VOLUME I, CHAPTER 1, SECTION 6
The dead end of capital. Even war is off, even the funeral trade is gone, and the world goes silent at once.
The last five sections locked the dead end of the human being. The plumber is not safe. The engineers are cutting their own throats. The professionals cave in. The white-collar army caves in. The blue-collar army caves in, and even the one collecting cans has no way to live. This section locks the dead end of capital.
Capital chasing profit is an instinct doing its job. Capital sees the meat of the AI Stampede and moves to eat. Capital hands out the knife, the engineer takes it, the knife runs through every job. Capital thinks it is winning. But capital forgot one root position. Where does the profit come from? Off the human being. Wipe out the people, and what is left to profit from? This section drives it to the floor.
First, lay out the script the earlier revolutions ran. Three times, capital ran the same one.
The steam engine set people idle, and the idle piled up in the cities, and those people would have turned and grabbed at the rich beside them, and capital, afraid of being grabbed, moved the state to gather the idle hands into great armies and lead them to a foreign battlefield, where tens of millions destroyed each other, the world order was reset, and capital grew larger.
Electricity and the combustion engine set more people idle. The Great Depression. Capital backed the Nazi party, militarist Japan, the New Deal, organized the idle hands, and led them to the Second World War. Seventy million fell. China suffered beyond words. The world order was reset, and capital grew larger.
The computer set more people idle. The Cold War. American and Soviet proxy wars, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria. The poor kept falling, the world order kept resetting, and capital kept growing larger.
Three revolutions, a hundred twenty million poor fallen on the battlefields, and capital stronger with each war. The same script, three times in three hundred years. Every time capital reached the moment the position vacuum piled up, it ran this script, bundled the idle hands, shipped them to war, let them destroy each other, cleared the space, and kept turning.
The fourth revolution, the AI Stampede, has a position vacuum thousands of times larger. Billions facing it. By the old script, this time bundles billions of idle hands and ships them off to be destroyed. But the script will not run. Because even war is off. The robots have taken the battlefield.
The war in Ukraine has shown the whole world. The drone decides the field. A cheap FPV suicide drone, a few hundred dollars, kills a tank worth millions. Ukraine builds millions of drones a year, Russia follows. The drone operator, hundreds of kilometers back on a controller, replaces the front-line soldier. In Gaza, AI systems generate the target lists. The AI decides who is struck. The human commander only stamps the list the AI made. Anduril, Palantir, Lockheed Martin have made AI decision plus unmanned platforms the core of the next-generation military. The US Replicator program aims to field thousands of autonomous combat systems. China, Russia, Europe, India, every military power is racing to build unmanned combat systems, robot dogs, robot soldiers, autonomous drone swarms, AI command. Within five to ten years, ninety percent of the positions in war are held by robots and AI. The living soldier's position caves in.
And here the pattern turns absurd. The first three revolutions bundled the idle hands to war, and at least gave them a position, the soldier's position. You put on the uniform, you stood on the field, you were spent as a life, but in the moment of being spent you had a position. The fourth revolution takes even that position of being spent.
The idle hands want to enlist? The army does not want them. The drone force needs a few thousand young people who are good at games, and that is all. The other hundreds of millions with nothing to do, the army has no position for. A robot soldier is cheaper than a man, a hundred thousand dollars and ten years of service against a hundred thousand a year to train and equip a soldier who might die. More precise, AI vision faster than the eye by hundreds of times. Does not break and run, no fear. Does not draw protest, no mother weeping at the White House when a machine is destroyed. Capital wants the state to bundle them. It cannot be bundled. The state wants to conscript the idle hands. They cannot be conscripted. War no longer needs flesh. The idle hands have lost even the position of dying for the flag. They cannot get onto the battlefield, because the robot has taken that position too.
Where do the idle hands idle? At home. On the street. In the internet cafe. In the depression clinic, if they can still afford the doctor. No job, no bottle to collect, and now not even the position of cannon fodder to be spent in. The old pressure valve of the position vacuum, capital moving the state to bundle them for war, has failed in the AI Stampede age. The whole script will not run.
The script will not run, the idle hands pile up, and what does capital do? By its instinct, capital only keeps chasing profit, keeps pushing AI to replace the living, keeps pushing robots to take every position. Capital does not stop on its own. But as capital cannot stop, capital forgets the root. Where does the profit come from?
A person buys a thing, capital earns. A person rents a home, capital earns. A person eats, capital earns. A person sees a doctor, capital earns. A person learns, a person plays, a person works, capital earns. Wipe out the people, and what is left to profit from? No one to buy the thing, so capital makes it to sell to whom? No one to rent the home, so the property sells to whom? No one to eat, so the restaurant's customer is who? No one with money, so finance serves whom? The whole logic of capital closes, stalls, freezes on the spot.
