I’ve been reading up on this whole Q* issue in its relation to Sam Altman being fired then rehired and it’s all…very curious. Just the idea that we may be approaching AGI is enough to give one pause for thought. And the idea that it may happen between now and when the so-called “Fourth Turning” staring in late 2024, early 2025 is very unsettling.
Imagine that just as the United States is having an existential political crisis, we are also being faced with something akin to a Singularity as well. If we achieve AGI between now and Election Day 2024, then, suddenly the idea of a Universal Basic Income becomes a serious political proposal.
But, wait, there’s more!
What if AGI is considered “woke” by MAGA to the point that they want it destroyed because it starts to take “jerbs” away from blue collar MAGA people? How’s that for a sticky wicket? You would pit the tech against the people at the same time as we the United States debates if it should lurch into fascism. And if AGI came and suddenly the entire economy was thrown up in the air…well, you really have a recipe for economic — and political — disaster.
But I am prone to “hysterical doom shit,” so, lulz, it could be that we just continue to drift through history and we punt our political problems down the road and only gradually reach any sort of technological Singularity. But I am…worried.
It definitely seems as though 2024 – 2025 could be one of the most momentous eras in American, if not human history. Only time will tell.
Given the legalistic nature of the autocracy that MAGA Nazis envision once Tyrant Trump is in power again, it seem clear that the existing ICE infrastructure is ripe for weaponization. If that happened, then I think ICE would become equivalent to the Nazi gestapo — or maybe even the SS if things got dark enough.
So, what might happen is, Trump becomes president. He has a MAGA controlled Congress. When MAGA isn’t passing legislation outlawing abortion and non fault divorce, I could see some sort of legislation dramatically re-defining the purpose and goals of ICE.
It would happen with a lot of smoke and mirrors, but the point would be to give Tyrant Trump a secret police he could use to bash heads. As I understand it, there is a “extended boarder area” that extends far past the actual border that ICE might use to “check the papers” of people randomly. If it turned out they wrote on their blog what a fucking small dicked cocksucker Tyrant Trump is, they get scooped up and thrown into an already-existent ICE camp.
As an aside, I am curious as to when the MAGA Youth and MAGA SA will come into existence. I’m sure it will be within the first 100 days of Tyrant Trump’s return to office, but those are 100 days that could give us anti-MAGA Poors time to realize what’s up and organize some sort of national collective action.
Or not. Most of the people who would organize such a thing will have already fled the country for Europe and beyond by that point. Lulz.
I did a little bit of an experiment recently. I had lunch with my father and put my phone closer to him than me to see if my hunch that Tik-Tok can somehow read our minds might be proven.
I still have no absolute proof — don’t know how I could — but it is interesting that in the last few days I have been pushed a lot of WW2 and 60s content. It’s very interesting.
The only reason why I continue to have a lingering suspicion that Tik-Tok can read our minds is how I keep getting pushed things that simply can not be explained by the power of an algorithm. Usually it has something to do with the body. But often times, it’s just something I’ve thought really hard about in a way where I see something in my mind’s eye.
It’s all very curious.
It makes you wonder the lengths that Big Tech might go to keep such technology a secret. The idea that America’s biggest geopolitical foe has the technology — even if it’s just peer-to-peer — to read the minds of the millions of users of Tik-Tok would…probably not go over well in the halls of Congress.
Being old, I know what I don’t know. And among the things I just don’t know at this point is — how much will my lack of any acting experience hinder my ability to write a good screenplay? I think it’s one of those things where it’s hard to quantify.
While it definitely HELPS to have training as an actor, it’s not like it’s totally impossible to write a decent screenplay if you’re just a regular old doofus like me. And, truth be told, it’s not like I’m opposed to taking acting lessons at some point in the future if that will help me write a better screenplay.
Now, this is where I pause and reflect on how fucking old I am. Age, like race, is just not something you can change. I just can’t help the life I’ve led. And, as such, I’m far more likely to get somewhere with a novel than I am a screenplay. But, having said that, I will note that I’m a really good talker — I love to schmooze, especially when intoxicated and I’m 100% extroverted.
…But I’m 50. I’m 50, poor and short.
And, yet, time and again in my life, I’ve managed to shock the haters by pulling a rabbit out of a hat. It happened in my 20s and it happened when I was in Seoul. When I was in Seoul, I not only was one of the best rock DJs in town for a few months, I also had the lone English-language expat magazine.
This it all went to shit.
Angst for the memories, and all that.
But I’m not dead yet. Though, if I somehow manage to blow up with my DJ money in my 50s and 60s, it will be a very bittersweet experience. On one hand, I will at last have the success I feel I deserve, but on the other I will be so fucking old that I can’t, like, go clubbing all night with twentysomethings without coming across as a freaky weirdo — or worse yet, a dirty old man.
