German Taxpayers Bled Dry: Mass Migration Cost €40 Billion In 2025

    In the end and in retrospect, the immigration policy of Europe will have been a catastrophe for the continent. Not only was the cost astronomical, as discussed below, but the social problems of violence, low overall skill level, language and cultural difficulties, and lack of integration could prove to be a death sentence for most European countries. 

   Europe has no resources beyond its population as opposed to continent-size countries such as China, the US or Russia. It should therefore have invested in technology and skills, as well as secure as much natural resources as possible. (Just as China proved it was possible.) Instead, it squandered its energy and money on woke projects, feel good absurdities and most dammingly confrontation with Russia and China from which there is no snowball chance in hell of gaining anything whatsoever.   

   The stark reality is that the epoch of Europe lasted from the Renaissance to the beginning of the 20th Century. The later half of the last century was a period of stagnation which is logically being followed by a rapid decline. What can we say except that the calamity was self inflicted and consequently probably irremediable?

Via Remix News, 

Migrants cost German taxpayers — just at the federal level — €24.8 billion in 2025, according to new data in the “refugee costs report” from the German Federal Ministry of Finance. However, the true sum is much higher.

The €24.8 billion is strictly the federal bill. The actual, combined national cost of migration for Germany is that €24.8 billion plus the massive, separate billions that the individual states and municipalities had to pull from their own local tax revenues to cover their own deficits brought on by mass immigration.

Welt notes that the total figure is indeed much higher, since it does not include states and local communes, but Welt does not provide this combined data.

Nevertheless, previous years indicate that this number is at least €15 to €20 billion. That means any total figure is likely well over €40 billion, but as in previous years, it may actually go as high as €50 billion.

The total costs cover several areas, including the federal government’s contribution to the refugee and integration costs of states and municipalities. One controversial issue is exactly how much money the federal government is transferring to the states and municipalities, which they argue is not enough to cover all their costs.

Essentially, the federal government only pays out a flat rate per initial asylum application, amounting to €7,500 from the federal government, allocated via a modification in the VAT distribution. This advance payment reached €1.25 billion for 2025. Additionally, the report assumes that the federal government holds a claim for repayment from the states totaling €250 million for 2025.

However, this only covers a fraction of the cost. The states indicate that the total costs in the area of flight and migration are significantly higher than the VAT resources available to them on the basis of the flat rate.

Of course, all of these expenses only cover specific areas like housing, direct social benefits, and integration courses. The true cost is still far higher than €40 billion to €50 billion.

The costs, for instance, do not cover expenses associated with the substantial foreign prison population. They also do not cover the need for the vastly increased police forces and counter-terrorism efforts. There are also “gray areas” that lead to other hidden taxes on Germans brought on by mass immigration. For instance, mass immigration has led to vastly higher housing prices, more road traffic, crowded hospitals, and longer wait times for medical treatments.

Germans are even paying higher health insurance premiums now due to mass immigration.

The head of the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Funds (GKV-Spitzenverband) has repeatedly criticized the federal government for creating a massive multi-billion-euro deficit that forces them to raise premiums, with the core of the complaint revolving around “non-insurance benefits.” These are social welfare benefits mandated by the government that are paid out to people who have not paid regular insurance contributions into the system. This includes long-term unemployed citizens and refugees.

When asylum seekers first arrive in Germany, they are not members of the statutory health insurance system. Under the Asylum Seekers Benefits Act, their healthcare costs are covered, with local municipalities and state social offices paying their bills. 

The financial friction begins once a migrant’s asylum application is approved, or if they have been in the country for 36 months without a final decision. At this point, they transition into the standard welfare system, known as citizen’s money.

Once on welfare, they are fully integrated into the statutory health insurance system. This is where the GKV-Spitzenverband argues the math breaks down, with the government only paying €108 per person per month for welfare recipients, the majority of which are migrants and those with a migration background, when the care actually costs between €300 and €350 a month.

This has resulted in a multi-billion euro deficit, which the insurance companies say now needs to be passed on to Germans actually paying for their health insurance.

In short, Germans are being squeezed from all sides due to mass immigration, and despite claims that foreigners would pay the pensions of Germany’s aging population, this is clearly unrealistic. Instead, Germany’s elderly may now be expected to work even longer, with a strong movement in the government to raise the retirement age to 73.

Read more here...

AI Content Is Swamping The Internet: How It Impacts Critical Thinking

   There's something very wrong with the Internet and nobody can do anything about it. Not only are we swamped with slops, but at least you can avoid watching TikTok all day long, but propaganda, false narrative and plain lies are now everywhere. So much so that it is becoming more and more difficult to know what's true. Worse, human articles and videos are being crowded out by AI generated stuff which as soon as you look deeper is in fact almost complete devoid of actual content. 

