Our dark future with competition
“If someone can change your mind, he has won you over without raising his hand against you. This is the future of warfare.”
Bangambiki Habyarimana
We have learned about the two subgroups of groups, the „inside people“ (which we associate with the political left) and the „border people“ (which we associate with the political right). It seems clear that the more a group is dominated by the „border people“, the better it is at competing with other groups. If the group is a country, they would increase spending for the army with resources they deny the weaker. But historically this process was always limited by the threat of severe inner social conflicts. This is changing now: we have seen before (chapter „Competition in the information age“) that there is a growing imbalance between the military capabilities of individuals and governments („stones against machine guns“) and that governments are under pressure to install a gapless surveillance system to limit the power of individuals. These developments make it possible for governments now to prevent social unrest by suppressing it with modern arms (police repression), propaganda, suppressing freedom of speech and surveillance. This allows a country now to operate in a highly competitive state without having the drawback of social unrest. This puts other countries under pressure to do the same. Note that the prosperity in these highly competitive countries will be very low for most people. In the end, the most competitive country will win the race. And again: this is nobody’s fault (also not of the „border people“) as competition will force countries to walk this path. The social democracies will have no chance against the totalitarian regimes and they will sooner or later have to implement a totalitarian military/police state too. Otherwise they will just face invasion from a more competitive country.
This was a short analysis. Let’s look at how this process could take place in detail and what will happen inside countries.
As groups don’t share knowledge in a competitive system and groups have different amounts of knowledge, they will grow at different rates. This means that at some point one group will dominate all others and there will be no way the other groups can catch up. It would be very difficult to create another Apple or Google today. These companies have just grown too big. The same is the case for some countries. Another effect is that due to automatization (soon in the form of advanced artificial intelligence), less and less people are required to run these companies. For a while, Whatsapp was serving hundreds of millions of customers with just a handful of engineers. This is also true for non tech companies. In the information age every company has to become a tech company, or it will perish.
This development will lead to an extreme concentration of power in the hands of the few people who are able to run these highly complex corporate machines. With the widespread adoption of A.I. most peoples work contribution will be not needed anymore. They will be replaced by robots and will have to be supported by the governments which will try to tax the mega corporations heavily to be able to pay for it.
Governments will also try to limit the power of the leading tech companies. But this will be very difficult as they are competing with other tech companies on a global scale (i.e. other tech companies in other countries). On the global scale size matters of course too. Therefore governments would slaughter the cow which gives the milk if they split large companies into smaller ones or hurt them substantially in other ways. Governments will have little choice and will have to leave them intact and let them operate mostly as they wish.
It is obvious that the elite will form a group to defend itself against taxation and laws limiting their power. They will try to corrupt democracies (buying politicians, e.g. by financing their election campaigns) and use the power of the digital/social media channels they own to influence elections. The elite will also play off countries against each other and use legal loopholes to avoid taxation.
This is why compromises like „social democracy“ will not work in the long run. In such schemes the government is trying to mitigate the growing social differences in the population but competition is still accepted, because it is assumed that it is needed to make people perform. But competition will always increase the concentration of power and the masses will be, for the mentioned reasons, ultimately powerless against the elite.
At some point in time the now „useless“ masses will be not only a huge financial burden but also a substantial risk for the few in power. The masses will be unhappy as the governments will be only able to support them at a minimal level. They will protest or even riot frequently. Terrorism will increase (also using cyber weapons and desinformation). This will allow the corrupted governments to implement a surveillance state and adopt drastic punishments for breaking the law (under the pretext that law and order have to be restored). A larger and larger percentage of the population will be „neutralized“ by putting them into prisons (which, as a welcome side effect, often deprives them of the right to vote).
As soon the incarceration rate will have grown to extreme levels, even more drastic measures will be required to keep cost at an acceptable level: a wider application of capital punishment.
Also the government will limit freedom of speech by controlling communication channels with A.I.. The free press will be replaced with propaganda channels.
Note that this process is happening already now: within countries (like the U.S. which has already a huge incarceration rate today), but also on an international scale: weaker countries are driven into poverty and when people defend themselves using unconventional measures, they can be fought under the pretext of „fighting terrorism“ using killer drones.
Even old democracies are starting to limit freedom of speech in social media and messenger apps.
It is clear that if the few in power want to survive on the long run, they will have to wipe out at some point in time the rest of the population. They offer no advantage anymore and are only risk and burden. The powerful will send death squads into the slums of the poor. Yes, the holocaust will come back.
At the same time these people will be very worried to lose ground to their competitors (it will have become evident at that stage what happens to those who lose) and they will also try hard to eliminate them too. This could lead to global war.
The final result might be a world where only one single individual has survived (and only competition is to be blamed, not the people involved which behaved rationally according to their fears!).
Now could this person be you? Of course it is statistically extremely unlikely even if you are a powerful, rich or famous person (there are still too many of those). But even if you are one of the world leaders it is extremely unlikely. The reason is that the person who makes it in the end will be most likely a highly technical person. It will be somebody who is able to decipher the encryption keys for a large drone army to take control of it or to hack into computer systems to gain important information about the enemy.
And even if you are the one who will make it: maybe you will want to suicide after two months alone because you are so terribly lonely.
This is an important result: even if you are the most powerful person on the planet today, you and your whole family tree are most likely going to be eliminated completely.
But this is only the case if the world is continuing to walk the path of competition. This is why we will try to develop an alternative in the following second part of this book.