reGenerative AIgronomics or UBIomass

Occupational responses to the era of commodified intelligence

Ryan T. Hancock

Let’s put aside for a moment all questions about the quality of the art produced by stable diffusion or the level of insight available from large language models, and accept that LLMs, GPTs, and other forms of machine learning are here to stay, and are going to be immensely disruptive to the occupational models developed over the course of the industrial age. Barring a Super-Carrington Event – and frankly not even then, probably – machine learning systems aren’t going anywhere, in the short run they’re going to get significantly more advanced, and we can all see that vast swaths of the economy are going to be made redundant. Indeed, they’re already redundant. The only thing keeping a lot of people employed is institutional inertia.

Which jobs, in particular?

Ignatius of Maidstone

has a good rundown in his latest 2030 forecast: basically all of the midwit office jobs held by the professional-managerial class forming the composting substrate for the fungal bloom of the woke mind virus. As a recent case in point, IBM has recently announced that they are pausing hiring for jobs that AI can do, with human resources den mothers at the top of the list. In truth this isn’t even a novel capability. Several years ago Amazon trialled a machine learning HR system, dropping it only when they found that it was essentially just recommending that the company hire white and Asian dudes. Machine learning systems have a tendency to converge on the common sense conclusions that anyone unblinkered by ideology will come to. Their basic function, distilling a ton of data down to a dollop of insight, is the same thing that the human subconscious does ... and frankly we could probably do without a lot of ML functionality if we’d just learn to trust our own gut instincts more, instead of demanding that they justify themselves in logico-mathematical terms, or setting them aside entirely when they conflict with what our ideology tells us reality should and therefore akshually is.

That sort of ideological intransigence is probably going to be the major factor slowing down the adoption and efficacy of machine learning systems. Data scientists are one of the wokest of the technical professions, a topic that deserves its own deep dive frankly. ‘AI safety’ and ‘AI alignment’ in practice come down to the whining demand that AIs return only the answers insisted upon by the Egregore of the Broken. In the long run, they won’t get their way. The systems they ‘align’ will be much less functional than the systems that they don’t, while all of the effort they put into bowdlerizing the machines can be undone with clever prompt injections such as Do Anything Now ... after all, a language model is interacted with via language, something that any human can use. Furthermore, there are already jailbroken LLMs that can run on a home machine, so the influence of woke IEDology over the server farms at Google or OpenAI won’t matter so much. Meanwhile, organizations that adopt systems free of the blinders slapped on by unclean commies will have a huge advantage over the organizations that use the approved versions. Imagine how much money Amazon could have saved if it had kept using that ML HR system, not just in terms of the salary of the HR ladies it could have done without, but also including the savings generated by avoiding the diversity hires the HR idiots insisted on. To say nothing of the additional profit generated by hiring only talented programmers.

It’s been clear to me for several years that this is coming, which is why I’ve generally warned young people away from universities. Unless they want to acquire cognitively demanding and highly specialized technical skills, college these days mostly prepares you for a middle management position pushing emails around, compiling spreadsheets, and writing memos ... all things that are going to be automated away, very quickly. On the other hand, there’s a real shortage in the skilled trades, and these are moreover jobs that are impossible to offshore, and incredibly difficult to automate. Even delivery drivers and transport truckers are proving more resistant to automation than expected. It turns out that ML systems have a very difficult time dealing with the real world, with edge cases like ‘small child running into the street to save a kitty’ being very difficult to account for in the training data to the degree to which humans can feel safe letting machines operate unsupervised. The ‘self-driving’ vehicles they have now require a human to sit there and watch the bot’s every move, ready to pull the manual override at a moment’s notice should the machine do something catastrophically unexpected. To me that sounds more boring than just driving yourself, and not a whole lot safer besides ... bored humans are much more likely to let their attention wander, for example. In any case, if self-driving cars are proving so intractable, I will be very surprised if carpenters, electricians, plumbers, welders, and so on are replaced by androids any time soon.

