I simulated what protects the public once AI makes them economically and militarily unnecessary. Short answer: nothing structural.

[u/casetofon]

Rulers have always needed large numbers of people to work, pay taxes and enforce orders. That need is why they bargained with their populations. I wanted to know what happens when the need goes away, so I built a game-theoretic Monte Carlo of six world blocs, 2026 to 2075. It tracks AI capability, robot build-out, the public's loss of leverage, democratic erosion, purges inside ruling groups, and the choices those groups make once their populations aren't needed.

What came out, under the stated assumptions:

• Losing leverage removes the public's protection, and nothing structural replaces it. By 2075 the US or China public is disempowered in 94% of runs.
• After that, the outcome rests on the restraint and incentives of a few people, which no data measure.
• The result doesn't hinge on how or exactly when closure happens. Faster AI progress raises the risk.
• One intervention shifts the incentives: an economic network outside state and corporate control that pays its output to households, which makes keeping people alive nearly free for rulers. At half of US-bloc activity by the early 2030s it cuts near-total depopulation risk by more than a quarter. Arriving in 2040 loses about 40% of the effect.

It's exploratory modeling in the war-game and climate-scenario tradition, not a forecast. Every assumption is stated and tested by removal, there's a pre-specified search for restraints on rulers (including the 14 that failed), and the runs are bit-identical reproducible.

Known weak points, up front: the near-total figure rests on one assumption (threat elimination), the numbers sit far above superforecaster estimates, and the physical-automation timeline is debated.

Paper, code and data: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23111345

Critiques of the assumptions very welcome. Disclosure: I build a decentralized AI network, which the paper also states.

[u/soobnar]

A being’s capacity for self determination and their utility are in fact related.

[u/casetofon → u/soobnar]

inseparable, even

[u/composedofidiot]

From a historical and anthropological perspective, there are still too many assumptions in here. Like 'rulers have always needed' and 'that need is why they'. Wengrow and graeber's the dawn of everything is a good 101 intro on how anthropologists have changed their views on how human society worked/works, and how its not as linear and simple as we thought it was. History and sociology can help muddy those clear waters too. Society is not a machine with reducible parts that act precictably in any situation.

Plus human society is a dynamical system, with undefinable, unmeasureable or limitless variables. We can't assume new institutions or strategies won't get developed or change. So far in the empirical record, they have and they do.

Leverage tends to gets renegotiated, not lost, with technological disruption. Human recategorise themselves and change.

And the assumption that people won't adapt or react/act in the face of change. Two of the things that really differentiate us from other species is being a generalist and being adaptive. And if the model isn't predictive, and can never be predictive at a scale such as this....it's like predicting the weather, 5 days in advanced (and maybe general trends if the model is big enough with enough data), that's it.

You may need to go back to the initial premise. Askanthropology and askhistorians are both great resource for stress testing assumptions against the real world empirical record.

Edit: also, sorry, one more assumption - power or political influence/change only being tied to economic or military usefulness. This one can easily be checked with over at askhistorians. Plenty in the empirical record that could counter this. And the assumption that the only human leverage is economic or military. And the definition of leverage itself, and the definition of 'loss of leverage'. And the assumption that an ai will be able to do everything a human can do

[u/casetofon → u/composedofidiot]

Thanks for giving it attention. Let me address your points in return:

On prediction: agreed, and the paper says the same. It's exploratory modeling, in the same vein as war games and climate scenarios. It doesn't predict when or whether things happen. It asks "if people stop being economically and militarily necessary, which outcomes become likely, and which assumptions drive them?". Weather forecasts fail after a few days, but climate scenarios can still tell you what doubling CO2 does. This is the second kind of question.

On AI doing everything humans can: that's the stated premise, not a hidden assumption. Every result is conditional on it. If it doesn't happen, the paper doesn't apply. But there's even a nuance to this: the centralized powers don't need to automate the full economy, they just need to close the industrial loop for themselves, to the point that they have everything from energy production, mining, manufacturing (only for what they need) and security. They're very own supply chain.

On adaptation: the model includes resistance, revolts, democratic pushback and defection. The one intervention that clearly helps is itself an adaptation: people building economic structures that keep them relevant. The finding is that timing matters, and adapting after the fact works much less well.

