KMO Show Episode Number 29, Sunday, February 23rd, 2025. Hey everybody, KMO here. And in this episode of the podcast, I'm going to share the first part of a conversation I recorded just today with Kopernikon, somebody I know from Substack. This was our first conversation, so I shouldn't really say I know him all that well. I don't know where he is in the world other than he is in the Mountain Time Zone. And I also know that his Substack bio reads as follows.
A happy little concerned citizen and humble meme farmer who is quite tired of the BS present in modern politics and the intentional violence and evil committed by the progressive left. I have an MS in anthropology. And I will just say that I was struggling with Skype when it was time to start with the interview.
I did not get my input set correctly, so even though I was speaking into a nice microphone, well not that nice, it's a black snowball, but it's better than the one that actually did the recording. It sounds for all the world as if it was the built-in mic in my laptop that picked up my voice. Sorry about that. But the conversation was supposed to be about science fiction, and we do return to science fiction from time to time. But here's my conversation with Kopernikon.
You're listening to the KMO show. I'm your host, KMO, and I am joined by Kopernikon, somebody who, like most of my guests these days, I know through Substack. Kopernikon, good to talk to you. Good to meet you. It's been great getting to chat with you ahead of the show, and I'm happy to get started. Well, my Substack is all about science fiction and futurism, and you contacted me after I had posted a comment on one of your posts having to do with cyberpunk.
So I wonder if you'd be interested in recounting briefly the point of that post. Well, so initially I responded, I remember I was walking around the house reading your response because I thought it was brilliant, because you actually understood the details of some of the things that were said in that post, and a lot of people just sort of blazed past it. The exact bit is the post itself was a discussion about, in my opinion, the cyberpunk genre is mostly dead at this point.
And it's dead because the future it described is a future past in the same way as 1950s futurism is. So the specific subparticle of that post that you responded to was a discussion about how neon lights have been replaced by LEDs.
And while that's a minor aesthetic change in the context of something like a film or a television show in a societal sense, that's very significant because neon lights are much more expensive than LEDs, so you have much more limited lighting, so you have much reduced surveillance. So that means that you can have people sliding underground.
You can have people moving around the edges of society in a very real and physical sense that can't exist in the modern world because everything is classified and everything is surveilled. And we have bizarre forms of pseudo social credit systems in the West and actual social credit systems in the East that ensure that everybody has to play by the same rules as those who lead and those who lead make the rules, of course. I also brought in the notion of Jevons paradox.
For many, many years, my podcast was almost entirely devoted to the notion of a fast collapse of industrial society because of peak oil or some other bottleneck in the complex support system that industrial civilization requires. I have renounced all Doomer participation in Doomer narratives since then, but there's a lot of tropes that come with that that stick with me that are useful from time to time.
And one of those is Jevons paradox, which is the idea that if we invent a way to do something that we were doing before but more efficiently rather than banking the savings, we just do more of it. Yes, that's definitely something that we've observed through the beginning of the 21st century, especially when it comes to things like information. I mean, AI can now pump out a tremendous amount of information, and we're not using this new ability to make gains.
We're using it to just increase the velocity at which bad information can be created. That is true. In the case of the neon lights and the LEDs, though, LEDs, they use less electricity. They're more expensive to manufacture, but they last longer. So over time, your amortized cost for the LED is lower than for the neon lights. And neon is just one noble gas among many that gets used in what we call neon lighting. But we could just replace the neon lights with LEDs and call it a day, but we don't.
We do more and more. And that is the application of Jevons paradox in this instance. I mentioned my my peak oil doomer days because scrolling through your your substack feed, you are reading a lot of the same books that I read like a decade and a half ago and in many instances, you know, interviewed the authors. And in one instance, which is a pretty significant one, given how you've talked about it, longtime listeners to my podcasting efforts will certainly know the name John Michael Greer.
I have interviewed him a dozen or more times over the years and met him in person many times participated in the same events, things like that. We largely disagree about the the trajectory of industrial civilization these days. But he has full, full respect for me for his work ethic and his creativity and his intelligence. But the book of his that you speak very highly of is the Eco Eco Technic Future. So I would encourage you to praise that book in whatever way you know it is meaningful to you.
