THERE is a fascinating short story by EM Forster called The Machine Stops. In this story, humans live underground and are completely reliant on a machine which does everything for them. Strong, healthy people have been bred out because they become unhappy living underground. Then, one day, the machine stops and humans are plunged back into the harsh Darwinian conditions that we were subject to until the Industrial Revolution. The story is a cliff hanger, but the future is obvious: there is going to be mass death.
Our situation is a little bit different. As I discuss in my book Woke Eugenics: How Social Justice is a Mask for Social Darwinism, we are effectively breeding for poor genetic health. Intelligence, which is about 80 per cent genetic according to twin studies, is genetically correlated with health and intelligent people have fewer children in modern conditions (they use contraception more efficiently, delay fertility to become educated, and just seem to not want children), meaning that, for genetic reasons alone, we have lost about 15 IQ points in the last century; the difference between a policeman and a science teacher. Eventually, this continuous fall in intelligence will cause civilisation to substantially collapse: look at South Africa or Zimbabwe if you want to see this in full swing. Health and social services will fail, there won’t be enough food and Darwinian conditions of about 40 per cent child mortality will re-emerge and purge the gene pool of harmful genes every generation.
How will AI interfere with this process? We need to distinguish AI from robotics; we are making great progress in AI, but not so much in robotics and, in this way, we differ from the world of The Machine Stops. Importantly, an interesting evolutionary process is happening which I’ve referred to as the Rayner Effect. We’re all getting less intelligent but the left are getting less intelligent more quickly, with the genetic component of conservatism being up to 60 per cent. Wokeness acts as a selection event when you just look at the top quartile of intelligence. The big predictor of fertility is conservatism and the big predictor of infertility is liberalism. These people – materialistic and imbued with Woke guilt for being white or human – are resigning from the gene pool.
We can imagine that AI will make this process of selecting for the conservative and the religious even more pronounced. In the film called Vanilla Sky, Tom Cruise, in effect, resigns from life and plugs himself into a machine which allows him to live in his own personal utopia. One can imagine that AI will be able to produce something like this and it will be so sating that you need not bother doing things like having real relationships or having children; you will have your paradise that you can plug into whenever you wish. And, why not? For you, life has no point other than pleasure. There is no meaning; there is nothing beyond the material. There will be those who will reject this and we can easily imagine that they will be religious and conservative. So, AI will turbo-charge selection for people like this. In that conservatism and religiosity are associated with genetic health, AI will turbo-charge the process of collapsing humanity back to those who are genetically healthy.
In the meantime, as this process unfolds, we are likely to see intriguing social changes that will themselves impact human evolution. Most obviously, AI seems destined to destroy the middle class, the desk job; the kind of job a university graduate expects to obtain. It will be increasingly pointless going to university at all and there will be a shift in which graduate parents will encourage their children to ‘get themselves a trade’. AI, remember, is far ahead of robotics. Anything that involves manual dexterity or a high degree of trust will still require humans: plumbers, electricians, car mechanics, security guards, carers, teachers, and nurses. These will be the growth professions. Already, skilled tradesmen earn more than most graduates. There will be so few graduate jobs that the natural tendency to value ‘status’ over ‘money will surely begin to recede. The son of the poorly paid university lecturer will become a well-paid electrician.
But look at the nature of the jobs that will be left. Due to intractable sex differences in psychology, they are almost certain to divide along sex lines. The relative gender equality of the office job will be but a memory. Men will do physical jobs. These will boost their testosterone levels which, interestingly, tends to make liberal men more conservative, potentially shifting the culture towards conservatism. Women will pursue caring professions, as they are evolved to do. In a sense, these situations are our ‘evolutionary match’ – we are evolved to do these things – and our instincts tend to be induced in our ‘evolutionary match’. For example, our evolutionary match is to be surrounded by death, and when people find themselves in elevated ‘mortality salience’ they not only become more religious but they have a greater desire to have children; this desire being instinctive.
This being so, people who, in an earlier generation, would have gone to university, become left-wing and resigned from the gene pool will, in this AI world, become conservative and have children. This will make the population less genetically healthy, and less genetically conservative, than might otherwise have been the case. This, in turn, will return us to a situation where society is less polarised and in which genetic liberals (who tend to be less genetically healthy) will be less segregated from conservatives. Similarly, AI will do our thinking for us meaning that we won’t think for ourselves and we will become less intelligent. So we can foresee a short term decline in genetic health.
But, overall, I suspect that AI will simply make the eventual collapse of civilisation even more severe that it would otherwise have been. Some people, like the Old Order Amish, will have nothing to do with it, will continue to be relatively genetically healthy, and will survive when, for example, the entire electricity system is knocked out by a massive solar flare. This is what happened with the Carrington Event of September 1859, in which telegraph machines caught fire and there were Aurora Borealis as far south as the tropics. Most people, however, will be subject to the selection event of AI that will result in such an unnatural, and easy, environment that they won’t desire children and nor will they get pregnant by accident. AI will, therefore, eliminate them as well.
Even if AI achieved some kind of immortality for those plugged into the machines, the problem with such an indefinite period of time is that some natural disaster would surely strike earth eventually and knock out the entire system and those reliant on it. It would also do this in a context in which AI has caused us to stop thinking for ourselves, so, for this environmental reason alone, our ability to solve problems will be especially poor.
It may be inspiring to believe that AI will somehow break the cycle of civilisation, but there is little reason to think it will. Instead, I suspect, like Wokeness, AI will be a selection event for genetic health via religiosity and conservatism. Such people are likely to look back on the early 20th century with a mixture of revulsion and amazement.