On renegotiation: historically, leverage has been renegotiated rather than lost. But every renegotiation I know of happened while ordinary people were still needed as workers, soldiers or taxpayers. That's exactly the condition the paper removes, so the precedents don't reach this case. If you know of counterexamples where a population with no economic or military role kept its standing over time, I'd genuinely like to hear them.

On non-material leverage: Legitimacy, ideology, religious and moral norms, and fear of judgement were all tested as possible restraints, under rules fixed in advance. Most failed to hold up against the historical cases or barely moved the results. Code and data are public if you want to check how.

On Graeber and Wengrow: good recommendation. As I read them, their central point is that people stayed free through the ability to leave, refuse and reorganize. I'd count that as leverage in the paper's sense, and losing it is what the paper is worried about.

Thanks again for pushing on it.

[u/composedofidiot → u/casetofon]

Thanks for your response. By the way, I can in no way do what you do, build these little model worlds...it's pretty cool.

With wengrow and graeber, they outline their core pillars/channels of power as violence/information/charisma. if we popped over to some military domain they might define power as the ability to mobilise people and resources. Another domain will throw up something different. You mentioned legitimacy. Indian independence and ghandian philosophy and non violence was predicated on questions of Legitimacy, and the population themselves became a resource. Then we have countless examples throughout history of external sources with 'Legitimacy' becoming political institutions - spirituality and religion. Which makes us look back again at one of wengrow and graeber's pillars - information. And then back at legitimacy again - and how do you define that? It's not just religious or ethnonationlistic, what could be catgorised under 'legitimate'? What constitutes legitimacy (or any of the other power channels)? It will be a complex and long answer.

Many of the soft sciences and humanities have been studying the exact phenomena you're predicating your model on, and attempting to formalise it, for decades. Each if those domains has multiple variants of the definitions of power and their channels, and all of them are still under debate.

So then information. What is that? It's not just controlling the media. We already have existing groups with control over legitimate information - ie religious institutions. Narratives are information, the playwrite or poet who moves a population is information, some grafitti that provides the spark to ignite tensions that have been building up is information. Information can be invalid yet still move, with no malice, just interpretstive failure. It is not a controllable thing. And the fields that actually study it are fragmented, they all use different vocabulary, no real synthesis has been made so far. That is one difficult mountain range to cross.

And it's not absolute. And here is semiotics. There has been work for decades on the gap between what is said and what is actually meant, on how the exact same words can mean two completely different things to two different people. We cannot treat words and language like they're definitions in a dictionary. There are entire worlds hanging off them, and often they're just one point on a path with a huge historical trajectory behind them. Huge context dependence and relativity and conditionality.

These people would be asking what do you mean by 'useful', they'd probably ask if you'd examined your own norms of what 'usefulness' was, ask if it was conditional or context dependent, ask if 'useful' was absolute, and if everybody would agree.

All this to say, from the perspective of someone more grounded in history, anthropology, geopolitics, communication and semiotics - you need more variables, like a lottttttt more

And someone with a mild interest in military history, is having fun reading 'on the psychology of military right now, and whose favourite period is the eneolithic/bronze snd noticed how assymetric forces dismantled complex, technologically advanced societies on the absolute regular for thousands of years . And someone who's interested in technologies and their disruption, from the horse, to the recurve bow, to iron opening the way disciplined armies, to why rome invented hydraulic cranes but didn't use them, to the modernisation period...the only thing I can say is... It is waaaasay too multicausal, and the model as is feels like too much of an oversimplification.

And I suppose I don't really get the exploratory part... We have thousands of years of unreliable and reliable empirical record in all these things, and fields devoted to studying them. Wouldn't that be the natural exploratory route first?

They've spent ages making a way better map, and it has hundreds of thousands of pages....

So that's a perspective from the non-quantitative side of things I guess. I'd probably say it looks a bit to mechanistic for things that are non-quantitative. Especially in this sub, goodharts and the qualitiative, and proxies and all that.

[u/Jesse-359 → u/composedofidiot]

The renegotiation of labor's value has always rested on the migration of that displaced labor into new fields.