I continue to drift towards my goal of finishing a novel so I can query it in the fall of 2024 — just as the so-called “Fourth Turning” is going to happen. Ugh. Anyway, I also want to have a fall back “second creative track.” As such, I’ve decided that screenwriting is going to be it.
Just as I have used Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl Who Played With Fire” as my “textbook” for the novel I’m writing, so, too, do I plan to use Charlie Kaufman’s “The Enteral Sunshine of The Spotless Mind” as my “textbook” for screenwriting. I think I’m probably going to do something similar with the Star Wars screenplay at some point soon.
I need to understand how to properly read a screenplay. I’ve already found bouncing back and forth between novel writing and screenwriting has helped my writing a lot. Something about thinking about how to structure a screenplay aids in helping me see things in a different way with the novel.
Anyway, something about the fall / winter season coming (along with a lot of more darkness) has caused me to feel a little unnerved. I’m still faraway, so close with the novel. It’s fun to just totally switch gears on a creative level and read about something completely different and new, while staying within the general writing skillset.
I hate the fact that I don’t have enough structure in my life. I have a rather idyllic situation going on at the moment and I spend way too much of my time just daydreaming and drifting towards my goal.
What’s more, I know damn well that this unusual — a great — situation that I find myself in can last for only so long. Something is going to throw everything out of whack soon enough and I’ll be smarting that I didn’t squeeze out every once of creativity I could when I had the opportunity.
I wonder what it will be. Maybe it will be The Fourth Turning, maybe it will be having to go underground when weaponized ICE agents start to hunt me down for thinking ding-dong Tyrant Trump is a fucking cocksucker.
I can be a contrarian at times and, as such, something dawned on me about the immediate future of XR and AI technology. I’m beginning to believe that Her-like AI technology (digital personal assistants) will be a far bigger service industry than any of us can possibility imagine at the moment.
Instead of a trillion dollar industry, it might be the thing that spawns a few trillion dollar industries.
I say this because I just don’t know if people really want to wear any sort of shit on their face. So, in the near term, it could be that XR technology will sound great on paper but, in reality, no one will actually do anything with it because of vanity.
This, in turn, leads me to the following scenario — rather than a Apple Vision Pro, what if you had a tiny black dot video camera you wore on your forehead over an eye combined with a earpiece that let you communicate with a Her-type digital personal assistant.
The camera would serve as the “eye” of your Her. As such, all the hard work would be done by your Her. Rather than YOU seeing the XR technology, your Her would. Her, in turn would tell you in your ear what she saw.
This kind of squares the circle, at least in the near term. I suppose once XR headsets look more like glasses as opposed to birth control devices then XR will begin to live up to its ages-old promise.
We’re now almost exactly a year away from one of the most election days in American history. At the moment, it seems, we’re careening towards a crisis not seen since 1860. This crisis could manifest itself in one of several ways.
The most obvious way is, lulz, we simply drift into autocracy with our eyes wide open and shrug as we transition from the halfway situation of being an “anocracy” to full blown autocracy. Trump is re-elected, he goes full tyrant and there’s no reaction on the part of the majority of the population. Of course, that doesn’t mention the 1 million smug Twitter liberals who will flee the country en masse as soon as it’s clear Trump is going to transition us into autocracy.
That scenario, for the time being, seems to be the most likely one.
Alas, there are some other, far darker scenarios that we have to contend with.
One scenario is Trump is re-elected, goes full tyrant and, well, he gets so absolutely bad that there is some sort of “Glorious Revolution” on the part of the populace — maybe with the help of the U.S. Military. I could see the organizers of such a coup using a novel — to say the least — interpretation of the 14th Amendment insurrection clause to kick Trump to the curb by saying he was never legitimately president to begin with.
That might be the legal fig leaf that would allow the New Patriots to get the job done and still be able to sleep at night. But there would be a spectrum with this scenario, with there being a “light touch” revolt that has the specific aim of getting rid of Trump all the way to a far more general collapse of the country because MAGA freaks out.
But, wait, there’s more.
Another situation would be Trump loses, and starts to demand a National Divorce with the specific intent of him personally avoiding going to jail. Then we have a repeat of 1860-1861 with states leave the Union one by one and a massive fucking clusterfuck.
Meanwhile, there is a small chance that rather than wait until Trump goes full tyrant, Blues freak out and do something akin to a civil war / revolution of their own starting as soon as Trump is named the winner.
But my thinking on this has evolved. I no longer think that Blues would cause a civil war. A revolution, maybe, but not a civil war. It’s just the temperament of Blues to want to start a new nation. Blues like me just want to reform and remake the nation that we have.
