Your “cannon fodder” argument got me thinking; I don’t exactly think the argument depends on a new sort of fully distinct intelligence emerging, but rather a change in how our existing superorganisms are constituted. Modern states emerged in part as a mass-mobilization technology, and were therefore biased towards democracy. But as we learn to automate more things, smaller groups of humans better at implementing automation can outcompete larger groups of people mobilized by ideologies or other modern methods. If this keeps going, maybe we’ll end up like the Solarians in Asimov’s The Naked Sun for a while, a low-fertility skeleton crew of highly territorial lonesome tech-yeomen. If the skeleton crew is sufficiently infertile, it may leave behind a rigid set of automations that eventually collapse for want of maintenance by a living mind, much like the house in Ray Bradbury’s story There Will Come Soft Rains.
Your “cannon fodder” argument got me thinking; I don’t exactly think the argument depends on a new sort of fully distinct intelligence emerging, but rather a change in how our existing superorganisms are constituted. Modern states emerged in part as a mass-mobilization technology, and were therefore biased towards democracy. But as we learn to automate more things, smaller groups of humans better at implementing automation can outcompete larger groups of people mobilized by ideologies or other modern methods. If this keeps going, maybe we’ll end up like the Solarians in Asimov’s The Naked Sun for a while, a low-fertility skeleton crew of highly territorial lonesome tech-yeomen. If the skeleton crew is sufficiently infertile, it may leave behind a rigid set of automations that eventually collapse for want of maintenance by a living mind, much like the house in Ray Bradbury’s story There Will Come Soft Rains.