I'm gonna be a little practical right now. Who is gonna build the drones, the surveillance cameras, and gas chambers needed to kill us all? There's not gonna be some day where general purpose AI is built and then everybody dies. Stuff will still need workers in order to build the tools to replace them.

This is the old historical process we all know and love. The one that kicked off this whole "capitalism" thing: mass automation replacing workers. It can get fast but it's never instantaneous.

And like, at every step of the way until self-sustaining AI (if that's even possible but let's assume it is), the laws of Capitalism will still apply: every factory that produces components for data centers will want some profit and -- assuming the slow replacement of workers -- will see their rate of profit going down the drain. That will kick off austerity, wage cuts etc. which will accelerate class struggle.

What I'm saying is that capital doesn't have a grand plan. It's a bunch of enterprises that have their own interests. Even if some rich assholes at the top have a plan, they can't personally plan the entire economy, they can't create killer robots out of thin air, they can't avoid squeezing the workers dry until AI becomes their omnipotent servant, and they can't make every single factory or enterprise stop thinking about profits for a little bit until they don't need labor anymore.

but if your AI can improve the robots doing the slaughtering enough, then you can guarantee your win.

There is a difference between some capitalists have terrifyingly awful ideas for how to control the poors and those ideas having a clear, realistic material path to them that avoids negation of itself. The point I keep trying to make is about how dialectical materialism works. It doesn't guarantee communism and I never said that it does, but communism is the only way we know of to resolve class contradictions. Changing the form of exploitation doesn't resolve class contradictions, no matter how many people you murder in the process; it changes the form of exploitation. This is what I mean when I say, "The only actual way for a capitalist to solve the worker-capitalist divide is to turn class traitor and help the working class take over, in order to transition to a state where class stratification is no more."

It's not that I think a bunch of capitalists are going to turn class traitor out of good sense. My point is that their ideas about overcoming the contradictions with more and better violence is vary shades of delusions; it is out of touch with how dialectical materialism works and (much of the time) probably wholly unaware that it exists, instead operating from idealism and the belief that better, smarter ideas will overcome the material problems. This allows them to wallow in a pseudo-intellectual "rationalist" haze where they can cogitate and navel-gaze over how this next form of mass oppression will surely be the one that stops the poors from revolting.

History has had people who have done worse than these modern techbro grifters with far less technology to do it. These modern grifters push ideology that is so far up its own ass, it can't see the light of day. The world got easily ground to a halt by a global pandemic just a few years ago and that was a relatively mild virus compared to how bad it could have been. Climate change keeps getting worse and could reach tipping points with staggering consequences. Meanwhile, these chucklefucks are techbroing about virtualizing people, while data centers for current generative AI alone require hefty resources to create and maintain.

I fully believe they're terrible people and want to do terrible things. I'm just saying we shouldn't believe the world can work the way they say it does because they desire it to work that way. Identifying threats is not just about reading people's saturday morning cartoon villain aspirations. It's also about working out what the most pressing, realistic threats are.