One last thing — never underestimate the possibility that Reds will, once Trump is in office, begin the process of calling a Constitutional Convention. I think that’s a real possibility.
Anyway. Good luck. You’ve got a year. Use it wisely.
In general, Americans are collectively pretty chill. It takes a whole lot to rile us up. We’re not French, after all. In fact, the last time we really got ornery was in the late 1960s, early 1970s in the context of the Vietnam War. Once The Draft ended, then, lulz, everyone just wanted to shake their booty and being politically engaged was a thing of the past.
A book I really enjoyed as a young man is William Safire’s “Freedom,” which is a huge tome of a novel that deals with the early days of the Civil War leading up to the Emancipation Proclamation. The book deals with what I would call “Radical Moderates.” This is epitomized by when one of the characters says, “We’re all Abolitionists now.”
The average person in 2023 has no comprehension as to how radical freeing the slaves being a war aim was in 1862. So, in a sense, if you want to know what a Radical Moderate is, just think of how President Lincoln only gradually warmed up to the idea of freeing the slaves.
ANYWAY.
The point of all that is — if Trump goes totally bonkers and full tyrant, what happens? Anything? All the signs point to Trump winning in 2024 and then, in a very, very fucking erratic manner, shoving tyranny down the throats of Americans in an unprecedented manner.
And, as an aside, remember — if Trump does happen to lose, there’s really good chance that he will single-handedly provoke a civil war in an effort to avoid going to jail. Let that sink in.
This is where I note that general macro political trends are for the United States to drift (peacefully) into autocracy. It’s a gimmie at this point. Now, in late 2023, the United States is an “anocracy” or even, maybe, an autocracy without an autocrat.
So, if any other Republican was in Trump’s position, we would simply wake up on day 20 years from now — or less — and wonder why the United States is invading Canada to free it from the “woke mind virus.” But this is Trump we’re talking about.
He’s so stupid, lazy and idiotic that what should be a historical gimmie, could turn into a massive fucking clusterfuck. But, again, this all raises the question — how tyrannical can Trump get before there’s some sort of “Glorious Revolution” lead by Radical Moderates?
And, remember, pushing things to the limit is kind of Trump’s thing. The man has been a one man stress test to our entire political system, ranging from the courts to the election process itself. So, yeah, I could see Trump going stark raving mad and tyrannical at some point in his second term to the point that, say, there’s a General Strike of some sort that might bring the nation to its knees.
This, of course, raises an interesting idea — might the U.S. Military step in? I don’t think so. And, yet, if Trump was running around demanding the U.S. Military to do things to the domestic population that were clearly illegal and un Constitutional….maybe they would step in?
An interesting way that Trump might be deposed is the an novel use of the 14th Amendment. Remember, the Radical Republicans of Reconstruction were able to fuck with the South for a few years by saying the did not have a “republican form of government.” As such, if Trump went crazy and started to do things that the U.S. Military simply could not brook, it’s at least possible that the legal fig leaf that would be used would be that Trump was illegally in office to begin with because he was in violation of the 14th Amendment.
But all of that is just a speculative daydream at the moment. I think that while Trump is likely to go full bonkers tyrant the moment he’s in office again, that, in the end, he’ll solve all his problems with the U.S. Military by demanding a Constitutional Convention that rewrites the Constitution in the likeliness of MAGA.
If that happens, may God have mercery on all our souls.
I have no special insight into anything, but I was alive in 2016. And Republicans made it clear in the days leading up to the 2016 Election that lulz, they were fully prepared to simply not allow ANYONE to fill a SCOTUS vacancy unless they were MAGA.
As such, Twitter liberals need to shut the fuck up about “Oh, if only Hillary Clinton had won in 2016.” Trump is nothing more than a symptom of some severe macro problems in the American political system that would have caused SOMEONE like him to become president starting early as 2016 and no later than 2024.
In some respects, you can’t even “blame” Obama for Trump. The forces that allowed Bill Clinton to win in 1992 also caused Trump to come into being. In general, America’s fucked because of the forces that bring down all empires sooner or later.
The only question in my mind at the moment is are we going to somehow pull off a third hat trick and — after some turbulence starting in late 2024, early 2025 — renew our democratic traditions and grow even stronger. Or are we going to slouch into a MAGA autocracy. Or, worse yet, we bomb ourselves into oblivion without any clear endgame.
But the point remains — Twitter liberals are being crybabies to pine for some alternative universe where Hillary Clinton won in 2016. I remember the passion that the Trump Train had behind it in 2016. If he had lost, we wouldn’t know what a horrible president he would be and he would definitely win in 2020. So, all the horrible shit that happened in 2017 – 2021 would just have been punted down the road four years.
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