Based Camp: How AI Will Alter Class Conflict

In today's discussion, Malcolm and Simone dive deep into the impending impacts of AI on society, particularly on class structure and economic preparedness. They examine how AI is set to radically shift the balance of power between the wealthy and the proletariat, with surprising implications for social mobility.

From exploring how AI could make the lower classes obsolete to forecasting the potential rise of genetically modified, AI-empowered underdogs, this discussion promises a thought-provoking look at our automated future. Simone and Malcolm also touch on the controversy of genetic purity, the dangers of victimhood mentality, and the pitfalls of class struggle narratives.

Join us as we take a unique look at the ways in which AI, genetics, and ideological alliances could shape the future of humanity.

Transcription and above written by an evil AI for SEO. The podcast is meant to be a podcast:They genuinely think the world would be better off without humans. There is no long-term allegiance here. There is nobody buddy. They are our cultural enemies. I can find a way to ally myself with the most religious extremists that has a worldview that is nothing like mine, but at least they wanna prosperous future for their great-grandchildren.

The, when somebody wants the end as a species, you just can't work with them. And the big lie is that there aren't genuine ideological differences. Between people who are outside of this elite cast in society and that at the end of the day it's all paved over because we just want their stuff. It's not, and that's how they've kept us down.

Yeah I would emphasize just how. Common. This is I would say approximately 15% of the people that we speak with. Friends, colleagues, people we respect. Respect, yeah. Yeah. Would say but isn't the world, isn't the universe better off without humans like and genuinely believe that and genuinely be.

Neutral or relatively pleased with a prospect that humanity will cease to exist soon. I think this is a real threat when you think about things like AI alignment or tech advancement in general. When. One would typically hope that everyone working on ai, AI alignment, or AI in general really, really, really cares about the safety of humans.

No, no, No. Yeah. And uh, what was it I've, I've heard from through the, the um, grapevine that one of the top people in the space when they were being told, Hey aren't you genuinely scared about the future of the human species? Their response was, don't be such a human ris. They didn't care. They did not care.

And I think there's a way to frame these people as malevolent, but they're not acting with malevolent intent. They genuinely, philosophically believe there is less suffering with less humans. Let's get rid of them all. You cannot tie this millstone around your neck. If you're looking to make genuine change in society.

You need to accept that even among people of your economic group. There are those that are not your allies.

 What I think we will begin to have as society differentiates is more of different social groups that are aligned with each other. Maybe not even by historic cultural backgrounds, and certainly not by ethnic backgrounds, but by ideological similarities.

Sort of an alliance of ideological tribes that understand that they can work together and that their groups are aligned in the long run.  Because for so long that we've been in a society of nations and I think between. Network state like effects and AI changing society into one where class structure is much more international and much more stratified.

 And I think that this is a really important thing to note here, is that this sort of wealthy class is an internationalist class. They do not care about their country. They do not care about their people they do not care about their religious cohort. Often they only care about uh, this, wealthy class.

 And the reason they care about this wealthy class so much is because this wealthy class all has a common interest and preventing themselves from losing the power that they're accumulating. But I think going after them is to some extent, pointless. They simply have more power than us and everyone else right now at an absolutely astronomical scale.

What we need to understand and vi to some extent, this frees them from concerns around us and allows us to work to sharpen ourselves. Outside of their supervision to some extent, so long as we are willing to pack up and leave if they begin to lock things down in certain countries, which is, so let's delve into this a little further.

Hold on. You're saying, the initial statement of the wealthy using AI to free themselves cells from the proletariat. Yes. That happens. But also the proletariat is using AI too, right? Yeah. What does that mean? What, what happens when the proletariat becomes fractured away from the wealthy?

Does this fundamentally change anything? Does it bring us back to a, another place and a cycle between wealthy and non wealthy classes? What does that mean? Especially when they're both very well equipped. Yeah. I love this point because it's  the biggest trick and it is the core trick of communism as an ideology class struggle.

And that they convince the idiots to believe everyone who's not wealthy is aligned with each other. Through doing that people who aren't among the elite cast and society millstone themselves to the floor. And what we are seeing in the future is a divide.

Amongst different people within the middle and lower classes of society where people are coming together based on ideological similarities and by ideological similarities, what I mean is what they hope for the future of our species. Do they hope for a prosperous future where everyone does their own share and pulls forwards?

And everyone every day is waking up and asking, how can I make civilization better? How can I make humanity more prosperous? Are they asking how can I build a system that allows me to spend, all day on idle pursuits? And these two groups have nothing in common. And the biggest trick is to convince these two groups that they are on the same team.

