“The Mamluks, who were the militarized elite that ruled Egypt, were recruited by buying Kipchaqs, Circassians, etc from slave markets. The sons of Mamluks couldn’t become Mamluks. So the elite numbers were regulated by how many military slaves were purchased on the market. There was no problem of elite overproduction, and the Mamluk regime was extremely stable to internal perturbations (it even weathered the disaster of the Black Death in 1346 that killed off more than half of the Egyptian population). Their power was only broken by an overwhelming external force (the Ottoman Turks).”
In the future when AI takes over and we are all reduced to landless peasants under the thumb of our robot overlords, they will not be challenged by the need to manage elite overproduction. Hooray!
Additionally, the AI empire may well be stable to other forms of instability. I’m not sure of the validity of the ‘hydraulic empire’ concept for explaining history: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_empire but the concept of an empire controlling a critical resource (like say, energy?) and therefore being invulnerable to internal overthrow might have value in this discussion.
Industrial production and scientific research will both be entirely in the hands of the AI, so something similar to the invention of the firearm or dynamite probably also will not emerge as a way to destabilize and destroy the AI regime.
If I had to guess at how the AI regime fails, I’d probably go for exhaustion of exploitable resources; humans can run pretty lean, datacenters really can’t, so there might be a point where Earth is habitable for humans, but the robots have consumed all the energy and material resources, and are thus unable to run. I think that’s low probability though, the last robot might shut down well after the last human dies.
Note: I think we have a long period of human oligarchs using AI to make the world a worse place ahead before AI takeover looks reasonable, and disagreed strongly with the AI 2027 scenario.
there might be a point where Earth is habitable for humans, but the robots have consumed all the energy and material resources, and are thus unable to run
This seems backwards to me. If AI has run out of solar power and nuclear fusion power to sustain itself, Earth isn’t likely to be habitable for humans.
To clarify my own perspective, I’m suggesting that a plausible, if unlikely, “window of time” could exist where an advanced robotic civilization fails, but Earth remains habitable for humans. My thought experiment hinges on the idea that a high-tech society could be dependent on a specific non-renewable resource, like helium, that is irrelevant to subsistence-level human survival. In this scenario, a collapse due to resource deprivation wouldn’t prevent humans from returning to a pre-industrial way of life on a still-viable planet.
However, I’m too much of a pessimist to believe this is the likely outcome. It seems to me that the more developed a civilization becomes, the less plausible this scenario is. With greater development comes a vast cascade of resource interdependencies. To reach a technological level where a civilization could exhaust a resource as fundamental as helium would likely involve industrial output and environmental impact that would have already rendered the planet uninhabitable for humans. It’s possible that the window for a high-tech civilization to fail without taking the biosphere with it has already closed.
According to Peter Turchin: https://peterturchin.com/does-history-cycle/
“The Mamluks, who were the militarized elite that ruled Egypt, were recruited by buying Kipchaqs, Circassians, etc from slave markets. The sons of Mamluks couldn’t become Mamluks. So the elite numbers were regulated by how many military slaves were purchased on the market. There was no problem of elite overproduction, and the Mamluk regime was extremely stable to internal perturbations (it even weathered the disaster of the Black Death in 1346 that killed off more than half of the Egyptian population). Their power was only broken by an overwhelming external force (the Ottoman Turks).”
In the future when AI takes over and we are all reduced to landless peasants under the thumb of our robot overlords, they will not be challenged by the need to manage elite overproduction. Hooray!
Additionally, the AI empire may well be stable to other forms of instability. I’m not sure of the validity of the ‘hydraulic empire’ concept for explaining history: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_empire but the concept of an empire controlling a critical resource (like say, energy?) and therefore being invulnerable to internal overthrow might have value in this discussion.
As far as non-elite rebellion goes, the Mamluks didn’t have that problem. Generally, peasant revolutions fail: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_peasant_revolts so rebellion of non-elites probably won’t work.
Industrial production and scientific research will both be entirely in the hands of the AI, so something similar to the invention of the firearm or dynamite probably also will not emerge as a way to destabilize and destroy the AI regime.
If I had to guess at how the AI regime fails, I’d probably go for exhaustion of exploitable resources; humans can run pretty lean, datacenters really can’t, so there might be a point where Earth is habitable for humans, but the robots have consumed all the energy and material resources, and are thus unable to run. I think that’s low probability though, the last robot might shut down well after the last human dies.
Note: I think we have a long period of human oligarchs using AI to make the world a worse place ahead before AI takeover looks reasonable, and disagreed strongly with the AI 2027 scenario.
This seems backwards to me. If AI has run out of solar power and nuclear fusion power to sustain itself, Earth isn’t likely to be habitable for humans.
I agree with your central point.
To clarify my own perspective, I’m suggesting that a plausible, if unlikely, “window of time” could exist where an advanced robotic civilization fails, but Earth remains habitable for humans. My thought experiment hinges on the idea that a high-tech society could be dependent on a specific non-renewable resource, like helium, that is irrelevant to subsistence-level human survival. In this scenario, a collapse due to resource deprivation wouldn’t prevent humans from returning to a pre-industrial way of life on a still-viable planet.
However, I’m too much of a pessimist to believe this is the likely outcome. It seems to me that the more developed a civilization becomes, the less plausible this scenario is. With greater development comes a vast cascade of resource interdependencies. To reach a technological level where a civilization could exhaust a resource as fundamental as helium would likely involve industrial output and environmental impact that would have already rendered the planet uninhabitable for humans. It’s possible that the window for a high-tech civilization to fail without taking the biosphere with it has already closed.