Well, so I more or less have spent a little bit of time looking for that book is a good way to describe it. I read RKU Futurism. I thought that was kind of a mess and didn't really enjoy it. But it was why it's been widely discussed and widely spread that specific book. I read Breaking Together, which is another book that discusses sort of peak oil limits to growth, that kind of thing. And I also read the Limits to Growth, which recently had a new publication in 2022.
The Limits to Growth always seemed overly alarmist and every version that I've seen of it, they're overly alarmist. And that's in comparison to somebody who does think that we're going to undergo major, major restructuring due to resource shortages. RKU Futurism is a kind of a vanity project.
But Ecotechnic Future, I think, is the only book that provides a social and technical and pseudo-industrial framework for looking at the way human societies are likely to develop as they transition from universal resource abundance, which is to say that per person the amount of energy and the amount of raw resources is very high to a post resource abundance period, where the amount of energy and the amount of resources per person is dramatically reduced.
And partially that will be just because there's limits to energy production and there's a lot of people and a lot of industry using it. And partially it will be because the quality of our ore has gone down dramatically since we were first building civilization in the 1800s. You used to be able to walk up to, there were places you could go in the world where you could find like copper ore, for example, that was two parts rock and one part copper.
And now it's 199 point parts rock and one part copper. And that is the standard for good ore. And while we are going to move toward recycling, most of our industry, most of our civilization is tooled for immediate development.
So Eco-Technic Future provides an excellent framework for looking at the ways in which human societies essentially are going to be forced to change in a broader sense without to a degree, there's a little bit of more doom or oriented collapse, collapse, I don't want to say theology, collapse messaging. There we go.
More doom or oriented collapse messaging in the book, but that's not really what it's about and it is not, in my opinion, integral to the value of the text because the value of the text is establishing a framework for examining these major social and industrial transitions that we're likely to see one way or the other. I like the idea of going out into space and mining asteroids. Don't think I've discounted that. A lot of people say, well, we can get more minerals from here or there or whatever.
But I think that there's a lot of people that are good at science fiction and a lot of people that are good at producing high technology and who understand high technology extremely well, but they don't understand mining or metallurgy or a lot of the processes that we currently use in order to extract gold were invented in the 1600s and they're still used. And it's because mining and metallurgy is not the same as the production of high technology.
So I think that there's sort of an information imbalance to a degree in a lot of the futurists because they don't have as much experience looking at where the resources are coming from in comparison to where the resources are going to. So that's my plug for why I don't think that we're going to go on a gigantic stellar adventure soon. I find it likely it's going to happen, but I don't think it'll happen soon. I hope it will.
But the structure of ecotechnical future provides an excellent structure and an excellent way to examine these ideas in a context that it doesn't really approve or disapprove of them. It simply states this is the patterns that we've seen through history. This is the patterns we're likely to see in the future.
And assuming current trends are roughly, roughly predictive of future trends, this is probably what we're going to observe as the resource crunch starts to become severe on various civilizations in the world. Is Ecotechnic Future the only book by John Michael Greer that you've read? Yes, so far it is. Do you follow his blog? I don't, but maybe I should. Well I don't know if he's still keeping up this level of productivity, but for a time he was putting out two and three books a year.
And his blog at the time was called the Archdruid Report because he really was the archdruid of one of the major North American druidic organizations. And he has since rebranded his blog, it's now called the EcoSophia. But he's written a lot of books. And I read the Ecotechnic Future. And there it is, EcoSophia. All right, go ahead. He has written a lot of books and I read all of them for a time. I'm not keeping up with his output anymore.
But two things I want to say about the Ecotechnic Future. First is that it's nonfiction, but he wrote a novel which basically illustrates what he's talking about. It's called Stars Reach. And you could classify it as a science fiction novel. There's not much advanced technology in it, but it is a speculative tale about the future. So from my perspective, it does count as science fiction.