They are not on the same team.

  And then  whatever individuals do well and start to rally people behind them or gather public attention the biggest trick is they'll start to brandish those people as elite.

They'll say, oh, look at this new elite person like they did to us. Look at the elite couple, right? Because they use elite to try to through class warfare, divide people. Divide people from the people who are actually their allies, actually trying to uplift as much of the population as possible.  

So your argument is that there never really was a class divide. There was a cultural divide. And often these things correlate with wealth or lack of wealth, but there, that's, they don't often correlate with the lack of wealth or wealth. I would say that it's actually interesting, I do believe that when wealthy people in these groups push this system, they genuinely believe, they believe in it.

If you know the kids of rich people, there is no group that you'll find more communists among. And the question is why does it perform so well in these economic circles? And the reason it performs so well as an ideology in these economic circles is because it is the ideology that best ensures intergenerational wealth transfer.

And thus the families that support it are the families that have maintained intergenerational wealth transfer for more generations.

 This happens because as power becomes more bureaucratic, And institutional, it becomes easier to capture within a family. Then is the case when power is just associated with capital, which

Nominally means at least to some slight extent was in any system. That's, barely functioning. It's associated with productivity.

This is where you get the joke in management classes in our society. Which goes, how do you tell old money, your second generation money and it's look for the socialist or the communist.

 how do you know, or how do you end up in this new development? With AI and with fractures of dependency forming, how do you end up riding this wave in an advantageous way? I think sometimes it's important to be honest with ourselves and say, we don't know. We don't know exactly how things are going to play out.

I know how things won't play out. How I, you know, I, I, I know. Well, So you don't, you don't, you don't envision a world in which AI hand, wavy hand wav solves everything. Everyone has universal basic income and of course, no one's always, I think just some extent that's a world you don't have to prepare for.

Oh. Because if it is, what happens? Then? There's, if it is what happens, whatever you have done to prepare doesn't become relevant. Right, right. Okay. Um, So variably, there's no reason to prepare. Like I'm thinking about what actions do I take for today? How do I prepare my family to ensure that I give our species the best chance for a prosperous, diverse and pluralistic future?

I'm not thinking about that future because things are already worked out in that future. Yeah. Um, I, I think much more likely is that you have some form of benevolent ai, as we've talked about in other videos, but that through its benevolence, it effectively castrates a vast majority of the population that simply, and when I say castrates not just in terms of them not having kids, but in terms of their spirit.

Like they lose their vitality to push forwards and change things because they no longer have struggles. And I say you can create struggles for the yourself. And I think what we see in our society today, you've talked about this collapse of mental health in our society, right?

Sometimes when people col create struggles for themselves, it's just indolent, daily whining, basically. And then other people, when they create struggles for themselves I think it's the way that we try to where every day we're like, okay, how can we. Do better. How can we improve, we play life on as hard and mode as we can in terms of the aggressiveness with which we move forwards because we know that if we fail, there's not many people who are genuinely working right now to, to fix some of the bigger problems that we have in the world.

Cause we don't have partial points for it, you know? yeah. People are out there and they'll, they'll hate on you. You point out something like collapsing fertility rates or the fact that no, no culture in the world today has figured out how to have a society that is prosperous and has a high level of education and that is socially and economically stable except for Israel.

No, no culture in the world had figured out how to maintain those two things. And Israel is a site that has said, we'll do a video on Israel one day, cuz it's a really interesting case study. Um, But uh, like that should be a thing that like people should be flagging right now. Like, Oh, like basically civilization isn't working anyway.

So another element of. AI and class that I think is discussed more. For example, in science fiction is, and before AI really became something real in society that we were actually experiencing people just vaguely referred to a singularity, right? Like this point after which. A lot of limitations, like not just wealth or resources, but also age just left us.

And then, a lot of sci-fi books explore, okay, in such a world, what becomes the new basis for social class. And in, in a couple of. Books like I always talk with you, Malcolm, about down and out in the Magic Kingdom. Yeah. Where the primary currency and thing of scarcity then is essentially social reputation.

Like how awesome are you and how much social cred do you have? And that's tracked in the form of a currency known as woofy in another. This is a teen dystopia book. Before they were super huge called like The Ugly Series by Scott Westerfield which was focused more around teens. It there was more fracturing of like subcultures but then within them you would do really heavy body modifications to fit into that subculture and try to gain as much social credit within that subculture as you could, which I think is really interesting because it.

