swampman posted:

I remain impressed by the long-enduring goonitude crusted to your tinfoil hats like mats of space barnacle. Bending environmental collapse chat to robot singularity chat is rad as hell. But robotics can't do it without a massive base of human labor. Humans will always be a necessary component of the system because they will always be the most efficient option for some set of tasks, and beside that are the end justification of the system as consumers. Therefore human complicity needs to be purchased. Labor shortages are extremely undesirable, one reason is same reason that copper shortages are undesirable, the other reason is that labor shortages give enormous power to the workers.

Also, massive unchecked resource extraction on a global scale is required to sustain a heavily automated environment just on the major-city scale. This resource extraction is actually better performed by billions of hungry little monkeys who can't coordinate on a systemwide level to say like, "Okay, if we keep mining, we're going to put so much mercury in the water that it will be hard to keep people alive in 15 years, so let's slow down the mining for a bit and plan what we're going to do."

What is happening is a massive release of stored energy, "oil as an apocalyptic force" that was bound to find a way to the surface someday, and we happened to be the hole-digging monkeys to have reached it. The coal and oil we're igniting to make this happen will not be replenished in the earth's lifetime, and not only due to the non-reproducible circumstances of their creation. After 600-800 million years, the sun will be too bright for photosynthesis to happen on earth. So yeah I guess my point is that the singularity is stacking chairs and the lights are about to come on

yes