Jeff Rubin is a Canadian economist, an expert on trade and energy, and author of the newly released book, A Map of the New Normal. His previous best-selling books are: Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, The End of Growth, The Carbon Bubble, and The Expendables. His website is jeffrubinssmallerworld dot com
Source: KunstlerCast 401 — Jeff Rubin and A Map of the New Normal – Kunstler
There is plenty of talk about the demographic changes happening in America, but not much thought about where it is headed. Some people mention the fact that the country will be majority-minority in a generation, but no one likes to think about that so that is as far as it ever gets. The people in charge seem to think America will be Brazil but without the favellas and kidnapping industry. The fact is the social and political structures that have defined America cannot survive the demographic changes that are coming fast. The main reason for that is the majority population, once it becomes just another minority population, cannot continue to think like a majority population. The majority will no longer be able to swap the good of the whole for the good of their group.
Everything about America is the result of the majority population swapping their interest for the interest of the country. This altruism works only when the interests of the country are seen to align with the interest of the dominant majority, which is a thing that comes naturally when the majority is near ninety percent. Once that majority shrinks down to nearly fifty percent this perception collapses. This is what we see happening all around us. The majority looks around and see nothing but angry minorities, both unhappy with their position in society and totally unwilling to sacrifice anything for the good of the whole. The campus protests, for example, are just another sign that we have reached the tragedy of the commons phase of the demographic collapse of the white majority.
That is the show this week. It is a rumination on how majorities naturally see themselves and how minorities naturally see themselves. Democracy can only work in a majoritarian society. Once a democratic society devolves into a majority-minority society, minoritarianism takes over and democracy is no longer possible. What comes next is from a set of choices most do not relish.
Source: Majority Minority | The Z Blog
I speak with Adam about the concept of collapse and the various theories surrounding it, the likelihood of nuclear war as a primary cause of collapse, and the adaptability of complex systems. We also touch on the desire for revolution and the disconnect between online narratives and the real world. The conversation delves into the yearning for a different way of life and the challenges of escaping modernity, the impact of urbanization, immigration, and comparative advantage in different countries, the complexities of development, and the interconnectedness of the world. Our conversation also explores the crisis of competence in modern society and the decline of certain industries and professions, the perception that young people are checked out and not interested in high-status jobs, as well as the potential lack of competence in certain skilled trades.
Source: Adam Van Buskirk (@Empty_America) – The strange 21st century
Jim talks with Sam Sammane about the ideas in his new book The Singularity of Hope: Humanity’s Role in an AI-Dominated Future. They discuss the hype around generative AI, obstacles to AGI, reinforcement learning, intuition & emotion, human-AI augmentation, rules of thumb, the plausibility of the brain as a quantum computer, Jim’s ScriptHelper project, machine-like jobs that will likely be automated, the age of retraining, using AI to self-augment, the digital proletariat, a compassionate approach to rethinking society, a priesthood for investing, AI-augmented drug discovery, a major uplift in education, love as an engine of learning, the danger of considering AI in education as cheating, personal info agents, advances in tuning of LLMs, brain-computer interfaces, roads toward AGI, the pure AI singularity, the limits of our understanding of intelligence, collecting wisdom, and much more.
Ashley Woodward is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Dundee and is a founding member of the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy. In this episode we discuss Raymond Ruyer’s text Cybernetics and the Origin of Information.
Is America in 2024 better or worse than the future depicted in these films?
Capitalism is finished. What’s replaced it is even worse.
Philosopher Edward Feser examines liberalism on the analogy of an immunodeficiency virus which not only compromises the health of the social body, but leads to its own death as well.
Stephen Wolfram is, strictly speaking, a high school and college dropout: He left both Eton and Oxford early, citing boredom. At 20, he received his doctorate in theoretical physics from Caltech and then joined the faculty in 1979. But he eventually moved away from academia, focusing instead on building a series of popular, powerful, and often eponymous research tools: Mathematica, WolframAlpha, and Wolfram Language. He self-published a 1,200-page work called A New Kind of Science arguing that nature runs on ultrasimple computational rules. The book enjoyed surprising popular acclaim. Wolfram’s work on computational thinking forms the basis of intelligent assistants, such as Siri. Reason’s Katherine Mangu-Ward interviewed Wolfram as part of the June 2024 AI special issue of Reason. He offered a candid assessment of what he hopes and fears from artificial intelligence, discussed the complicated relationship between humans and their technology, and elaborated on the ways that artificial intelligence can already overcome existing regulatory burdens.
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