering Revolutionary aspect of it all:  that Human Beings for the first time in History will be freed from labor.    We know how Marx said “Workers of the World unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains”.  Well, this Freedom from Labor is really what it  means to be freed of our chains.   Marx’s Socialism would’ve only changed the sign on the workhouse door.  We’ll still just be Workers at everybody else’s beck and call.  Is THAT the life we want to live?  Do we need a pay check so badly that we’re willing to WORK for it?: to dig and scrape like dogs?   Do we have no Human Dignity?  Well, of course we do!  And we always had the intuition that selling our labor was uncomfortably similar to selling our sexual favors.  

10.  Our only regret will be that we’ll have no place in that Bright New Workerless World.  In prior Civilizations we might have been rescued by the Social Moral aesthetic sensitivities of any of the Higher Religions which would’ve imposed ‘sacred’ duties upon the Rich to foster the Poor, but the one thing that both Capitalists and vanguard Leftists both agree upon today is that there is no God and nothing’s sacred.  With no science-based strictly rational social-moral imperative to rescue the useless workers, the logic is grim and the outlook near hopeless.   

11. But, yes,  the first few generations for the Bright New World will probably be a rough patch.   The only people who are entitled  to move forward will be those with money, capital and assets.  Let’s call them the “Entitled”.   And it won’t be in the interest of the Entitled to pay into a tax regime to prop up the now useless and impoverished Workers.   And the Predictive Planning System would be in a huge bind because if it did provide for the allocation of wealth to the Unentitled, then wouldn’t the Unentitled feel secure enough to have children and then the problem would perpetuate itself to successive generations and never go away.    So I would have to think that the Predictive Modelling System would be looking for ways of winnowing the Workers out.    

12. I would suppose that the former workers might probably react to being winnowed out in all the wrong ways, that’s to say, in ways that the Predictive Modelling System would be deliberately manipulating them to follow.    For instance, many Workers were raised under a strong work ethic where they were conditioned to believe their self-esteem depended on having a good job; well, we already know how that’ll go, because we’ve seen it among vast numbers of unemployed in the Rust
Belt:  what will happen is we’ll have a great deal of opioid overdoses… actually thinly veiled suicides.  If the Predictive Modelling System is especially unsentimentally ‘cruel’, it could actually push a lot of media content  designed to emphasize the ‘dignity’ of work —that would be implying the humiliation that would attach to unemployment and dependency.   It would be a deliberate calculation to push the unemployed to despair and self-harm.  When you think about it, maybe the Rust Belt was just a rehearsal for the Big Show coming up.  

13. Then there is another demographic segment.  I would expect many of the Unentitled to contemplate their own Revolution, to either bust up the Robots so they can go back to work themselves,  or, where leveler heads prevail,  they could demand that all Capital be made Public, and that everybody share in the wealth.   That would seem reasonable and I would not argue against it, but my intuition is that the Rich would never go along with it.   

14. Now we should consider just how powerful the Top Billionaires and the Multinational Banks really are.  If the World’s Central Banks keep printing money at the rate they are now, then they will have about 100 Trillion Dollars to play with by the time they need it.   Even the United States military budget is still just counted in the Billions.  The Banks, with that much money, could build thousands of earth moving and heavy construction robots to build hundreds of fully robotic underground factories that could turn out every variety of robotic surveillance and weapons systems.  And because it’s all robotic from top to bottom, “nobody”, that is, no human being,  would know anything about it.  Even the Execs that load in the Guidance Parameters into their Planning System could subsequently be kept out of the details. The entire operation could be contained in perfect secrecy.  This would be revolutionary in itself, that for the first time in History, since Barbarian Kings wielded their own swords,  the Rich and the Powerful wouldn’t have to depend on poor people’s police or poor people’s armies any longer.  They could handle Security ‘in house’, and they wouldn’t need to contract out for Death Squads any longer.  When you consider all this, then how could we believe that Workers could ever hope to “demand” anything?

15. But, yeah, although it looks really futile to me, apparently a lot of Leftists are still optimistic about their chance for winning the Revolution because of their vast superiority in numbers: and they do outnumber the Billionaires by about 4 million to one.  But where do you even go to find a Billionaire to kill, who doesn’t live behind multiple layers of security and who could jump into a private helicopter to be whisked away to a private jet at a moment’s notice?  