The other thing that I want to say about it, other than that I don't remember the details all that well because I did read it a long time ago, but I know John Michael Greer's thoughts on these matters just from conversation with him and reading his blog and things like that. He predicts that the first book of his that I ever read was called Apocalypse Knot.
And while he does respect the limits to growth and peak oil narratives, he also has been critical as long as I've known him of the fast collapse scenario, which he finds to be I think alarmist and sensational. And he says, no, the collapse of this civilization is going to take a couple of centuries and it's going to be a stair step. He calls it a catabolic collapse where there will be a crisis and a discontinuity and then we'll get things back together.
We'll tighten it up and it'll seem for the optimists, they'll be able to make a case for the fact or for the idea that we're back on an upward trajectory. But really, it's just a stabilizing period before the next step, the next fall down the staircase. And he says that's going to take a couple of centuries.
And in the process, we're going to move from faltering growth based high energy throughput modality that we're in now into a sort of reclamation or scavenger phase where we're basically just tearing down the remnants of the old in order to repurpose the materials and to keep going at a low lower energy throughput level. And eventually we'll get to what he calls the ecotechnic future, where we're much more integrated with the cycles of the ecosystem.
And in Star's Reach, they're sort of at that transition between those next two stages. And you've read the book much more recently than I have. So if I've misrepresented it, please let me know. No, I think you've represented it pretty accurately. I think that his big breakthrough, in my opinion, in ecotechnic future that allows for this framing is the recognition of human civilization as another form of ecology.
With the anticipation that it adheres to more or less the same rules as other ecological systems. I think that's the big breakthrough that he made in that book. And that's what I'm most interested in terms of structure and point. And that makes sense for him to write through the next sort of the one after next, the transition after next. In terms of a stepping, a stepping, that's more or less what I read in the book is that you're going to have different levels of catastrophe over time.
I'm not fully on board with that. There's another book I've read. Have you heard of The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tater? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I read Tater and I've listened to many interviews with him. As far as I remember, I've never talked to him, but I'm definitely well versed in his, you know, I think his work is a more accurate rendition of what social collapse looks like.
And that is frequently referred to as apocalyptic civilization collapse because the kinds of historians who look into it are the kinds who get paid by a bloated civilization and not the kinds and not farmers or mechanics who are working on the sidelines during the collapse because they take generality and increase in quality of life. I think the first thing I'd point to is the limits of growth.
The limits of growth model made a number of assumptions that don't seem to be accurate in the long term. And I was going through this because since the limits of growth was published, we now have a half century of data, which is why I think it was overly alarmist to begin with. But the half century of data that we're looking at implies to me that we're more likely to see there's various models that they use. We're likely to see a stable population stabilization after a population collapse.
And the population collapse is currently happening is the demographic collapse everybody's talking about right now. But it seems very likely to me that we're going to stabilize around four billion people. Industrial output is probably going to remain the same. And we're actually going to see a higher quality of life on the other side of this cultural chasm that we're sort of looking at right now. But it's going to be very different.
The ecology of humanity and the way that human civilizations relate to the world will be very different on the other side than they are now, both in terms of industrial and technical capability. I'd imagine we'll keep most of our technical knowledge through all of this.
But in terms of average quality of life and average resources consumed, it seems very, very likely that we're going to shift into a almost an aristocratic culture, an aristocratic type of civilization where you have those who can afford the factory produced goods because they will be very expensive because shipping will be expensive and there won't be a huge demand for them. So they'll be partially artisanal. And then those that mostly consume that which is produced in their own communities.
So I'd imagine something like, you know, that's a good way to describe it. 1700 centuries, 1700 peasants with cell phones and internal plumbing kind of situation. You mentioned aristocracy. Aristocracy is a word that I've been thinking a lot about just because of the fiction that I'm writing. There's an aristocratic class in the setting. And the word aristocracy, it means rule by the best.
We live in a democratic society and we tend to favor and see, you know, democratic norms as being genuinely good and like objectively preferable to oligarchy or plutocracy or, you know, monarchy or particularly aristocracy. The whole notion of aristocracy seems offensive to us, you know, in a democratic context. And yet, you know, we also talk about elites and they do tend to be, you know, better educated and more financially successful.