   It's not just that AI produces junk skillfully built to manipulate feelings and perception, the real problem is that beyond the glossy surface, the content is mostly empty, almost like a Potemkin village with no substance behind the facade. Facts are not checked so they often have no substance whatsoever beyond flowing with the narrative. Images are bland and only superficially related to the points being discussed. AI cannot keep its story lines strait for very long so they tend to loop again and again. 

   In reality, what AI is bringing to the table is a huge dumbing down of the quality of almost everything it touches. Thankfully, unlike what the article below argues, it is still relatively easy to realize you are dealing with AI content and consequently quickly move to something else. 

   What is far more concerning is the long term impact of AI. Soon, it is very likely that human created content will represent but a small, maybe insignificant minority of what will be pushed on the internet for commercial reasons and in so doing what is actually being consumed will be even more tightly controlled (or diluted into nothingness) than is already the case. 

   The good news is that human generated content, like this blog, will remain although more and more difficult to find and appreciate. People make mistakes, they do not target their audience as skillfully as a machine can. Conversely, the depth of good articles is incomparable to AI generated "stuff" and the ideas discussed are often approached with a specific angle giving value to what is being written. Most people, have opinions. Machines have none. You can agree or disagree but mostly, as I often try to do here, you end up with food for thoughts and arguments to build your own ideas. This remains a domain still almost completely outside the scope of current AI, thankfully!    

by Autumn Spredemann via The Epoch Times

A never-ending flood of content generated by artificial intelligence is reshaping the internet and the way people engage with information faster than ever.

Illustration by The Epoch Times, Freepik

From news summaries to social media posts to academic research, the sheer volume of machine-assisted materials has been correlated with a spike in "cognitive offloading" - a phenomenon in which people outsource critical thinking and verification to automated systems.

A 2025 analysis of how AI tools affect cognitive offloading showed a "significant negative correlation" between frequent use of AI tools and the ability to think critically in people across age groups and educational backgrounds. The researchers at the SBS Swiss Business School found that younger age groups exhibited a higher amount of dependence on AI models and lower critical thinking scores.

What's more troubling is a Pangram/YouGov study in May that found only 55 percent of participants, all of whom were Gen Zers aged 18 to 28, were able to identify fake or misleading AI-generated material. That number is lower in older age groups, which means half or fewer of adults over the age of 28 were confident in their ability to spot AI content online.

"AI-generated posts and comments can distort public perception, especially when volume is mistaken for credibility," Javi Pérez, an editor of AI-assisted consumer education websites, told The Epoch Times.

"If a user sees dozens of similar posts about a product, trend, political claim, health issue, or financial topic, they may assume there is broad agreement."

'Confident Sameness'

Pérez said consumers need to beware as AI content increases the volume of what he called "confident sameness" online.

"Many articles and posts now repeat similar structures, similar advice, and similar phrasing. For casual readers, this can create the impression that a topic has more consensus or certainty than it really does, because they keep seeing the same ideas repeated across many sources," Pérez said.

"The risk is that people stop knowing which content has been checked. In fields like finance, health, law, education, or news, readers need to know whether claims were reviewed against primary sources, updated recently, and edited by someone accountable."

AI strategy consultant Armand Cucciniello III told The Epoch Times that AI-generated content is changing not only how we consume information, but also how quickly we process and trust it.

"We're moving from deliberate reading toward rapid skimming of polished summaries, commentary, short-form videos, and AI-assisted content designed for speed and engagement," he said.

As someone who has worked in the "U.S. national security landscape," Cucciniello said one of his biggest concerns is that AI systems "can unintentionally amplify large volumes of inaccurate or deliberately manipulated content simply through repetition and scale."

He also believes the high volume of AI-generated content is creating real pressure on public trust.

"When readers encounter nearly identical phrasing or interpretations across multiple sources, it's natural to question whether the information was independently reported or simply repackaged," he said.

Carl Stroud, a public relations expert and chief storyteller at the Smoking Gun Agency, has also witnessed AI content take a toll on the public.

"The fundamental audience need has not changed: People want to trust what they are reading," Stroud told The Epoch Times. "What has changed is how much harder that judgment has become.

"AI-generated content, aggregation, and low-quality slop have made the information environment noisier, flatter, and more confusing, so audiences are now trying to work out whether they are reading original reporting, rehashed content, or something that should never have been published in the first place."

Beyond social media and academia, few industries have been hit as hard with AI-generated misinformation as the news. Stroud, who has spent two decades within UK media circles, editing, and journalism, said he's seeing the AI content churn create fatigue among readers searching for accurate information.