Capital hands out the knife, the engineer takes it, the knife runs through every job. Capital thinks it is out in front, running. In truth capital is running toward a cliff. Capital thinks it is earning profit. In truth capital is eating its own root. Capital is cutting its own throat too.
Section two locked that the Silicon Valley engineer is cutting his own throat, locked in by the signing bonus, the prisoner's dilemma, the pressure of capital. This section locks it one layer deeper. Capital is locked in too. Capital is locked in by its own instinct. Capital sees the profit and must eat, cannot not eat, because the capital that does not eat is outcompeted by the capital that does. The whole logic runs like a machine out of control, every gear turning on its own instinct, and the whole machine driving toward self-destruction. Capital is not evil, the third chapter will lock that down. Capital only runs on instinct. But the instinct, run to its limit, swallows capital itself.
And what does the dead end of capital look like at its end? I will paint it plainly, and hold one thing in your mind while I do. This is the picture if nothing is changed. It is a warning, not a wish. The world goes silent at once. Frozen. No one on the street. No one in the store. No one in the office. No one in the factory. No one in the hospital, the doctors caved in and the patients caved in too. No one in the school, the teachers caved in and the students caved in too. No one in the restaurant. No one in the funeral home. Only robots.
Robots patrol the street, but there is no one left to protect. Robots stand guard in the store, but no one comes to buy. Robots wait in the hospital, but no one comes to be healed. Robots tend the graveyard, but no one comes to mourn. Robots face an emptied world and keep running, until the battery drains, the solar panel fills with dust, the servo rusts, and the last robot stops too. Then the world is truly silent. Frozen.
And here lock one more position, the deepest. Even the funeral trade is gone. The funeral trade is one of the oldest trades of human society. From the beginning of people there was a funeral trade, burying the dead, easing the souls, comforting the living. For thousands of years, through every disaster, every plague, every war, it stayed. Rome fell, the funeral trade stayed. The Black Death killed a third of Europe, and the funeral trade, worked to exhaustion, stayed. Two world wars killed a hundred twenty million, and the funeral trade, run off its feet, stayed. It is the last trade of human society. Even the dead must be handled.
The AI Stampede takes even that last trade. The crematorium fully automated. Smart funeral homes in pilot in Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing. Robot handling of the body already in large funeral homes in Japan and China. Driverless hearses. AI-monitored, automated grave maintenance. AI officiants leading the service. Chanting, Kyoto's AI sutra service is already commercial, forty thousand yen a funeral, cheaper than a live monk. The whole flow, from the body to the burial to the rites, roboticized. The funeral workers, the morticians, the cremators, the grave keepers, the officiants, all caving in.
But this is not the deepest. The dead are not needed either. Once the logic of capital has wiped out the living, even the customer called the dead disappears. The funeral trade's customer is the bereaved family, and the family pays to handle the dead. But the family are people too, and they were swallowed by the AI Stampede as well. The family has no money to pay, so the funeral trade has no customer. And the dead themselves may be unclaimed, no one to pay to handle them. Great numbers of nameless dead appear, the ruined middle class, the scavengers of the street, the billions cast off by the logic of capital, with no family to claim them and no money to handle them. In life, no job, no income, no position. In death, no one to send them off, no one to claim them, no one to remember them. Handled at the end by an automated system, no rite, no name, no trace left behind.
The capitalist himself, the same. Capital chases profit to the end, and the capitalist dies, and there is no one to bury him. His capital, left to whom? No one. His wealth, inherited by whom? No one, the children swallowed by the AI Stampede too, the grandchildren never born. His company, run by whom? No one, the staff all replaced, not even a person to sweep the floor. His house, lived in by whom? No one. The tens of billions in his account, spent by whom? No one, the stores gone, the restaurants shut, not even a place left to buy a single bun. Capital chases profit to the end, chases it until there is no one to bury its own corpse. This is the dead end of capital.
Lock it here. The market caves in, war is off, even the funeral trade is gone, the capitalist dies with no one to bury him. But this is still not the deepest point of the chapter. The dead end of the human being caved in the position. The dead end of capital caved in the profit. There is one dead end deeper than position or profit, the bloodline of the human being itself. The next section locks the chapter's last alarm, and its deepest. Even human reproduction is gone. No violence, no war, no disaster. The human race simply stops making more of itself, and walks off the Earth on its own.
Or go straight to the way out. Volume VI, Saving People: A Race Against Time Before the Blood Runs.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Seven. Even the next generation is gone. The deepest dead end of the AI Stampede