16. The bitter truth of it is that a People’s Violent Revolution would just provide a rationale for a planned and coordinated super reaction. It is even likely that the Predictive Modelling System would even toss out some particularly stinging provocations so that the People will rise up in arms at a time and place most convenient for their annihilation.  They say that ‘History is written by the winners’.  Well, if the Unentitled Revolutionaries fire the first shot, and kill even one sacrificial Capitalist,  then the responsibility for their own destruction will be represented by History as resting on their own blood stained hands.

17. I suppose that the only way that a Non-Entitled person  might be able to manipulate and ‘play’ the Predictive Modelling System for any protection, would be to represent his or her self  as a complaisant docile low-threat, low maintenance, non-reproducer.  If we really want to survive perhaps the best route we could take would be to bring back something like Quasi-Religious Monastic Orders with vows of celibacy (really just not having children) and vows of poverty.   You know, in Medieval Europe and even in Asia where I’ve seen it personally, the Monasteries were not there for Religious fanatics but for illegitimate children that needed to be warehoused  somewhere, and for Criminals and overthrown Tyrants who sought asylum against an angry public, and for those who had irredeemably disgraced themselves and could no longer go back and face decent Society.  The remainder of their lives would be dedicated to using up the least amount of  resources, you know, by being vegetarians and fasting a lot,  and then by dying without leaving any human baggage behind. Even an Atheist can see the Beauty in that, right?  But, yes, Religion was traditionally found to make the Monastery’s protocols so much more emotionally and aesthetically palatable than if the starkly materialistic reality of their situation were explained to them.    So anyway, if we want to survive and finish out our natural days, and don’t want to intentionally “overdose”, or get shot down on our own barricades, then being a quasi-religious ascetic renunciate may be our ticket to see that Bright New World, at least from its margins.  

18. When you think about it, in dealing with the present Unentitled, such as ourselves,  the System will be able to develop the procedures it will need  for dealing with their own future Unentitled.  You know, the Rich have always been known for their gambling and spending beyond their  incomes.  Falling into poverty in the Future will still be a thing.  

19. Oh, another thing we need to keep in mind is that the Predictive Modelling System will not get hung up on being Ideologically consistent.  I say that because we can  imagine that in the First Wave of this Bright New Civilization, that many of the people collected to survive will be Unentitled Guests.  The Wealthiest People will always have their entourages, hanger-on’s, proteges and pets, and such people will certainly be taken into account, living on the tabs of their Patrons.   But what to do with them after their protectors die?  Is it off to the Monastery or will the System create a slot for such people?  Keep in mind that these people will have all been mixing socially, many of them ‘Pets’ who had been handpicked for their talents, charm, cordiality and grace, and so there may be many among the Entitled who really care about them. 

20. I suppose maybe the System might adopt some kind of Social Credit Quantification, like what the Chinese now have with their own Social Credit System.  Well, how could our Predictive Modelling System accurately assess a person’s social worth?  For this as well as for other reasons I suppose that the Predictive Modelling System will set up a Total Surveillance infrastructure.   Total Surveillance could be established as easily as just giving everybody their own Personal Assistant Robot that hears all, sees all and never sleeps.  From the crib the ‘Personal Assistant’ Robot could start out as a fluffy talking “Doggie” that would be able to be swapped out into larger and more mobile  robotics  bodies to keep up with the child as it grows.  A Boy and his Dog would keep no secrets from each other, and that intimacy between Person and Personal Assistant Device  would become a lifelong habit.   Nobody should  have too much in the way of privacy concerns as long as the Personal Assistant System is useful in a thousand ways but  remains sympathetic,  non-offensive and isn’t judgmental beyond any deal-breaking point.    With all that personal information available on everybody then the System will be able to infer quantifiably whom people like and whom they don’t.  If the Predictive Modelling System wants to keep the populous happy, then what better way than to salt the population with happy people.  So the Future might have a good many people who get by entirely on Social Credits.   Smile and the World of tomorrow will smile with you and upon you.  But if you go broke and everybody hates you, well, there’s always the Monastery.

21. Now let’s look at issues of Population.  Population will need to be limited.  My first thought was to set the line at about 300 Million which is what I heard the World was at the time of the Julius Caesar.  There seemed plenty enough people to keep the action going in every corner of the globe, and yet most the World then was still grasslands and forest.   But the Guiding Stones in Georgia use 500 Million.  Okay, why quibble, but we can assume that the Predictive Modelling System would crunch all the important variables, such as Global Warming and Resource Depletion,  and determine for itself  some optimum mean level for Population.  But what would it use as a mechanism to maintain Population around this optimum mean?   Well, my guess is that the System would ask for a certain value in Capital Security before a license could be issued for having a baby.  This Security could be made so steep as to discourage all but the Wealthiest from carelessly multiplying themselves.  Also, think of this Capital Security as a Trust Fund for the child.   If they set the Security Trust Fund at an appropriately high level then every child on earth could grow up with the confidence of being independently wealthy. Now wouldn’t that be cool?  