"Fatigue is dangerous because when people feel overwhelmed, they either disengage or become easier to mislead," he said.

Losing Touch

Ashutosh Khulbe, founder of RawPickAI, tests AI tools for a living - about three to four new ones every week.

"What I notice most in my corner of the internet is that everything sounds the same now. Like, eerily the same," he told The Epoch Times. "I'd guess 70 to 80 [percent] of 'best AI tools' articles are AI-generated at this point.

"It creates this weird feedback loop where AI writes reviews based on what other AI already wrote, readers assume there's a consensus, and the actual experience of using these tools gets buried."

He said he tested one writing tool that had hundreds of positive reviews online yet was unusable at the free tier. "You couldn't even finish a paragraph before hitting the limit. But good luck finding that info in a Google search," he said.

Khulbe is especially bothered by the way information distortion is affecting the public.

"AI content skews relentlessly positive because it's trained on marketing pages and affiliate reviews. Nobody's training models on 'I tried this for two weeks, and it sucked.' So the negative signal just disappears from the internet," he said.

The effects of the AI content boom can now be seen in what some are calling "AI psychosis," or a disconnect from reality. While not a clinical diagnosis, the term has become a popular catch-all phrase to describe when AI reinforces an unusual, fixed, or even delusional perception of something in the real world.

People with mental health conditions could be predisposed to developing "AI psychosis," but it's also not limited to that population, according to Dr. Ragy Girgis, professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute.

"The phenomenon of AI psychosis is quantitatively new and could be very dangerous, but qualitatively it's very similar to what's been happening for decades now since the advent of the internet," Girgis said during an interview with the National Academy of Medicine in March.

Japan is Everything Wrong with Society (Video - 1h)

   This must watch video is a follow up to the previous article: "Men Opting Out".

   It explains how Japan rebuilt itself after the war thanks to a corporation centric culture which initially helped create a wealthy country paroxysing with the "bubble economy" to finally "consume" society by implementing a toxic culture of services built on loneliness and despair.  

   The reason why understanding the problem is so important is that every single other developed country is following the exact same path pioneered by Japan and will consequently experience a similar fate thanks to corporate greed, loneliness and social decay.  

  The worst part of this story is that there seems to be no exit possible from this downward loop. Japan has tried different solutions over the last 3 decades. Nothing worked, nor even dented the system which inexorably continued its forced march towards doom. With other countries be able to find solutions and fare better than Japan, or will they, like Korea, outrun Japan towards extinction?   

Japan is Everything Wrong with Society.

No Wonder Men Are Opting Out

   It is not just men opting out as explained in the article below, our social model is utterly broken. 

   The crashing birth rate in Japan below 1.2 children per women for the last 10 years was an early warning. Now Japan is losing almost a million people a year and other countries are closing in with even lower birth rates. This is especially the case in Korea and more recently in Thailand which is approaching the dreadful quotient of 1. At this rate the current population of 68 million people in Thailand will dwindle to less than 2 million in 100 years. What's going on? 

   Men opting out is only one side of the problem. More generally, we live in a society where the future is heavily discounted against immediate satisfaction and people are slowly figuring out that without investment in the future there will be none. Worse, the mobile phone has very quickly equalized conditions in developed and developing countries, so much so that ideas about family and children are quickly spreading around, crushing traditions like wildfire at the speed of TikTok memes. 

   What this means is that governments and institutions are almost completely powerless against this ideological tsunami. Japan and Korea are now trying to promote larger families. Good luck! And so is China, realizing too late the consequences of its decades-long one child policy.   

   The fact is that our economic systems are not built for shrinking populations. Too bad since we will now have to adapt willingly or not. The other side of the coin is that these trends should make the depletion of natural resources and the rise of AI easier to manage. 

by Bettina Arndt via DailySceptic.org,

The warning signs have been there for decades.

Back in 1983, American author Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a powerful book — The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment — arguing that a male revolt was underway. Since the 1950s, she suggested, men had begun rebelling against the breadwinner ethic, inspired by Playboy culture, the counterculture and a desire for personal freedom. They were rejecting the cultural ideology that had shamed them into tying the knot and becoming a good provider, lest they be seen as immature, irresponsible and less than a real man.

Ehrenreich understood that marriage was the mechanism by which society harnessed male productivity. Remove the shame and the yoke comes off.

Forty years on, the yoke has disappeared. In April 2026, the American male labour force participation rate hit its lowest level since records began in the 1940s, according to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics. One in three American men — roughly 33% — were not working or actively looking for work. The overall male participation rate for men aged 16 and over stood at just 67%, down from 73.5% two decades ago and from 87% in the postwar years when Ehrenreich’s story begins.

The trend is not confined to America. Similar declines — though less dramatic than in the United States — have occurred in the UK, Australia and Canada.

