Ouch sorry. I swear I’m cooler offline. Maybe I picked up that weirdly formal writing style from interacting with bots on the Reddit.

I wrote that all myself, although I do tend to use formal or even stifled language. I don’t even have ChatGPT yet, although I do use some AI art on occasion.

I think getting rid of/addressing our physical needs and worries is almost as important as how immersive the world superficially appears. It’s hard to make the most of an artificial universe if you starve to death or get a pandemic halfway through.

By definition, baseline reality is excluded. Non-answer.

Humans are a vile tribal bunch, and as long as the most prosperous countries are those with limited migration and very high percentages of Northern European ancestry my faith in humanity is absent.

Which regions are worse?

We literally don’t have the resources for post-scarcity, at least not without turning the planet into Coruscant. What’s more likely is that we’ll have more security and work fewer hours per week, with much higher levels of self-employment or small businesses. The “Norman Rockwell with autonomous vehicles sprinkled in” future is my hope, and the kids who grew up on Transformers: Rescue Bots are already conditioned for it.

My grim intrusive thoughts are that we’re heading into an era of complex problems (the climate, regulating and taming capitalism, public health, public infrastructure) that require collective action and likely require more cohesive nation-states than most of the world has available to them, a huge shift from the prior 75 years and one that could prove devastating to regions like the Americas with low-cohesion, high-diversity histories. I don’t want to die and be buried in Planet Nazbol.

I just hope we don't return to 1930s brainrot where everyone of non-Western European descent is automatically second-class or worse a drain on finite resources.

A mix of Middle Eastern, North African, and Central Asian iirc.

“So, uh, this weird peninsula on the west coast of Asia, whose population is indigenous to nowhere because the real natives died off, is going to become the dominant power in world history.” Truth is stranger than fiction sometimes.

IIRC modern Europeans are relative latecomers, genetically speaking, and the earliest human remains found on the European peninsulas are genetically closer to Asians and Indigenous Americans than they are to the Europeans of, say, the Middle Ages.

With a dash each of Fallout, Wall-E, Idiocracy, and the Transformers continuity of your choice.

Disasters that affect every continent, along with incredible AI/robotics/vehicle innovation, are a core theme this decade it seems.

Biggest patch should be to change the name to something like Advanced Copilot. You aren’t Waymo.

The problem boils down to how scarce resources really are. If there’s only so much stuff we can mine without destabilizing or ruining our own homes, then robots become competition for resources rather than expansion.

Shrinking workforce + shrinking aggregate supply?

Assuming it isn’t simply a bluff and that employers in Germany actually want to hire, all of a sudden they look a lot more competitive for, say, Brazilian and Indian talent.

Can’t they literally just raise wages a bit without their business model collapsing?

How does Germany have both a labour shortage and falling real wages? Something doesn’t work there unless we’re seeing the country’s economic carrying capacity shrink faster than its workforce.

God damn the 2020s. Liberal trade makes everyone more prosperous, and countries like Germany having to source more raw materials locally decreases their carrying capacity.

Thank Allah that the USA and Canada have lots of sparsely populated and temperate areas to house domestic and foreign climate migrants (unless we have another baby boom and/or the newcomers are unable to fully integrate).

No surprise. The T in ChatGPT stands for Transformers after all.

Decepticons!