Feeds into a lot of the things that you like to discuss about how dominant hierarchies work within subcultures and how they can lead people to take on more extreme stances, modifications, et cetera. But like when literally you're like modifying your body to fit that, it starts to make you look really weird, which is fun.

People do that already with tattoos. Yeah. And all sorts of crazy things. When the tech gets better, it, the mods get more interesting. In a world, let's say that we do enter that, ubi, everything works out AI world. What do you think new attempts at gaining status or higher social class do, what do you think science fiction writers or other people are not necessarily anticipating that we may really see?

Because what we do know for sure is that we're not gonna receive get to this U B I world where everyone has everything they need. And people won't be just sitting at home happy with what they have, right? There will still be at least a subset of the population that has to just be the best or that has to have more than other people.

It has to be better than other people. How will they try to be better? What will be the measures that we use that we're not thinking about or discussing a lot? I think one of the things we miss is that to a large extent, we already live, like people talk about a post scarcity world. And what they don't realize is that from the perspective of somebody living 300, 400 years ago, we are already living in a post scarcity world. Totally. Yeah. And yet people have never felt like they have less. And by that what I mean is all diseases are basically cured to the extent that, we're often dying from Random, like heart failures and cancers not diseases.

Diseases like we used to, you used to even going back a hundred years, or I think it's a hundred years, might be like 120 where 50% of kids died in, early in their life, childbirths or early on this might be a 200, I don't know exactly, but, we very few people in the developed world at least really want for food.

And, we used to fight wars over spices and now you can get your, spicy Cheetos or Doritos. This is not, we live and you look at access to education books, having a few books was a sign of immense wealth. Now most people have access to all human knowledge, and this is true in the developed world as well where access to things like cell phones are really common.

Cell phones with internet access. So we already live in a post scarcity world. So what people misunderstand is they think that when they have access to more, it'll feel like they have access to more. But the truth is that the more leisure you have access to, Typically the less happy you're going to be on average, unless you force yourself into a hard and rigid lifestyle, which we are beginning to see people realize and do, but we are only seeing this often on the more conservative ends of society.

Like monk mode and stuff like that. And there's many ways in which people do this, where they create artificial challenges for themselves that aren't just like personal emotional challenges, but are like some sort of objective challenge, like work out every day or do X every day or live x kind of structured life.

And then they began to find a lot of these concerns they have began to melt away. So I guess what I would say is there's this, I think perception. That. Oh, once we have more, it'll feel like we have more, but it won't. What I'm actually hearing you say, which I think is really interesting is a lot of people sci-fi writers, futurists, et cetera, talk about the excesses, talk about how crazy things are gonna get the crazy things people will do, the crazy things people will modify about themselves.

It's all about additive, maximalism. What you're describing is that you anticipate that more factions might go for really intense minimalism. The this sort of intentional deprivation. Intentional hardship. Yes. And that this is going to be a show like in, in a world in which excess is the default, then deprivation is how you show differentiation and that will be an underrated class.

Signaler. I couldn't agree more. Yeah. And I think. Another thing nothing in society is more a sign of luxury and surplus than the ability to self indulge in victimization and emotionally indulge. When we look at the world today and we look at the mental health quote unquote crisis people have, a lot of this existing mental health crisis is because people now have the leisure.

To have these mental health problems, a leisure they don't have in the developing world. And it's why you don't see these in the developing world. And it's why you don't see these before, but I think when we talk about what are going to be the leisures that people most indulge in that they're not indulging in today, I think one of the biggest leisures that people will indulge in.

Is going to be mental health crises is going to, oh my gosh. No. Hold on. No, we're already there. We are already there. No, it will be so much worse than it is today. So you're gonna see just the ultimate like spoony, the ultimate like complete, invalid. Can't get out of bed. Oh, yeah. In ways that you can't even imagine today.

Maybe even like self amputees who, who create this situation for themselves and, and wallow round strap to tubes. I, I do not like this. Yeah. You are going to have the, the level of self-imposed. Emotional stress and victimization because this is the thing, people think that what people want when they have leisure is stuff when they have money.

Mm-hmm. Now what they want, what most people naturally want when you just give them access to everything is just to wallow around in their own distress in their own. And you say this as a new thing, look at Daisy Buchanan, you know, back in the days of the great gadsby. Was there any more a sign of wealth back then to, oh, I just fainted.

The sign of me, oh, somebody said something distressing. I must oh, oh, oh, and you're panicked about this for a week. You know? This is something that wealthy classes have been doing for centuries. Now it's just that everyone has access to the ability to this kind of self-indulgence. So a lot more suffering in the future.