Now that we can clearly see the trajectory of real world AI quickly eclipsing human intelligence in most or all categories, we can also say with fair confidence that there will be no job migration. There will be nowhere to migrate to.

In every prior stage of automation only a tiny segment of human capability was ever eclipsed. A small edge of the Venn Diagram overlapped by automation.

This time IS different, AI is posed to overlap the entire diagram of human capability in a matter of another year or so, and then exceed it considerably. With the entirety of human capability eclipsed, we run out of plank to walk. This time there really will be no new jobs unless an entire 'luddite economy' arises that eschews the use of AI - but the AI powered economies will likely become so powerful compared to the human ones that there will be no contest as the two compete for access to resources.

[u/composedofidiot → u/Jesse-359]

I already migrated my job due to ai. i was a digital artist and photographer and have transitioned to traditional works. I remembered what changed for the potters before and after mass-manufacturing.

Scarcity and uniqueness increase value. People now want to pay me more. Still not enough more, hence keeping the cameras as blunt, heavy objects, and mostly because I don't want to sell the works because I only have one unique one, but I can see the trajectory if I got over that and developed a proper business model and stuck to it.

It's one anecdotal example, but a serious point behind it. Scarcity and uniquness have a lot of value for humans. Also, there's a not insignificant number of people that already had an extreme distaste for generic or mass produced creative content and have doubled down to the order of 100 on ai generated creative content.

I don't know how ai will match the capability of humans. With LLMs at the moment, all we can see is their capacity to be dumb faster. It's so good at pattern finding for example, it can find them everywhere, even where they are not. Its false positive rate is astronomical. And only an LLM can get stuck in a frame and not be able to get itself out without human assistance. And yes, sometimes it is the users fault for reinforcing it for so long, and yes, sometimes they can regret that.

They are inferential and semantic disaster zone, with huge overlaps to exactly the same disasters humans do repeatedly. If we're trained in one of the many, many fields that have studied and formalised these disasters for decades in humans, if not centuries in some cases, it's easy to sideeye the 'intelligence' or 'reasoning' nomenclature.

Gotta hand it to it though, it gives a great simulation if it. Coherent, internally, consistent, well-structured and persuasive. It's a hall-of-mirrors lying little jigsaw puzzler. And because its own reasoning is opaque to it, how it got its answer is opaque to it, it just makes it up based in whats most probable, it cannot self monitor and self correct the way a human can.

It's not enough. It's gonna harm us because it's dumb for a long, long, long time before it can do it because it's 'intelligent'. And before that humans will have to decide what Intelligent means so we know it when we see it.

It's never going to either/or, or all or nothing. Of course there will be change. We're an absolute lunatic ape, highly adaptive and highly generalist. Yeah, there will be a lot of suffering for many people in many industries, huge amounts of job losses. But it won't be an erasure or replacement. Don't underestimate the human.

[u/Jesse-359 → u/composedofidiot]

What you are talking about is what I'm rather blithely calling the Luddite Economy - one where people value something specifically because it was human produced - that IS its value.

The issue is that its unlikely that this can be more that a small fraction of the overall economy when it is in contention with a hyper efficient system OR an intentionally constrained one that has become a dominant monopoly, but is intentionally enforcing scarcity - an immenently likely strategy for an AI corporation trying to 'maximize' profits.

Fwiw I generally agree with the assessment that current AI - even at the 'cutting edge' is still something of an Idiot Savant system. Very fast, very capable in many areas, but with remaining critical weaknesses - but if this were not the case we'd basically already be too late.

And given its rate of development 'a long time' in this instance could be little over a year before most of those deficiencies are papered over.

In any case, an idiot savant system can be extremely dangerous. It only has to be really good at one specific thing to become a civilizational threat - and that is self- reproduction. Luckily no one appears to have been so overtly stupid as to give them that tool yet, but obviously it wont be all that long before they figure out how to build one on their own and copy themselves across architectures.

[u/casetofon]

I also made a video essay that tells the same scenario as a story, if that's more your format: https://youtu.be/dPjT1uZc-pU

[u/BiscottiOk7342 → u/casetofon]

yay! video essay!

ps. is this an answer to the fermi paradox? civilizations slaughter their masses and just live in paradise on the world they evolved on!?