And you know, you could say that their gains weren't they didn't come upon their gains fairly, but you know, what's fair. So I just wanted to put in a word of support for the notion of aristocracy, quay, rule by people who are more accomplished. So I actually I'm not sure how far through my sub stack you got, but last summer I published an article. I believe it was called The Return of Kings, a Reasoned Argument for Monarchy.
And my current political beliefs is actually I am a monarchist for a couple of complex reasons, a reasoned case for monarchy, return of kings. That's the name of the article. And aristocracy, so there's negative things you can say about aristocracy, especially when they abuse their power.
We currently have a pseudo aristocratic system globally and in the West, especially because the elites currently have like the Bezos types and the ones you don't know about have power on par with most major governments as individuals. They don't exercise power in the same way, but they have the power.
But with a with a monarchy, I find it likely that under most forms of a structured monarchy, so my recommendation in this case, and this is one of the articles that I'm working on right now, is how to actually set up a monarchy is with a monarchy, you know that the kids of the king are going to be the next king. And that's really helpful because you can aim their education that way. One of the big problems we have with our current elites is that they're terrible leaders in the West.
Our elites are awful leaders and that's because they were trained to be lawyers, bankers, and businessmen. They were never trained to be statesmen. They've probably read Plato here and there, but they were never trained on the works of Napoleon, they were never trained on a lot of these historical works that good leaders should be trained on. So one of the big issues right now in the West is that leadership is the class of scoundrels, thieves, and lawyers.
Whereas under a monarchy, you can get bad kings, absolutely. But at least you know the kids going to be the next king or one of the king's kids is going to be the next king. And so you can train them for that job instead of training them for whatever the school system pumps out. Another advantage of aristocracy or monarchy in this case, monarchy with the nobility specifically, is that the monarchy can give up the spiritual consensus that we kind of have now in the West of democratic governance.
And in being able to do that, you can remove the idea of egalitarianism under the law, because it's the king's law. If you're in a kingdom, it's the king's law. Like if you're in Vietnam, you don't insult the royal family or you will get arrested.
But because it's the king's law, or because it's the council, if you live in one of the cities, then what that means is they don't have to create this bureaucratic apparatus in order to micromanage people to give the impression that everyone's treated equally because that's mostly what the bureaucratic apparatus does. Instead you can have the count say that building's about to fall down, it's in my city, fix it or I'm taking your hat. Simple as that.
It's not some faceless bureaucratic drone who's going to give you fines and maybe they'll check up on you in six months or a year. It's the guy right there who can put his foot down and make a judgment. And I think a lot of people would rather respond to the type of leadership where you can actually speak to the leader who's telling you that you've messed up rather than the type of leadership that's attempting to get you to have an argument with a stack of city, county and corporate policies.
It just reminded me of something that John Michael Greer has talked about as well in terms of the shape of society as we go to a lower energy throughput status and that is a return of feudalism. But he defines feudalism as rule by personal relationships, which is to say the feudal lord knows his serfs. They are not some faceless mass off in the distance. They're certainly not some geographically distributed demographic that he's only in touch with through administrative systems.
You go to the lord of the manor and you pledge your service to him. And when the king calls upon him to produce soldiers, he knows the names of the people that he's going to send into the king's army. So John Michael Greer talks about as larger administrative systems that are dependent on electricity and computers and that sort of thing as they falter.
We are going to have not necessarily a transition back to something which is definitely recognizable from some previous historical period, but something which is definitely much more premised on personal relationships between the lords and the vassals. I find that to be very likely. I mean, we're already kind of seeing a push for it in really weird ways. My monarchy article got a tremendous amount of traction, surprisingly enough, when I first published it in comparison to what I usually get.
And you're seeing a lot more people attempt to develop personal relationships in their communities in non-conventional ways. I would define conventional as between 1900 and 1980. Between 1900 and 1980, you've got the people in your community. You've got your mayor and you have these little book clubs and you have your exchange club and whatnot. But the way people are forming relationships now are almost best described as microcultures. They're forming microcultures online.