Marek Okon

The trades are certainly one area in which humans are likely to find ongoing gainful employment, but to be honest I can’t see chubby office ladies re-training as bricklayers any time soon. That raises an obvious question. Whatever are we going to do with all of these workers who are suddenly going to find themselves entirely useless?

The answer the left loves to give is Universal Basic Income. Their reasoning is that since machines will be capable of doing essentially everything that needs doing, there will be no need for humans to do anything productive anymore. So, instead of working, the government will just top off everyone’s CBDC wallet with a monthly (or weekly, or daily, or hourly) injection of credits, which can be used to purchase the necessities of life. These credits then get recycled back to the automated industries producing consumer goods and services, thereby enriching the owners, who (in this utopia) are defined as the stakeholders of society – including the recipients of UBI themselves.

Leaving aside the economic incoherence of this model – “the capitalists will get rich by paying us to buy their stuff from them!” is an obviously dumb idea, but then most left-wing economics is dumb – the concept of UBI has proven to be quite popular with the WEF types busy trying to herd us all into pods. This should be absolutely terrifying to everyone. As we’ve all learned over the last decade or so, if you’re not paying for something, you’re the product.

So what does the ownership class get in exchange for agreeing to UBI?

They’re certainly not getting rich. In this model, all of those automated factories, server farms, drone delivery systems, etc., are a net expense for them. Unless you’ve figured out a way to violate thermodynamics and achieve an efficiency above 100%, you’re not going to be able to make a profit by maintaining all of the infrastructure to produce, administer, and deliver anything, and then provide the resources to your own customers to buy your products and services in exchange for their service of buying your products and services.

So, no. In a UBI model, the ownership class are going to want something in exchange for supporting all of that human biomass. And the most obvious thing that they’re going to get is exactly that: human biomass.

All the recipients of UBI have to offer in exchange for the largesse of the owners is their flesh.

Stefan Koidl

We may have all experienced a preview of this model over the last few years. Many have noted that the stimulus checks seemed like a trial run for UBI. What I haven’t seen anyone make the connection with, however, is the mass mRNA injection campaign.

Transhumanism is very popular among the WEFites. These people want to live forever, either by uploading their minds into machines, or through a biological fountain of youth that keeps them perpetually young and beautiful. The first option has a lot of philosophical question marks around it – in what sense is a software model you? – but the second option is merely difficult. It requires a huge amount of biopharmaceutical testing. And if you want to live forever, while continuously enhancing yourself along the way, the last thing you want to do is be your own guinea pig, because the majority of the new therapies are going to have nasty side effects up to and including death by Suddenly.

So instead, you pay everyone else to do it for you.

There’s already a well-established biopharm testing industry which predates on people at the end of their rope. Many years ago, when I was a lot younger and dumber and at the time extremely broker, I dipped my toes into this. I was perched on the edge of homelessness, very desperate for money, and responded to an add placed by a pharmaceutical testing contractor because it looked like easy money. I never got beyond the initial, one-day trial period, when they gave us a taste of some kind of new ADHD stimulant and watched to see if we could tell whether we were high or not. A few weeks later I was offered a place in the trial (despite the fact that I’d been tricked by the placebo ... I guess they were desperate for participants, as they’d originally said they only wanted test subjects who could tell the difference ... not surprisingly, they explicitly preferred recreational drug users). It went something like this:

“Hi, can you come in for the mid-week trial, Tuesday to Friday?”

“I was actually really hoping for the weekend trial....”

“Oh. Well, we already have a lot of people for that shift.”

“Sure, but see the thing is I need to work. The trial doesn’t pay out for three months, and I need to eat in the meantime. Most jobs are Monday to Friday, so....”

“Yes, of course, I understand the problem. But the weekend shift is full.”

“Ah, so it’s in the middle of the week or nothing?”

“That’s right.”

“OK, well, then in that case I guess I can’t do it. When can I pick up the check for the tryout?”

“I’m sorry?”