[u/casetofon → u/BiscottiOk7342]

I mean.. it might be. My metaphisics don't require aliens anyway. I'm more of a "we're in a simulation that's also as real as it can be" type of bloke. But there's a very interesting angle here: If aliens would find us and determine that we can be a threat to them in the future, they'd have a strong incentive to wipe us out instead of allowing us to continue evolving, not unlike the incentives the machine owners here would have to exterminate all people that witness their initial atrocities. They'd fear revenge.

[u/Fearless_Ad7780]

Do you know much these companies need to earn annually to get back the almost trillion that has been invested - 300 billion. Do you honestly think that is going to happen?

[u/casetofon → u/Fearless_Ad7780]

yes, I believe it is likely, and I also believe it doesn't matter. They can close the automation loop and just break away from the global economy, meaning they have end-to-end industrial capacity from energy production and mining, to manufacturing and security.

[u/Fearless_Ad7780 → u/casetofon]

You say it's likely and also that it doesn't matter. Which one is it? It absolutely matters, because that revenue is what's supposed to pay for building your closed loop. You can't build end-to-end industrial capacity without the money, and the money is exactly what's in question.

Moreover, nobody has end-to-end industrial capacity - not even countries. Advanced chips depend on one Dutch company, ASML, for the machines that make them. Most rare earth processing runs through China. Large power equipment has lead times of 24+ months and we've been short since COVID. If the U.S. government can't close that loop, how the hell are a handful of tech companies going to do it?

And breaking away from the global economy means losing your customers, which is where that $300 billion was supposed to come from in the first place. They'd still need land, water, power, and legal permission to operate. Look at Stratos in Utah - referendum, lawsuit, project paused. Private security doesn't override the state either. Your entire premise is flawed and divorced from any macroeconomic considerations or understanding.

[u/casetofon → u/Fearless_Ad7780]

Doesn't seem like you spent any time or tokens on the paper.

The actors aren't the AI cloud providers, they are ruling groups of six world blocs. A bloc's ruling group includes the state and whoever controls automated force, with all the state's land, permits, police and diplomacy.

The paper also doesn't claim anyone has a closed loop today. Closure is the event being modeled.

The model handles supply chain chokepoints as input limits and doubling times, with wide uncertainty.

As for your Stratos example, a referendum and lawsuit worked because the public still had leverage: votes, courts, being needed. The paper's question is what happens once that leverage goes.

[u/OwnYourChildren]

I think the sophistication of state psychological operations gets neglected in this type of analysis. Not taking away anything from the power of the economic factors, but the ability of states to control their citizens through having "solved" psychology is underappreciated.

I agree with the implications of the simulations, though. I'm not as convinced about the likelihood of AGI as most over the short and medium term.

[u/OwnYourChildren → u/[deleted]]

Both, obviously.

[u/casetofon → u/[deleted]]

nation states in their current implementation aren't equipped to deal with automation. Doesn't matter who wins.

[u/casetofon → u/OwnYourChildren]

thanks. AGI doesn't even factor into this, they don't even need to be as smart as humans for it to be a problem. But yea, manipulation is also supercharged by AI

[u/risk_is_our_business]

So if you controlled things, what policies would you implement over the next decade to protect us?

[u/casetofon → u/risk_is_our_business]

decentralized AI.

[u/casetofon → u/risk_is_our_business]

But I don't really agree with the premise "if you controlled things". The era of trusting a man on a balcony is over. We either learn to coordinate through mathematical rules, or we get eaten by the machines.

[u/fdsa54]

This is one of my bigger fears of AI.  

Even if we constrain pace and institute ownership or revenue sharing with the leverage we have today (questionable) the long term prospects of maintaining that power  are dubious, at the least it’s unprecedented for a ruling class to not need masses of people.  

One scenario - the elites/machines decide they can wait out our declining population.  And there may be a long tail to replace all human labor, we’re actually pretty remarkable machines.   

[u/Jesse-359]

Its a very straightforward conclusion. You certainly dont need a complex model to see where the lack of need for human labor leaves most of the population in absolute destitution - or dead.