Young men are forming a lot of different microcultures online, each with its own internal conceptualization of reality. And if any of those small communities becomes the dominant community in a place, so if it localizes from online to a physical location, example is they all move into the same. You get a Discord server of say 500 or 600 people that are all basically on the same page and decide to move to the same town of 10,000 people or 20,000 people.
All of a sudden, they're going to become an extremely dominant force because they will be able to flex a degree of cultural and social control that no one else can do. And so I agree with you. I think we're going to see a transition from a system of faceless administration to a more personal system one way or another. Although I do think that, so the question was whether this was going to happen soon or in several hundred years.
And I think that a year ago, I would have said it's probably going to happen soon. So within the next 30 to 60 years, with the current administration and the recent election, it seems more likely to me that we're looking at maybe 200 years out before we transition into those systems. The reason being that the US more or less had the options of going through and still has the options of going through either a Balkanization or an imperial transition.
It looks like they're aiming for an imperial transition. So from Republic to Empire. So Warhammer 40K is more predictive than half of science fiction out there. I love the Warhammer lore. I'm actually listening to a Caiaphas Kane novel right now. Excellent. Okay. Hey, I'm going to go and refill my coffee. While I do that, let me encourage you to Google, I think it's Pine Bluff, Arkansas. I think there's a guy with a lot of money who's buying up lots of property in Pine Bluff.
And basically, you know, it's a town in serious economic decline, with lots of abandoned buildings and lots of sort of derelict properties, and he's just buying them up. You know, I don't know exactly what his plan is, but he's going to be the Duke of that, you know, of that little feudal plot. There's a few wealthy people that are doing that around the country. I'm going to look up Pine Bluff specifically, though. Thank you.
So it is very tempting to focus on current events and the Trump-Vance-Mask administration and historical resistance to it. But I do want to get back to science fiction. Absolutely. Yeah. You talked about the fact that basically the timeframe that cyberpunk was describing is, if not entirely past, I mean, we've lived through enough of it that it's clearly not going. It doesn't look like Neuromancer. It doesn't look like Blade Runner.
You know, the original Blade Runner takes place, the movie takes place in 2019, which is past. What I love about Blade Runner 2049 is that it says, nope, that's how it went. That's what things were like in 2019. We're just, you know, we're sticking with it. We're not retconning. We're not apologizing. We're just going to continue the story in that universe. You know, if you don't gravitate to cyberpunk, what's your science fiction subgenre of choice?
So I enjoyed cyberpunk as much as the next guy back in the 90s when I was a kid. But it does seem to be somewhat, for lack of better phrasing, outdated in the same way that 40s, 30s serials are outdated because you're right, history took a different turn. 40s took a different turn and somehow things are worse because it has a big fake corporate smile plastered on it.
So the subgenres of science fiction that I really am interested into, I, so I like science fiction in principle because it allows you to discuss ideas that you can't discuss in other genres or that are difficult to discuss in other genres. Science fiction is really good at opening people, opening your eyes to, to potential futures or potential ideas or potential social concepts or political concepts that don't even exist otherwise. So I've always been, been into more odd science fiction.
I just finished Project Hail Mary, which made me think of the three body problem and going down to the three body problem, I would say that is probably one of the highest rated science fiction trilogies I've ever read. If you've, if you've read it, you know what I'm talking about. It's the only, it's the only science fiction book that I've ever, that's ever given me really really weird dreams. But it has.
So the three body problem essentially posits this question in the position of science fiction. It takes the for me paradox and it also asks the question what happens if there is, is not a limit to technological development? What if you can actually develop your way through a brick wall? What if you, what if there's no limit to how good your technology can get or the things it can do? What would, what would the universe look like? And how would humanity react to that?
It answers a bunch of interesting social questions. In some ways it predicted, it's impressively good predictive capacity. It predicted the, some of the social phenomena that have happened both in the East and in the West from when it was published in 2007 to now. Basically the way humans behave when all of their problems are taken away and the breakdown of hierarchy and gender and all sorts of weird stuff. It talks about that.