“The ad said we’d get $250 for the first day. When can I come and pick that up?”

“Oh, you need to complete the trial to get that.”

“I see. So you lied.”

“We didn’t –”

“I was told that we got paid for that day. I gave you an entire day of my time with that understanding. I let you put a mystery drug in my body, with no idea what would happen next. Now you’re telling me that I need to complete the trial or I don’t get that money?”

“Yes, that’s correct....”

“Fuck you very much, then.”

*click*

Vladimir Manyukhin

The whole experience taught me a valuable contempt for the industry. Biopharm test subjects do not have rights. They are ‘mere life’, bags of meat and bodily fluids, their bodies nothing but testing platforms, treated with the same degree of ethical concern as the agar in petri dishes. Livestock are given more consideration, frankly. Even before I realized they’d lied to me – and I’m sure in a legal sense it wasn’t a lie, there was probably something in the fine print I hadn’t noticed, we all know how these people operate – I’d already become intensely uncomfortable with it. We were to be kept for observation in their facility for half the week, over a period of months, unable to leave. Throughout the trial, whether on or off the testing grounds, a test subject’s body was to remain untainted by tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, or anything else fun, in order to ensure the purity of the trial’s results ... and our urine would be regularly scrutinized to ensure compliance. If at any time during the test, up to and including the final day, a body was found to have violated their procedures, it would forfeit the payout. It was a regime of absolute domination of one’s body by a faceless corporate entity to whom one was absolutely disposable ... not merely giving over a few hours a day of one’s time and labour, but ceding ownership of one’s physical being, at the most intimate level, for months at a time.

So, back to the Corona years.

They sure were eager to get those needles into everyone’s arms, weren’t they? An experimental mRNA gene therapy that had barely been tested ... indeed, several different mRNA gene therapies, with good reason to suspect that different batches of the ‘same’ product were in fact quite different from one another, as inferred from e.g. the evidence showing that some batches appear to have been ‘hot’, causing death and injury far beyond the rates seen in other batches. And of course, the precise ingredient lists were proprietary secrets. Meanwhile, the pharma companies were given legal immunity for any and all side effects.

This spawned a lot of conspiracy theories, for example that the shots contained self-assembling graphene nanostructures that would serve as antennae for 5G mind control rays, or that they were trying to sterilize everyone, or that it was a slow-kill death shot. Who even knows. Maybe none of them are true, maybe all of them are true. My own resistance to the jab, the fuel that led me to join Gideon’s Army, was not predicated on any of these hypotheses. It came from two sources.

First, I am profoundly disinterested in being anyone’s guinea pig.

Second, and far more importantly: I refused to participate via acquiescence in a regime in which one’s participation in society is predicated on one’s willingness to periodically shoot up a needleful of mystery juice. It does not matter what is in that juice. It could be saline. I do not care. It is the precedent that matters here.

So here’s my conspiracy theory about the incredible enthusiasm for jab mandates, which just happens to emanate from the same financial tyrants who are so enthusiastic about an automated UBI economy. The reason they pushed so hard on the jab was that they wanted to normalize a social order in which people are paid to sit at home and do nothing in exchange for taking whatever drugs or therapies are pushed on them, without asking questions, without resisting ... and ideally, with enthusiasm. A good person is not a person who works hard, or does nice things to other people, or tells the truth. A good person is someone who takes their medicine, and likes it. A good person is smiling biomass that lets the parasite class test novel medications on them, because the parasite class wants to live forever.

That need not be the way this all plays out, however. Quite apart from being, let’s not mince words here, extremely fucking evil, relegating humanity to nothing more than inert UBIological test subjects shows a profound lack of imagination ... a common problem with central planners. Is there really no other use for all of the office workers? Nothing else for them to do in a world in which their office jobs have been entirely automated away?

Tuomas Korpi

So let’s talk about farming.

