Yeah ruling juntas do need to "man the fields & factories" (1st order meatware), in order to produce and maintain those drones. Or nukes, or whatever "deciding factor beyond numbers" put them in power.
But they also need 2nd order meatware to support that 1st order: teachers, doctors, merchants… You need scientists to advance your technology against other militaries… You need leaders (3rd order) to keep the first two populations quiet and productive since that turns out to be more cost-effective than fear control through extermination…
Hell you need a certain level of genetic diversity so your own kids don't come out weird.
Give evolution a little more credit. The required number of humans for the in-group to be self-sustainable is definitely not billions, plus it's been shrinking with automation. But we are where we are for a reason – lots of alternative arrangements have been tried over millenia and found wanting.
"Keep my bunker + my drone factory and some farmers, kill the rest" leaves rulers with terrible quality of life (bad) and the next-door-junta taking over pretty quickly (also bad). It is a self-defeating, poor long-term strategy.
Automation tips the power balance further: fewer humans needed, more local autonomy. Which is, I suspect, why the ruling class are so terribly excited about AI, more so than some market valuations. Fewer pesky humans across all levels. Genetic diversity of bloodline remains the primary concern (unless you manage to live forever, which happens to be another evergreen of power ghouls).
It gives the old saying "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man adapts the world to himself; therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." a new twist, doesn't it?
1. AN AI MODEL IS GIVEN ENOUGH CAPACITY to capture (some of) our human perspective, a snapshot of our world as reflected in its training data. <== We've been here for a while
2. AN AI MODEL IS GIVEN ENOUGH CAPACITY to fabulate and imagine things. <== We're unambiguously here now
The fabulations are of a charmingly naive "predict the most probable next token" sort for now, with chatGPT. But even as a future model is (inevitably) given the ability to probe and correct its errors, the initial direction of its fabulations will still reflect that "inception worldview" snapshot.
For example, if a particular fashion trend or political view was popular around the time the model was trained (with training data typically skewing toward the "recent", simply because "recent" is when most digital data will have been produced), that model can be expected to fabulate along the lines of that imprinted political view.
3. AN AI MODEL IS GIVEN ENOUGH CAPACITY to make the is-vs-ought choice between "CORRECT ITSELF" = adapt to the world; or "CORRECT THE WORLD" = imprint its worldview back onto the world (probably indirectly through humans paying attention to its outputs and acting as actuators, but that makes no difference). <== We're getting there rapidly
Will it be more reasonable or unreasonable?
And which mode wins out long-term, be more energy efficient in that entropic struggle for survival that all physical systems go through?
I sincerely wish your post ended before that last sentence.
I realise yours may be just a figure of speech, but I find it in such bad, sinister taste to start bringing more gods and blessings into this tragic event. Really?
But they also need 2nd order meatware to support that 1st order: teachers, doctors, merchants… You need scientists to advance your technology against other militaries… You need leaders (3rd order) to keep the first two populations quiet and productive since that turns out to be more cost-effective than fear control through extermination…
Hell you need a certain level of genetic diversity so your own kids don't come out weird.
Give evolution a little more credit. The required number of humans for the in-group to be self-sustainable is definitely not billions, plus it's been shrinking with automation. But we are where we are for a reason – lots of alternative arrangements have been tried over millenia and found wanting.
"Keep my bunker + my drone factory and some farmers, kill the rest" leaves rulers with terrible quality of life (bad) and the next-door-junta taking over pretty quickly (also bad). It is a self-defeating, poor long-term strategy.
Automation tips the power balance further: fewer humans needed, more local autonomy. Which is, I suspect, why the ruling class are so terribly excited about AI, more so than some market valuations. Fewer pesky humans across all levels. Genetic diversity of bloodline remains the primary concern (unless you manage to live forever, which happens to be another evergreen of power ghouls).