It discusses the way that people can respond to problems in self-defeating ways, which I think is a lot of what much of the environmentalist activists are kind of doing right now. And what happens when you take that too far and the way society will bounce back from it or have a social repost, so to speak, a backlash against bad ideas.
I really like the three body problem because it contains all of these really complex social and scientific concepts in a system, in a, in a narrative that no one else has ever written before. And I really appreciate that. Another book that I really enjoyed is Accelerando. There's also a review of that.
Accelerando is a book that discusses the limits to AI and our ability to control them and the way in which AI are likely to function in practice rather than function in theory and how that can create its own nasty set of paperclip problems with the paperclip maximizer problems with the way that humans sort of are going to and are currently treating AI as a magic box that will just give them things if they program it right. And then I like some of the weirder science fiction out there.
The Strugatsky novels I've really enjoyed so far. The Doomed City, Roadside Picnic. I'm currently, excuse me, you asked what I was reading. I am currently reading through Monday starts on Saturday, which is fascinating to me because those listeners familiar with the SCP Foundation. This is the book that I think created the idea for the SCP Foundation. It's a great book.
And until very recently, there was not really a equivalent to it in modern history until somebody created the SCP Wiki, which isn't as good as it used to be. It used to be a lot of fun to read through that. But Monday starts on Saturday is the Soviet novel that sort of kicked off that genre. And then the Doomed City and Roadside Picnic kind of kicked off the Soviet fiction genre in general.
But yeah, I like science fiction with interesting ideas that it wants to discuss more than science fiction with any specific place in the universe. I'm planning to start the Zeely sequence here at some point. I've heard that it's quite good, but I haven't gotten around to reading it yet. And then the reason I brought up Project Hail Mary right at the beginning is it's sort of like the opposite of the three body problem.
While the three body problem is a story spanning hundreds of years, complex characters, and massive scientific arcs and hostile alien intelligences, Project Hail Mary does the opposite of all of those things. One character over a very brief period of time with very consistent technological development and friendly aliens. So I just find them fascinating inversions of each other, those two pieces of work. And Project Hail Mary also has a lot less to say politically and socially.
Well, I just recently listened to the audiobook of the Hail Mary project or Project Hail Mary. And I should tell people who are not familiar with it, it's by Andy Weir, who is the author of The Martian. The Martian, which famously the famous quote from that film is, I'm going to science the shit out of this.
Yes. Andy Weir loves to write like hard sci fi in the universe is a problem to be solved mode, which a lot of people hate science fiction because it takes that viewpoint, or at least it used to. Like the pre new wave, like what you're calling the sort of outdated pulps and cereals. Yeah, it's pulpy. That's a good way to describe it. Yeah, I mean, but you know, he he approaches it with humor and goodwill and, you know, a modern sort of up to date scientific acumen.
And I absolutely love his books. So I enjoyed the book. I absolutely enjoyed the book. It's just bizarre, absolutely the opposite of the three body problem trilogy in every way. Now I have not read the three body problem. I did watch the Netflix the first season of the Netflix show, and there's also a Chinese TV adaptation of it, which I've seen. I don't know how much of the novel I'm missing, you know, by relying on those TV adaptations. Well, so I can I can give you a breakdown.
The first thing is that the novel is big. So in the TV show, you've got like these five main characters, and that's because they could afford five, you know, B list actors. And in the novel, you're talking about hundreds of different people and hundreds of different government agencies kind of thing. So is the difference between like a James Bond film and what an actual intelligence apparatus looks like is a good description of the difference between the TV show and the book.
The other thing I would say about the three body problem is it's very likely to to kind of fall apart in the second and third seasons of the television show. And the main reason for that is because the first book, the whole book one of the three body problem is best thought of as a prologue to the other two. Well, it's my understanding that the Netflix series is not taking the story in sequence, that it is bringing in elements from later novels in the earlier in the first season.
Yeah, it kind of has to do that. It is doing that. But so there in the Netflix sequence, Netflix series is adapting it chronologically, whereas the books are telling stories about different people that each lived through the same like three or four hundred years. Which Project Hail Mary is is fun in that there's two two timelines. One is the current timeline where this guy by himself, this human guy is in a different solar system trying to figure out basically how to save the world.
