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My_Username_Is_What t1_ja20bjs wrote

A country could, hypothetically speaking, spend around 800 billion dollars on their military and be the strongest country on the planet. You can't beat them in a fight, ever.

But you don't need to. Just get this hypothetical country to rot from the inside. You start introducing your ideas into pop culture, massage the media for a decade or two, and buy politicians. Convince those politicians to fleece their constituents, destroy the education system, and simultaneously get the public to think it's, once again hypothetically speaking, say a minority population that is at fault. Not the politicians.

Then you have uneducated stupid people running around killing each other and tearing up history in some "morality" based purge and tada, that once homogeneous and united country is now divided into city states busily attacking each other.

A wise man once wrote "in the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity."

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One-Step2764 t1_ja2bq3p wrote

Futurists worry about rogue AI for pretty good reasons; we've already experienced a primitive form of the problem in our social bureaucracy. Those politicians and powerholders do horrible things as they optimize toward a misaligned reward function, whether that's votes in a unrepresentative majoritarian polling system, leverage in an absurdly lopsided legislative system, or financial tokens in an economic system that rewards hoarders.

What's happening now in the US is not dissimilar from a game AI spamming some useless behavior that runs up a counter to no useful purpose. Unfortunately, the dollar-counter gives our social AI ever-greater power to perpetuate itself. Millions, billions, trillions of dollar-points, all redeemable for more and more human labor to be spent on accumulating more and more points, absolutely disregarding the humanitarian or ecological cost.

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Poopoopug t1_ja28eth wrote

Reminds me of the movie Idiocracy

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Wizzle_Pizzle_420 t1_ja2a5c0 wrote

Sometimes the characters in that movie don’t seem as terrible as what we’re dealing with. I had to stop reading/ watching dystopian movies, because some of them don’t seem as bad, and it made me angry that we’re in the age of douchebaggery.

We’re probably a horror movie for those in another dimension.

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WettWednesday t1_ja38fxm wrote

>we are a horror story to those in other countries

Ftfy

In Germany they don't just learn about their past to prevent becoming nazi germany again, they also learn in their version of high school, about current American propaganda. And not only is Germany well aware how fucked up we are over here, so are most of western europe. And they're seeing a lot of same overlap in the UK with very similar propaganda and internal destruction.

When Americans stopped aiming for a better future for all Americans, and started only focusing on ourselves and the "I got mine fuck you" mentality, we started accelerating this process beyond a means of fixing it.

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