Automation vs. Power to the People
Why is the debate over AI going to be so contentious? We run Pronatalist.org and often hear people dismiss demographic collapse as an issue (demographic collapse entails a future with a large elderly population and a minuscule young population, which causes a myriad of problems, one being that nations’ young populations become unable to support elderly populations’ state reliance through tax contributions). Those dismissing demographic collapse cite an increase in automation as the solution. Automation always and everywhere consolidates power—it never distributes it.
Every single time in human history that power (without bloodshed) has gone from the wealthy and powerful to the have-nots, it was because the powerful needed the have-nots and were dependent upon them for something. In the first democracy, Athens, this happened because naval warfare carried out via triremes—which secured the trade routes that generated income for the wealthy—required a huge population of low-skill fighting men. Before that, fighting men needed to be equipped and trained, meaning that only land owners with an income stream were useful in war. Triremes made it so that the wealthy needed to at least pretend to care about the opinion of the average man.
The same thing happened with the termination of serfdom and monarchies. The Black Death lowered the number of available workers, which granted surviving workers greater negotiating power. That negotiating power eroded the power of the elite.
A similar pattern can be seen at every point in history in which power flowed from the elite to the average Joe.
A person excited about automation freeing them from labor is like that idiot in a movie who is promised freedom by the villain only to be killed at the scene’s end, with the villain saying: “Of course I mean freedom from your mortal coil.” It’s that moment in Clerks when the guy says, “I always said this job would be great if it wasn’t for the customers,” and we all laugh.
Labor is what gives the average citizen power. Automation makes it so people with power no longer need people without it to get everything they want in life. Automation doesn’t free the average man from labor; it frees the elite from the average man.
What makes this whole situation somewhat more sickening is the speed with which people are throwing themselves into the wood chipper of automation. We, personally, didn’t choose automation because we wanted to, but out of a rising disgust with the incompetence and sloth inherent in human nature. We automated our companies not because it was cheaper but because B and C players kept making mistakes that hurt our customers and our simple conditional algorithms never did.
The process of largely automating our businesses made it clear to us how delusional people are when they say the average workers of the world will come together and demand power from the elite. You and what army? Even if the elites of the world didn’t have veto power over the use of any state-level military force, they would still have all the fruits of automation to defend themselves, be they drones or autonomous tanks.
But we all know it will never come to that—the average person is too lazy to do anything. Venezuela shows us how bad life can get before the people try to claw back power and how unrealistic taking back power will have become by the time they try.
Automation is the cheat code that breaks the system used by small players to occasionally outcompete large players and thereby access social mobility.
Automation frees the bourgeois from the proletariat and its progress cannot be stopped. Any new Luddite[[81]](#_ftn81) movement will inevitably fail. Why? Because if you stop progress in your nation, it will charge onward in another, giving that nation more resources and eventually the ability to assert control over your own. This leaves you in conditions worse than those you would suffer under automation.
We get that we are hammering this point home ad nauseam, but you must understand that your only hope in this game is to become one of the elite or join forces with a governance structure that is resistant to corruption and incentivized to protect you and your descendants. We are working on creating such a structure, so keep reading.