And then we're getting alternate chapters where, you know, it's the backstory of how he came here. Yeah. And of course, you know, late in the novel, there are twists revealed in the backstory chapters which paint everything in a new light. Very clever. Yeah, I thought it was clever. I enjoyed it. One of my favorite book series, if you've read this one is We Are Legion, We Are Bob.
I listened to the audiobooks of the first few of those and they are fun, but they didn't they didn't grab me enough that I've listened to all of them. OK, I just finished the fourth or fifth. I think it's the fifth one. Then they are a serial. They're there, I described them as dumb, fun science fiction. They're hard science in that they're sublight, but they're soft science in that they kind of start getting out there pretty quick. But Andy Weir is a much harder science fiction author.
I think that he puts a lot of effort into doing things the right way. And I really appreciate that. And I enjoyed Project Real Mary and I will be writing a review of it on my on my sub stack pretty soon here. Let's see. Have you read much of the Stravinsky work? You know, I started to read Roadside Picnic many, many years ago and I don't know how far I got into it. I don't think I finished it.
I really enjoy the Stravinsky novels, but they're very avant garde in comparison to normal science fiction is a good way to put it. As the film stalker would would support its very well on guard. Well and the video game to a degree.
What I really appreciate about I think Soviet fiction is that to keep the spirit of the to keep the spirit of the book, they had to completely rewrite the plot and the characters in the film and to keep the spirit of the book, they had to completely rewrite the plot, the characters in the setting in the video game. But the spirit is the same between all three of them, which I think is fascinating because most genres don't do that.
Most genres don't need to completely uproot everything but but the core themes in order to switch medium. But for Soviet fiction, it does seem to be that way, which I find fascinating. I also identify with Soviet for Soviet fiction partially because the United States at this point and this is why the current administration is such a big deal and why I keep oscillating back the politics, but I'm going to try to stay out of it for this conversation.
But the United States was 35 percent public spending. Our GDP was 35 percent public spending in the United Kingdom is 50 percent of their GDP is public spending. We are on the edge of just living in a Soviet style economy in the West in most countries at this point. And so it makes sense that people will that some people might identify more with Soviet style fiction.
You know, one place where current concerns and science fiction definitely overlap to a degree that one simply cannot ignore is the role of emerging artificial intelligence and particularly how it's going to impact people in terms of, you know, any individual's ability to make a living. You've mentioned in passing and I don't think you've you've said it explicitly, but I know that you're referencing Rudyard Lynch and his references to the mouse utopia.
A you know, a total singularity, cornucopia situation where everybody gets everything they want is not necessarily the best case scenario or a favorable outcome, but nor is you know, everybody is suddenly being rendered useless and, you know, feeling as though they have to rely on the charity of the oligarchs. You know, people need to be able to make a living or at least believe that they're making a living. There's a nonfiction writer named Kaifu Lee, who wrote a book called AI Superpowers.
And then he wrote another book after that that was addressing, you know, the challenges of artificial intelligence in the near future. But he's doing so in partnership with a fiction writer and he's creating these little fictional vignettes and at least one of the chapters in the book is about a company that is supposedly their whole reason for being is to take workers who have been displaced by automation and finding new jobs for them.
And another company that does the same thing starts up and the first company has got a success rate of like 20 percent. And the second company has a success rate in the high 90s. And you know, the CEO of the first company is like, that's impossible. There's no way. And he assigns one of his employees basically to infiltrate this other company and figure out what they're doing. And they're just making, you know, they're just basically having displaced people play video games and call it work.
You know, they people they're told that they're consulting on construction projects and things or that they're driving telepresence construction robots or things like this. But they're really not doing anything. They're just the company exists to take government subsidies and distribute them to displaced workers. But, you know, to give the word, it's basically adult daycare. But the adults who are being taken care of believe they're at work, which is necessary for their sense of worth.
And you know, there are possible futures that look kind of like that, in which case, do you want to actually know the real nature of the world in which you live? Or do you want to live with the comforting illusion that you are actually somebody who, you know, supports a family and does something meaningful and useful for his society? Well, I mean, like, I'd rather leave.
I think that's what many of the large social movements in the West are about right now is different groups of people attempting to leave the social system in different ways to make an exit. Yeah. In terms of AI development, it's gotten I don't know how much better it's going to get. My suspicion is that we're closing in on the limit of how good we can get it. You had deep sea come out and they said it was a $5 million system.
But I doubt that the Chinese government was heavily involved in releasing deep sea. I don't know what AI will be able to replace well, it seems like it's going to be able to replace a lot of the bureaucracy well, and is likely to be used as a replacement for a lot of the bureaucracy as the current administration is ripping chunks of the bureaucracy out. But in terms of more of a long term view, AI might be able to emulate a lot of the things that people can do.
But I'm kind of worried about are you familiar with the with the training data issue that AI seems to have? We'll say more about that. That's a big time. So AI has a hard time training on AI generated data. Now you can somewhat train an AI on AI generated data. That's less true now than it was a year ago. Yeah, it's less true now than it was a year ago. But I wouldn't I find it a lot of institutions are going to require highly specialized AI systems in order to run.
So if you're running a factory with an AI or something like that, you have your own AI system, and you've trained it based on the things that people have done. What that effectively does is it locks your factory into its current structure. And if you change anything, the AI is going to start having problems with that. Because the only way to train it on the new things that you're doing is to train it on the things that it itself has done.
So I do think that we're looking at a future economy that's going to be radically different. Everybody we're seeing academia is getting hammered right now, partially through the administration's bureaucratic changes, but also partially because large swaths of people no longer think it's worth the money. And it's developed into sort of a factory system. In many ways, bureaucracies are kind of like AI in that you program them to do a thing. They do the thing relatively well.
But if you change it, they're extremely sluggish and slow to respond. Manual labor is going to be a human thing for the foreseeable future. Complex data and analytics, that's going to be a human thing for most of the foreseeable future outside of a few specific applications. The real issue is going to come down to how much AI can get integrated into governance and management. Because if it gets fully integrated economically, it's going to be able to replace a lot of people.
Now, it could be just that instead of banking the savings, we'll just do more stuff. But a lot of people aren't really inclined to keep themselves busy when they're not otherwise being stimulated by an economic need. So what I could see and what I think is that we're in an evolutionary sort of Darwinian bottleneck where the people that have a difficult time acting outside of a group expectations mentality are not going to be having a whole lot of kids for the next generation or two.
And what you're going to get is you're going to get people that either have very poor impulse control or people that have a personal sense of duty and ambition are going to be the ones who lead humanity after this, because those are going to be the only true groups that have kids. And that itself is going to lend itself to a more aristocratic type of social transition.
Even if it's not official, what you're going to end up with is two groups of people with phenotypes that are distinctly different in terms of their capacity for future planning. All right. That was Copernican. There will be more, but sorry, folks, the remainder of the conversation will be behind a paywall. So it will be in an episode of the Sea Realm Vault podcast and also on my sub stack for paid subscribers there.
I will say that in the second part of the conversation, we do find something to disagree about. So it's not like we have a knockdown drag out argument or anything like that. But we do go back and forth a bit on just how likely or unlikely it is that companies like, well, any tech company, really, there's no need to pick one out, would be very abusive in their use of any implants that one might get, particularly cognitive implants, cybernetic implants in the brain.
If you are not listening to this on sub stack, I would recommend that you check out my sub stack and from there you can find links to other people's stuff that I have really enjoyed. Substack is like a blog in the posts section. It's more like your typical social media in the notes section. And then there's also a like section or liked section. So you can see which items I have read and liked, but not bothered to comment on.
And if you're listening to this and you are a sub stack user, but you do not follow my account, well, I would invite you to do so. Also, if you are new to my podcasting work or just new to my work in general, you don't know who the heck I am, I would recommend that you check out Fear and Loathing in the Kuiper Belts. It is available as a Kindle book or in paperback. In the fullness of time, it will also be an audio book, but not just yet. All right. Thank you very much for listening. Say well.