Ironically, even though a lot more suffering, because that's the thing that people,

 the biggest thing people get wrong about humans is they think that when they have prosperity, that they will choose to escape suffering. They think suffering, victimization. It's what humans fear. But the truth is, is that victimization removes responsibility and responsibility.

That's what humans fear more than anything.  

And if you give them the chance to remove that responsibility from themselves, something that you are able to do when you have enough prosperity in society that you no longer really need to worry about starving, that you and, and when you remove responsibilities from yourself, you don't have kids.

Terrifying. Terrifying. But that is where I think a portion of society is going. And I think another portion is going where you said the minimalist route. Self-imposed. Scarcity, and it is the minimalists who will end up improving themselves and will end up in disproportionately in the economically advancing class of society.

Yeah. But th this class of our society that is this LA class that will be made a permanent elite because of ai, they will move further and further into this self victimization.  You wait. More and more something we are beginning to see in our society, and we will see it more and more, is people with the reins of power in our society will begin to classify themselves as the ultimate victims.

They will begin to ban people from social media for saying that they aren't really victims. They will begin to potentially even jail people for saying they aren't victims.  You began to see this. Remember when there was a period where journalists started to lose their jobs? When other people were loosing their jobs, journalists told them, Hey, get out there.

Learn to code. And then when the journalists started losing their jobs, the journalists in elite classes in our society, a class seen as a disseminator of truth, they might not be the economic elite. You can look at our revolutions videos for this differentiation, but they were certainly a social elite class in our society because they determined to an extent what was true and what wasn't true.

They began to lose their jobs. And they're often the kids of people who don't really need to worry about money and stuff like that. That's how you end up in this journalist class. It's how you end up. The reason thing, how you end up in the professor class is not having to worry about money and being the son of a wealthy person.

But anyway, so they were in this silly class and then people started making fun of them the same way they had made fun of other people saying Learn to code. And those people, when they made fun of the journalists for that, they began to get their account banned on Twitter. And so why weren't journalists getting banned when they were telling other people they should learn to code?

The answer is simple because they became a protective class. People began to realize people in power, oh my God, if people can attack this group for sort of their self-indulgent whining right now, they might be able to attack us. And so that's what I think we're gonna end. Yes, is our kids growing up, that it's actually the wealthiest in our society who are the biggest victims.

Those with the most systematic benefits in our society who really struggle the most, and anyone who attacks them well. Those are the real monsters. Those are the real monsters. I guess time will tell. We can revisit this in what, how long is this gonna take? 20 years. I don't know. Our kids will revisit it.

They'll look at our videos and say, wow, they didn't know what they were talking about. I really one of my favorite books is The Martyrdom of Man because he is got a whole chapter at the end of it that's just dedicated to us. People living like 200 years in the future, 150 years in the future.

He gets so many things right. And that's who I hope I'm talking to, is this also families prepare intergenerationally because, just hoarding money doesn't help you in the way it used to. What you need to do is you need to build a durable culture for your kids and a culture that builds into some extent of hardship for them so they don't end up like this.

And that teaches them these truths about the world in a way that when they begin to have people in their society offering them the candy of self indulge, self victimization, that they are able to say no. I say no. I am okay with the induced hardship that my family taught me to bring upon myself and how I move forwards because it will sharpen me and give me a chance to self betterment because that's what matters in life.

Let's hope that you turn out to be a Winwood read and not. Some other crazy predictor who didn't get anything right, but I hate better, I could out turn out to be a Nostradamus, someone who gets everything wrong, but everybody pretends like he got everything right by making up protections from him.

Fact, no, we want you to be a real shot caller and this is why I like that you're really explicit about the things that you say, you're not you're not speaking cryptically. This is all very clear because. Honestly, this is how you wanna read people. You wanna read how well they predict things.

You don't just go by how fancy someone seems or how intelligent they seem, but rather how well they accurately model and predict things. It's performance that should speak louder than anything else. So, well, we, We definitely don't live in that world today. Yeah. We repeatedly see the people in positions of power in our society, just completely making wrong calls and then attacking anyone who points it out.

Our hope is that age is soon to come to an end. Um, But we gospel. I appreciate your optimism, Simone. That's why I'm married to you. Your kindness, your optimism. You always think the best of other people in the best of the future. Well, That's very kind of you to think if delusional, but I love you. I I'll uh, I'll look forward to our next conversation.

Bye Malcolm. Bye.

Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe