The potential effect of Artificial Intelligence on civilisation - a serious discussion

Commentary article that touches on an AI related issue.

Everything modern civilization has built rests on two modest skills: Reading and arithmetic. America spent two centuries showing what they make possible. It is now showing what their absence does.

The news from American classrooms is, for lack of a better word, depressing. Reading and math scores have been declining for more than a decade. Some of the fall predated the pandemic, which made matters considerably worse. The latest chapter in the story is the strangest, and perhaps the most disturbing. Professors report freshmen who cannot read basic sentences, let alone finish books. They struggle to follow arguments from beginning to end, as though every paragraph should arrive with a skip button.
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Opinion: How did basic literacy stop being a prerequisite for college?
 
People are giving away their most powerful tool to AI: The ability to think.

Across TikTok and Substack, users are posting about how they have become so dependent on AI that they use it to make basic and personal life decisions — what to eat, what to wear, how to phrase a message to friends, or how to navigate a toxic relationship.

What may seem like a harmless convenience is becoming increasingly common. And researchers say it could have profound consequences. The more people rely on AI to make decisions, the less practice they get making difficult decisions on their own.

Over time, that risks weakening the cognitive and social skills people develop through experience, uncertainty, and trial and error. In more extreme cases, AI researchers say it could begin shaping not just what people do, but also the beliefs they hold.
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The hidden cost of letting AI choose your lunch
 
Commentary from about a week ago...

AI is making children workshy, a leading educationist has warned.

Sir Anthony Seldon, the former headmaster of some of the UK’s best-known private schools, said Britain was “sleepwalking into disaster” as children were “infantilised” by AI.

He said AI gave them “easy answers without thought or struggle” and incentivised them to cheat.

The technology could have real benefits for young people if harnessed correctly, he added, but it was currently making them “less curious, knowledgeable and intelligent, and more insecure and work-averse”.

Sir Anthony’s warning comes days after the chief of England’s exams regulator claimed the threat of pupils using hi-tech devices to cheat should not be underestimated.
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Anthony Seldon: AI makes children workshy
 
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Australian teenagers are rapidly relying on artificial intelligence in every part of their lives.

For some teens, chatbots are just a study buddy, but some youngsters are leaning to AI for friendship.

“They are using them in all aspects of their lives, whether it’s study, as a tutor for them, but there are also marketed products for them out there that sort of do present as friends or even emotional support companions,” clinical psychologist, Dr Charlotte Keating, told Today.
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Loneliness among teens leading to unhealthy use of artificial intelligence
 
NilsD said:
The Butlerian Jihad cannot come soon enough.
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... the thing is that in order to keep the edict that results from it, you have to literally murder everyone on a planet that you suspect is breaking the edict. That is, unless you literally modify humanity's very essence to remove the tool-making ability entirely.

So, the sad reality is that you can't stop it. Thus why I keep saying that we need to accept that we need to use authoritarian methods from now on.
 
There was an item on the bleep bleep cee news which I cannot bleep find now, that ai is already writing some of its own code.

Skynet here we come.......
 
GTX said:
What a dystopian and frankly ridiculous position to take.
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Less dystopian and more understanding that 1) technology determines everything, and 2) Hobbes is the best case scenario for the human condition.

You're also getting into the freedom-maximal trap as well. The sad reality is that the freer the freedoms, the freer the people is a lie. The sad reality is that the freer the freedoms, the less free the people.
Arjen said:
That just removes feedback to government.
Remove feedback, and you will no longer be worrying if a process will go tits-up, but when.
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The big problem is that the technological context (the sum of human knowledge and its applications) forces humanity in this direction. Remember, in one technological context, things like killing privacy are authoritarian, but in another context, it's basic flipping governance.

So, unless you want to have the best-case future being a world where law enforcement is now authorized to commit mass murder as a law enforcement tool, you have to accept that things like privacy are completely obsolete.

To quote someone who understands what I'm saying:
He might be firing on more cylinders than you realize. While I'm not entirely sure, as he's not being clear on how privacy leads to police "mass murder..." I think what he's arguing is the same thing that Edward Bernays (nephew of Sigmund Freud) and his crew believed.

And if that's what he's arguing, he's actually firing on a good few more cylinders than the average person. Bernays was very intelligent. Total psychopath, but very high intellect.

Basically, Edward Bernays, and some of the people he worked with, believed that average people were inherently so prone to being hooked by ideology and delusions, and were so unable to think and act rationally on their own, that the existing authorities needed to use extreme coercive force to keep fascism from emerging. This thinking came directly out of what Bernays and others witnessed in Germany during the rise of the Nazis.

They believed they needed to use surveillance and suppression as a sort of fire break against out of control information wildfires. Fight fire with fire. The idea was that you needed to be able to see what people were doing at all times, and control what the population was able to see, hear and think, as to contain out of control psychosis, and stop it from spreading and causing disaster before it can start.

What I think he's arguing is that information force multipliers, E. G. the internet, has made the situation such that a handful of people with absolute privacy and freedom of speech can spread mass psychosis so efficiently with modern technology, that with no eyes on them, and no 'special police' to stop them, no one else can respond to the spread of information hazards in time. So it either results in fascism (or some other bad ideology) directly, or behavior that is destructive enough that it necessitates a fascist crackdown.

Notice he used the term fail-deadly. That's a dead giveaway that this is what he's arguing.
This is not simply a push or pull situation. It's both. Both privacy and freedom of speech are leading to this problem, because people either don't know how to or refuse to be objective and reality based, and they also refuse to stay in their own lane or respect the boundaries of others.
The reason for this is because people have been allowed to develop such vast delusions through selective omission of information, that they now have to either protect their delusions from external truth, or allow that truth in and deal with the harsh reality of their ignorance.
Take a wild guess what most people choose to do. Hint: It's what they've always done. Crusade against the wrongthinkers that bring inconvenient truths into their "safe spaces."
I linked this in another post, and I'll link it again here because it's relevant to this subject:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwCEAdeFXEM

The 2001 game Metal Gear Solid 2 predicted what's going on right now all the way back then. It got some of the details a bit wrong, and it contextualized its message in Bush era politics because that was what was going on at the time, but it none the less nailed the overall phenomenon and accurately described the shape of what's going on.
The "small gated communities" that the AI talks about are what we call "echo chambers" or "safe spaces" now, and what enables these echo chambers to exist is a combination of moderation and privacy... Which when combined allow purity spirals and radicalization to occur outside the vision or agency of other groups in society.
The primary problem that's occurring is actually a result of privacy and content moderation, as the outcome it's producing is that bad ideas and delusional nonsense is able to effectively insulate itself from interference. The harsh reality is that various forms of psychosis can't effectively iron itself out if you have privacy and content moderation, because no one can interrupt bad ideation with new information.
Delusions and radicalization simply grow and grow and grow. Sometimes you can see it, sometimes you can't, and regardless of its visibility, it's typically insulated until it emerges... At which point it's already too late, and you have a volatile, destructive memetic problem on your hands, ready to clash with other, similar instances of deranged memetics. ...Or just cause some kind of mass disaster.
What the AI from MGS:2 got wrong was that it predicted this would cause simple stagnation and that all these different echo chambers would simply avoid conflict with each other and stagnate. In reality what we got was information warfare and culture war.
By the way, this sort of thing happened before the internet. You know of the WACO incident, correct? It's far more justified than the people who decry it will ever realize. The reason why the FBI caused such a clusterfuck, is because they had to. They were trying to address a heavily armed doomsday cult that was slowly fermenting at a compound, insulated from the rest of society, because they didn't want to have to deal with a Colonia Dignidad or Aum Shinrikyo situation down the road.
You're actually right about one of the things that has changed: The problem we've run into is that the internet has allowed these cult ideologies to fester basically anywhere, and across enormous distances, in a way that only large scale religion used to be capable of.
But the problem isn't freedom of speech. It's selective omission of information, and memetic insulation. The entire reason bad ideology has *EVER* been able to grow, is that no one was able to kick the knees out of their faith before they got rolling. Every bad religion the world over exists because some people's faith wasn't properly challenged.
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So yeah, we're entering a situation where the 'bad end' of the Vulnerable World Hypothesis is coming true, and even that paper states that a privacy-less surveillance state is a requirement of future governance.

We live in a world where memetic warfare exists, and AI bots make it easier. Privacy, I'm afraid, is now fail-deadly, just as unlimited information and speech are becoming fail-deadly.
 
Without authoritarian leaders being scrutinised and censored for their mistakes - and they make big mistakes - who will decide which information is right to propagate, which is not?
Authoritarian system can survive for centuries, by brute force and manipulation.
But Switzerland's democracy survives today.
 
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Navigating a new city and job, Marie Lansley is on the hunt for a partner, and like many, she's turning to artificial intelligence for a helping hand in modern dating.

The 36-year-old San Franciscan admits she’s been "trying everything" to find love, including enlisting AI chatbots to assist with starting conversations – a task she finds challenging on dating apps despite her ease in person.

This approach is far from unique, with AI chatbots increasingly serving as dating coaches and relationship experts. Lansley, while optimistic, acknowledges the disconnect between romance and technology.

"I am open to AI finding me the love of my life, but I’m also not fully convinced that it can," she said. "AI is great at making dating more efficient. But the chemistry — that’s always going to be analog."

Adopters utilise the technology in diverse ways, from patronising AI matchmaking services and building dating profiles to, most commonly, drafting messages and interpreting received messages.
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AI chatbots hit the dating scene as singles 'outsource' love life
 
Arjen said:
Without authoritarian leaders being scrutinised and censored for their mistakes - and they make big mistakes - who will decide which information is right to propagate, which is not?
Authoritarian system can survive for centuries, by brute force and manipulation.
But so has Switzerland.
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That ignores the new technological context. We're in an evolving technological context where our assumptions have been turned on their head.

We've seen how much damage rudimentary memetic weapons with a support infrastructure can do, and it's only going to get worse as our understanding of memetics improves. Hell, I'll be unsurprised if we discover Project Itoh's Genocidal Organ (a phrase that, when said enough times, literally flips a switch in the human brain to turn people into genocidal monsters) or SCP-metaverse's memetic kill agents (which has some presidence given the McCollough Effect) in the future.

We're sadly seeing that Edward Bernays isn't wrong about this, which should be raising a lot of red flags.
 
"There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong" H.L. Mencken
Authoritarian rule has been tried before, and, in places, is still around today. With nasty results.
 
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Arjen said:
"There is always a well-known solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong" H.L. Mencken
Authoritarian rule has been tried before, and, in places, is still around today. With nasty results.
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You're stuck in a 'rights and freedoms are static' mindset when reality (and history) tells you that they're very fluid. As I said, what is authoritarian in one context is basic governance in another.

You also sound like someone who believes that the political philosophy pessimists (and those adjacent to them) are wrong when the harsh reality is that they're close to the money at best.
 
Sorry Im just catching up, what this all about ? IA is gonna be so smart that it is gonna help put in place an authoritarian world order, and it's all but "normal", that's the idea ?
 
GTX said:
What a dystopian and frankly ridiculous position to take.
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Every bit of discussion revolving around AI is dystopian, mostly because modern society is a "boring dystopia". The AI debate and developments have proven that the majority of the population cannot be entrusted with a basic tool without abusing it, i.e using it to remove as much stress and burden-of-decision from oneself as possible. Irresponsible usage and propagation of technology certainly devolved the social and academic quality of the population at large over the last decades. Luckily for most, academic structures are slow and cumbersome to adapt which is why these people still get their grades, rather than being chased from a given school or campus for essentially cheating by outsourcing their thought processes to "AI" (LLMs).

In that sense I can see how the idea of a wise and benevolent ruler that subdues the human nature to, excuse my language here, fuck shit up, seems appealing. The benevolent dictator, the wise king, these are historically appealing concepts with some real world examples. Unfortunately, especially today, the average autocrat is not above the general population when it comes to being irresponsible, lazy and unaware of the consequences of their action. With some notable exceptions, of course.

However as a consequence, the "technocracy of retardation" will continue to grow for the forseeable future. One doesn't even have to look beyond this forum to see gleeful eyes once any kind of slop that has the word "AI" plastered all over is being mentioned. People who believe in a promise of technological advancement for the benefit of mankind, the naive and childlike crowd.

The worst part about the boring dystopia is that it's lame.
 
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galgot said:
Sorry Im just catching up, what this all about ? IA is gonna be so smart that it is gonna help put in place an authoritarian world order, and it's all but "normal", that's the idea ?
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... no, what I've been saying is that we're at a point in our technological development where authoritarian methods are no longer authoritarian but basic governance.
Arjen said:
I thought I was arguing a point of cybernetics, not ethics.
YMMV.
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In our situation, they're becoming increasingly one and the same.
EmoBirb said:
Every bit of discussion revolving around AI is dystopian, mostly because modern society is a "boring dystopia". The AI debate and developments have proven that the majority of the population cannot be entrusted with a basic tool without abusing it, i.e using it to remove as much stress and burden-of-decision from oneself as possible. Irresponsible usage and propagation of technology certainly devolved the social and academic quality of the population at large over the last decades. Luckily for most, academic structures are slow and cumbersome to adapt which is why these people still get their grades, rather than being chased from a given school or campus for essentially cheating by outsourcing their thought processes to "AI" (LLMs).

In that sense I can see how the idea of a wise and benevolent ruler that subdues the human nature to, excuse my language here, fuck shit up, seems appealing. The benevolent dictator, the wise king, these are historically appealing concepts with some real world examples. Unfortunately, especially today, the average autocrat is not above the general population when it comes to being irresponsible, lazy and unaware of the consequences of their action. With some notable exceptions, of course.

However as a consequence, the "technocracy of retardation" will continue to grow for the forseeable future. One doesn't even have to look beyond this forum to see gleeful eyes once any kind of slop that has the word "AI" plastered all over is being mentioned. People who believe in a promise of technological advancement for the benefit of mankind, the naive and childlike crowd.

The worst part about the boring dystopia is that it's lame.
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The sad thing is that both Orwell and Huxley are right in different ways, and we're being shown it in real time.
 
GruntFox said:
Arjen said:
I thought I was arguing a point of cybernetics, not ethics.
YMMV.
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In our situation, they're becoming increasingly one and the same.
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I disagree.
Going for authoritarian rule will replace one imperfect system of governance with another, a system that will inevitably evolve from merely imperfect to downright disfunctional - because that is what happens to systems where feedback is hobbled. Disfunctional, unless the system's function is that the public serves the system, to the benefit of the ruler(s). Such systems can survive for centuries when religion steps in.

The ethical ramifications of authoritarian rule are another matter.
GruntFox said:
You're stuck in a 'rights and freedoms are static' mindset
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I don't think so, and beside the point.

In my view, this still holds:
‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’ - Winston Churchill, in 1947.
 
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GruntFox said:
... no, what I've been saying is that we're at a point in our technological development where authoritarian methods are no longer authoritarian but basic governance.

In our situation, they're becoming increasingly one and the same.

The sad thing is that both Orwell and Huxley are right in different ways, and we're being shown it in real time.
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Are you talking about leaving power of edicting laws to an IA ?
Because to me, basic gouvernance and authoritarianism are two different things.
The fact that laws would be implemented by IA, doesn’t change the fact that laws would be decided/voted by peoples (unless you let laws be created by IA, which would be stupid).
If laws are voted (democracy), then implemented by IA (basic gouvernance), then it’s still democracy.
If laws are edicted in an authoritarian way (say by one person, or group, upon the poeple without consultation), then implemented by IA (basic gouvernance), then it’s authoritarian.

Mind you, even just a basic gouvernance IA, ie laws voted democratically but implemented only by IA, would be a complete stupidity. IA is very far from being ready (ever ?) to do such a thing correctly.
 
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What a fanciful idea... Good democracy should be able to promote national governance efficiency, improve people's living standards, and achieve long-term development and social stability. It should not be limited to mere formality.

Human society just isn't ready to accept AI yet.
 
galgot said:
Are you talking about leaving power of edicting laws to an IA ?
Because to me, basic gouvernance and authoritarianism are two different things.
The fact that laws would be implemented by IA, doesn’t change the fact that laws would be decided/voted by peoples (unless you let laws be created by IA, which would be stupid).
If laws are voted (democracy), then implemented by IA (basic gouvernance), then it’s still democracy.
If laws are edicted in an authoritarian way (say by one person, or group, upon the poeple without consultation), then implemented by IA (basic gouvernance), then it’s authoritarian.

Mind you, even just a basic gouvernance IA, ie laws voted democratically but implemented only by IA, would be a complete stupidity. IA is very far from being ready (ever ?) to do such a thing correctly.
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No, we're talking about any government will need to do authoritarian things like kill privacy; institute a special police force to police information and culture, while giving them the power to contain and suppress the information equivalent of wildfires; set up a surveillance state; that sort of thing.

Basically, the opposite of what the freedom-maximal minded people say is the correct direction.
SUPER=BUG said:
What a fanciful idea... Good democracy should be able to promote national governance efficiency, improve people's living standards, and achieve long-term development and social stability. It should not be limited to mere formality.

Human society just isn't ready to accept AI yet.
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AI makes 'good democracy' impossible at this stage, I'm afraid. Welcome to the world of memetic warfare, where the very information and culture you consume have a good chance of being weapons against you.

Why fight your enemies when you can effectively hack their brains with the very information and culture they consume?

Russia figured that out, and the genie is well out of the bottle... and the sad thing is the only way to counter them is authoritarian anyway...
 
GruntFox said:
No, we're talking about any government will need to do authoritarian things like kill privacy; institute a special police force to police information and culture, while giving them the power to contain and suppress the information equivalent of wildfires; set up a surveillance state; that sort of thing.
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Sorry, why would any government "need" to do authoritarian things, such as you describe ? to stay in power ? then in that case it's already authoritarian.
it's already the case in many countries, China in particular comes to mind. But these are already non-democratic States.
But again, if say a democracy needs to regulate such things as AI or social medias, cause it would cause unrests, or mental issues to citizens, or in case of national threat, then it can only do this by voting laws to regulates it.
If these laws are proposed by an elected government or institution, then voted to be applied, then why would that be authoritarian ?
Regulations are not necessarily authoritarian.
GruntFox said:
Basically, the opposite of what the freedom-maximal minded people say is the correct direction.

AI makes 'good democracy' impossible at this stage, I'm afraid. Welcome to the world of memetic warfare, where the very information and culture you consume have a good chance of being weapons against you.
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There is no such thing as "good democracy" anyway. Democracy is just the less imperfect form of gouvernance, and as any human thing, it will never be perfect. Never.
GruntFox said:
Why fight your enemies when you can effectively hack their brains with the very information and culture they consume?
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That is why such things as AI needs to be regulated.
GruntFox said:
Russia figured that out, and the genie is well out of the bottle... and the sad thing is the only way to counter them is authoritarian anyway...
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Russia is already an authoritarian (in poor) State, nothing to do with IA.
 
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In short, I find authoritarian ethically suspect, furthermore I think it is a dead end that will not provide a solution for the challenges posed by meme warfare (disinformation is as old as the hills, how did that enter this thread anyway?) or AI.
The worst charge against any automated system I ever worked on or came to my attention was It. Does. Not. Work.
 
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I suspect that the fad for what is currently called "AI" will create a needless economic, environmental, and political crisis--but not because of the Singularity/Eschaton, Skynet, Terminators, cyber-dictatorship, or even mass replacement of human workers by more capable machines. The causes of disaster will be much more old fashioned and entirely familiar.

The world's billionaire investors, banks, corporate CEOs, and government leaders will continue pouring resources into "AI", even though they do not understand the alleged technology, much less the need for it. If anything, when combined with greed, this lack of understanding will make AI's various investors/champions that much more anxious to double down, lest they be left behind in the stampede towards the mysterious AI Promised Land. The scale of past investment will then begin to dictate future investment: AI will have to work, because the alternative will be unthinkable after so much expense and after so the reputations of so many Serious Persons have come to depend on it.

The scope of such a huge investment soon drives governmental and corporate policy. Long-established legal precedents and tried and tested government regulations get swept aside in the interest of Progress. We are already seeing a push for an environmentally ruinous and financially expensive return to large-scale use of fossil fuels, lest AI data centers lack for power. Politicians and business leaders are already trying to override public water- and land-usage policies in order to meet data-center space and cooling requirements. AI has to succeed.

Worse, businesses and governments are already dismissing supposedly redundant and expensive workers at an ever accelerating rate, on the mere assumption that future AI applications will successfully replace them. Software companies are dismissing experienced engineers in order to hire neophyte programmers that are more comfortable using "AI coding tools" that copy (and no doubt mangle) other peoples' code the way AI chat copies and mangles other peoples' writing, illustrations, and photographs. A few well-known companies are even laying off staff that currently does revenue-producing work in order to use their former salaries to buy more stock in AI-related ventures. This AI layoff binge will, I think, result in a catastrophic two- to three-generation experience/talent/knowledge vacuum, if and when the AI gamble fails to pay off as the Serious Persons hope and expect.

The race down the AI Yellow Brick Road is creating a speculative bubble of potentially unprecedented scale. When the bubble bursts, the resources will have vanished into the pockets of a few AI prophets and insiders--the billionaire investors, AI-vendor CEOs, and government officials that get early warning and sell before anyone else can. There will be no resources--or at least no stomach--for investing in alternatives. The experienced professionals that might be able create alternatives will be long gone, with no bright young graduates waiting in the wings to learn from them and replace them. AI had to succeed, remember? No Plan B?

So what will "AI" provide in return for the fortunes spent and lost? the environmental ruin? Etc? I think it will provide little more than the now-familiar AI slop, supplemented by a lot of unoriginal (and probably buggy) software slop, and, perhaps, more precision bombings of primary schools (targeting slop? piloting slop?).
 
iverson said:
....

So what will "AI" provide in return for the fortunes spent and lost? the environmental ruin? Etc? I think it will provide little more than the now-familiar AI slop, supplemented by a lot of unoriginal (and probably buggy) software slop, and, perhaps, more precision bombings of primary schools (targeting slop? piloting slop?).
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Great post .
What strikes me are these doom predictions that AI would become smarter than us, could "escape" and control us, yada yada...
If one check a bit from who these predictions come from, it's mostly from people with connection with big tech, ie these are marketing campaigns.

AI surely is a great (but very costly, with us the public, forced to pay for it, without noticing) tool, but it's just that, a tool, nothing like intelligence.

Thing is, we already are seeing a backslash with AI becoming quite unpopular. According to a recent pool in the US, the use is growing, mostly because we are force feeded with it, especially at work, but a majority see it negatively. And funnily, especially the younger generation.
 
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iverson said:
Long-established legal precedents and tried and tested government regulations get swept aside in the interest of Progress. We are already seeing a push for an environmentally ruinous and financially expensive return to large-scale use of fossil fuels, lest AI data centers lack for power.
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https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-choose-ai-climate-goals-data-center-chief-warns/

The push to revert back to fossil fuel power and infrastructure is beginning to look more and more like a feature, and not a bug, of the LLM (and crypto) data centre rush. In the above article an industry lobbyist is pretty much spelling it out - use fossil fuels or else. Renewables are challenging (and beating on merit) fossil energy sources but the latter still have enormous clout. Incredibly fossil energy is still publicly subsidized roughly five fold more than renewables, reflecting just how ingrained (and undemocratic) their influence is:

https://www.iisd.org/articles/press...ore-public-money-fossil-fuels-than-renewables

As the LLM AI "race" is presented at the moment, requiring enormous scaling, it's something of a trojan horse to introduce further and renewed energy- and technology- (and thus also democracy- and freedom-) scarcity upon the vast majority of the world's population. Fits well with the classic authoritarian "there is no alternative" rationalizations, the powerful representing themselves merely as the humble managers of necessity rather than consciously and determinedly depriving others of freedom of thought and choice. Big oil and AI bros currently move in the same rarefied circles so I can well imagine their relationships evolving into a mutually beneficial direction.

The rest get artificial data, artificial images, artificial prose and artificial services which will replace the real deal, at the low, low cost of irreplaceable resources. This need not be. Currently the "leading" LLM AI behemoths are running big deficits so societies (democratic ones) need to ask themselves serious questions as to how consciously these structures are unsustainable and how that unsustainability manifests itself. It's a tricky situation in that AI does show real promise as well; perhaps we should take a cue from the absolute hostility that many tech bros have for EU's data and consumer protections and build very different kinds of AIs based on these protections.

Open source LLMs are only months behind proprietary ones after all, calling into question any inherent advantages the latter have over more (energy) efficient, democratic and sustainable ones.
 
Looksmaxxing hit headlines in relation to young men, like influencer Clavicular (Braden Peters), who promote bone smashing, extreme diets, and chin extensions to reach their maximally chiselled potential.
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Well that fucker Claviconnard and his nazi looksmaxxing ideology have just suffered an humiliating defeat at the hands of parisian women. On vous aimes les filles, bravo !

I've just realised that in Starship troopers (1997) all the characters are looksmaxxed - Verhoeven deliberately picked actors Casper van Dien and Denise Richards for that reason. Then again, looksmaxxing and nazi aryan obsession have a lot in common... things coming full circle.
 
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GruntFox said:
... the thing is that in order to keep the edict that results from it, you have to literally murder everyone on a planet that you suspect is breaking the edict. That is, unless you literally modify humanity's very essence to remove the tool-making ability entirely.

So, the sad reality is that you can't stop it. Thus why I keep saying that we need to accept that we need to use authoritarian methods from now on.
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That extremely strongly would depend on who exactly is wielding those authoritarian methods. Hello, Benevolent Wise Alien Overlords, anybody there???
 

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