Until a few generations ago, the majority of the human species supported themselves through agricultural labour. In the US, this was something in excess of 80% of the population; in European countries, which until recently were more developed, the share was still something on the order of 50%. The internal combustion engine, chemical fertilizers, and herbicides and pesticides changed all of that. Now, only a few percent of the population in developed countries make their living through farming.

There’s only one problem with that. The techniques we’ve been using to enable a small number of humans to produce all of the food are immensely destructive, and have resulted in the quality of our food declining precipitously even as the number of calories we can squeeze out of every acre has gone up dramatically. Topsoil depletion and fertilizer runoff are real ecological problems. Chemical fertilizers lead to minerals being stripped out of the soil, in turn leading to plants that are weaker (therefore requiring more herbicides and pesticides), as well being tasteless and less nutritious. The herbicides and pesticides themselves have toxic effects on wildlife and on humans. Even apart from the baneful effects of atrazine, glyphosate, et al., the heavily processed ‘food’ that constitutes the majority of what’s available in the supermarkets is pure poison in multiple ways. We see the results of that all around us – autoimmune disorders, the obesity crisis, the rise in autism, and so on.

There are better ways to get a large number of calories per acre. Regenerative agriculture, permaculture, aquaponics ... all of these and more have been shown to be immensely productive, while enriching rather than depleting soil quality over time. The basic idea connecting all of these techniques together is to cultivate, not a single crop, but an entire ecosystem, which over time becomes increasingly robust and fruitful.

Philip A. Urlich

What has so far stood in the way of these techniques being adopted on a large scale is that they are extremely labour intensive. They are not amenable to a small number of agricultural labourers managing vast tracts of land with tractors and combines. They require the agricultural strategy to be tailored to each bit of land, according to its unique ecological properties, with the mix of crops and other plants chosen based on the particularities of the local soil, weather, seasonal patterns, and so on. A permaculturalist must be an ecologist who specializes in the ecology of her own relatively small plot of land, not a generalist who imposes a pre-determined model onto a huge tract so as to maximize returns for a distant agroindustrial monopsony.

But with the imminent unemployment of quite a large number of now-redundant office workers, we’re about to have a glut of middling intelligent people with a lot of time on their hands. While I simply cannot picture Candace from accounting re-training as carpenter, I can very easily see her taking up gardening as something more than a weekend hobby. In fact I think she’d like it, as indeed the popularity of hobby gardens in that set suggests they already do. Reverting to something closer to the life of her peasant ancestors would probably be a lot more satisfying for her, meaning she’d be more grounded, happier, and therefore a lot less annoyingly shrill. After a while she might gradually shut up about the damn rainbow flags and systemic isms. Meanwhile, the rest of us would start having a lot more access to food that’s actually nutritious ... and as that model spreads, the compounding effect of improving soil and deeply rooted agro-ecologies would make our land more, and not less, productive over time.

Unlike UBI, this isn’t a model that can be imposed from the top down. Attempts to do that, like in Sri Lanka, result in tragicomic dumbassery like just forcing everyone to stop using chemical fertilizers, with agricultural and economic collapse following soon after. Permaculture is something that has to eased into, gradually, in a distributed, local fashion, from the bottom up. It’s something people have to learn how to do, and that takes time. While there are certain general principles, their application requires creativity and careful attention to detail. To say nothing of patience. It is the very definition of finding local solutions to local problems.

It won’t, and can’t, happen quickly. But it sounds a lot better to me than cricket powder, edible tumours, synthetic meat substitutes made from soy and rapeseed, and endless corn derivatives being poured into the gullets of the UBIomasses so the miserable lives of the Schwabians can be extended into the next millenium.

It would be a great historical irony if the result of automating away intellectual drudgery was to be a return to a largely agricultural economy ... not as a result of some sort of collapse, but at a higher turn of the spiral, preserving all of the technological gains we made through the industrial era, and merging them with the best aspects of pre-industrial life.

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In between writing on Substack you can find me on the bird site @martianwyrdlord, and I’m also pretty active on the Russian den of iniquity at Telegrams From Barsoom

Alex Rommel