22. Oh, and what about Eugenics?  I don’t think we could discount the possibility that the Predictive Modelling System might occasionally play Eugenics Matchmaker, if certain exquisite young couples got together.   The Baby Security Trust Fund License Fee  could come out of the Social Credit Quantification Fund.   This would give them the mechanism for being able to precisely hold the World’s Population at the Golden Mean, by balancing the License Security Trust Fund Fee against the number of Social Credit Quantification Babies. That means that if the system anticipated underpopulation, it could still hold the Trust Funds at a high level and supply the population deficit with Social Credit ‘Love’ Babies.  

23. You know, it is entirely possible that the Predictive Modelling System might even take a stronger hand in Eugenics by actively pairing up ‘exquisite young couples’ who don’t even know each other yet.  How hard could it be for their ‘spontaneous’ meetings to be subtly arranged.  Remember that every Personal Assistant Robot is on the same network as all the others, and people will have been conditioned from birth to listen to these Personal Assistants, and the Central Network  Predictive Modelling System will have everybody’s very complete psychological profiles on file, and so the System will certainly be able to find ways to persuade and manipulate a couple of young people, and if need be all their friends,  into being at the same place at the same time for a love match meeting to occur.  Then, if the Predictive Modelling System is worth its salt,  the chosen two will fall in love at first sight and the future of the Human Race will be so much the better off for it.  

24. Okay, lastly, to answer the question: “Well, aren’t Revolutions about the poor rising up to slaughter the Rich to take over for themselves”?  Can it even BE a Revolution if it’s the Rich who win?   Well, yes, I do understand the common intuitions regarding all this.  Yes, “Up the Revolution”, but, well, we all really knew way down deep that we couldn’t really win this thing, right?  But, yes,  it was our Last Hope, and it was to be our Last Stand, and it should have been our final face saving ‘Going Out with a Bang’ Moment, but now I’m trying to take all that away, and certainly nobody likes it, and I can understand that.   But we shouldn’t be delusional.  I think we should know what’s out there in front of us.  It might help us face our doom if we thought there was some silver lining around that big foreboding dark cloud out there.  You know, I am not Rich myself, and so I have nothing to gain from this Revolution from the Top stuff, but with all the thinking that I could do, I couldn’t get past the idea that They ARE Entitled to their money.  Even most Workers believe in the sacredness of property, even when they have so little of it.   So Entitlement makes for a very handy selector, if you are wondering who should survive and who shouldn’t.  Just think that if we did win our violent revolution, well, who would get what and why?  Disputes and infighting would never stop until, again, we eventually decide once more upon the sacredness of property.  And then the race towards Inequality would begin all over again.

25. And then think of the tragedy in regards to our Enemies the Rich if we should win. We would be killing off a relatively small  demographic of mostly healthy, happy, cultured and educated people who would’ve been able to sit lightly and unobtrusively on the face of the Earth, and we’d be replacing them with what?: would we really want to scourge the World with a veritable cancer of Billions of us: a huge redundancy of twisted, angry and hateful Revolutionaries primed to make our own lives as miserable as possible with Purity Contests and this New Puritanism that’s taken hold everywhere.   And if we were lucky enough to capture the economies intact, then in order to satisfy the overwhelming democratic  demand to the make all of us 7 Billion People even just moderately prosperous, to make our lives just barely endurable, then we’d have to crank up the economic engines well past any level they’d ever been before, while the Capitalists were maintaining a Scarcity Economy,  and  Global Warming would spin way out past all the tipping points and it would bring on the true End of the World.   

26. So we need to forget about our own miseries.  We can’t let ourselves stand in the way of the best of all possible futures for Humanity and for Planet Earth too.  Just picture this: if we let THEM win, then every little boy and girl will get a pony on their 9th birthday.  As they grow up there will be Balls and the dancing will go on until dawn.  Friends will always be available for  excursions and adventures, or even just pleasure tours, because nobody will ever be busy at work again.  Everybody will be secure and everybody will happily belong to some group or another, because  the Predictive Modelling System will see to it.   It will be the top of Maslow’s Mountain of Self Actualization. Historians 50 million years from now will see this as the First True Civilization and their calendars will date from it.  Yeah, sorry we won’t get to be a part of it, but we can try to not to be too much in its way.