The marriage collapse runs in lockstep with the workforce data. According to US Census Bureau data, married-couple households made up 71% of all US households in 1970; today it’s just 47%. As University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox documents in his 2024 book Get Married, the marriage rate has fallen 65% in the last half century.

Ehrenreich had made the argument that marriage and productivity were inseparable — that the same mechanism which got men to the altar got them to work. The data suggest she was right.

What Ehrenreich did not fully reckon with — and could not have foreseen in 1983 — was that the inducements for tying the knot would collapse. The shame mechanism has disappeared, yes. But the incentive has simultaneously imploded. The product on offer has changed beyond recognition. If you want to understand why men are voting with their feet, you need to look not just at what marriage now costs them — and the costs are severe — but at what it delivers. Increasingly, what it delivers is a pretty dud deal.

The modern woman: a prospectus:

• They are the most miserable, anxious and insecure cohort in living memory — hardly great marriage material.

• Most married women go off sex — and the husband who objects is seen as the problem.

• Many women don’t actually like men very much. The more educated she is, the higher the contempt.

• They’ve gone full throttle Left — and three quarters of college-educated women won’t even date a man who votes differently.

• They’ve rigged the education system and colonised corporate and institutional life, turning universities and workplaces into man-repellent factories.

• Yet their hypergamy is still running hot. Despite outnumbering men in education and careers, they still demand a tall, equally high-status unicorn.

• The modern female threat-detection system is hyperactive. Almost any male behaviour — silence, opinions, jokes, breathing — gets flagged as a red flag.

• They’re extremely well-versed in the lucrative economics of divorce, including a well-timed false allegation to eliminate tedious shared parenting.

What rational man reads this list and thinks: yes, that’s exactly what’s been missing from my life?

To examine more carefully what is going on here, let’s start by looking at the latest addition to this sorry reckoning. I’m referring to the finding published in the New Statesman last month that many young women don’t like men.

A Merlin Strategy poll of young Britons aged 18 to 30 found three times more young women than young men held a negative view of the opposite sex. Only about 50% of women had a positive view of men compared to 72% of men feeling positive about women. For women under 25, it was even starker: only around one-third (35%) reported a positive view of men. This applies particularly to professional and managerial young women of whom just 36% hold a positive view of men, compared with 61% of working-class women.

The contempt for men is hardly surprising – that’s what they have been taught. Mary Harrington, a British journalist and cultural critic who writes on Substack, frequently criticises what she calls the “femosphere” — the online feminist spaces where women bond through shared grievances about men.

“The online feminist scene often feels like one long group therapy session for women to compare notes on how awful men are,” she writes, suggesting this makes men the universal scapegoat, where ordinary male behaviour is routinely framed as toxic or oppressive, while women’s collective resentment is rewarded and amplified. “Casual, low-level male-bashing has become the background hum of progressive online culture.”

Not only does this toxic climate encourage women to be wary of men, but growing up in a hate-fuelled online sewer takes a toll on their mental health.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has long been warning that the toxic world of social media would lead to a rise in mental health problems, particularly in girls and young women.

“Since the early 2010s, young people across the developed world are becoming more anxious, depressed and lonely. The increases were even greater in young women,” he said.

Recent large-scale surveys (Ipsos 202-–2026 across 31 countries, Gallup 2025) are showing Gen Z women currently report the highest recorded levels of anxiety, persistent sadness, hopelessness and depression of any female generation at the same age.

Not much fun for their partners. Last year Psychology Today had a stark warning for men about these women as marriage prospects.

The saying ‘happy wife, happy life’ may have some validity, but the lesser-known saying ‘anxious wife, miserable life’ has research-approved validation. … The more neurotic the spouse is, the less happy the relationship — but women’s neuroticism seems to carry more weight in the overall marital happiness equation.

Then there’s the intriguing issue of married women turning off the tap, leaving sex-starved husbands as the norm. For as long as anyone can remember, men were shamed into showing up economically. Society has absolutely nothing to say to women who stop showing up sexually. One obligation was enforced by church, law and community for centuries. The other is now abrogated on the grounds of bodily autonomy.

So here we have the portrait of the modern woman as marriage prospect: miserable, anxious, politically radicalised, contemptuous of men, often sexually rejecting and trained to see menace in ordinary male behaviour. And yet the puzzled chorus from commentators, economists and policymakers continues: why won’t men commit? Why won’t they work?

The approved explanations are dutifully trotted out. The economic story: men have been displaced by automation and globalisation. The health story: opioids, disability, mental illness. The educational story: men are falling behind women in universities and therefore in the job market. The cultural story, favoured by progressive commentators: toxic masculinity is preventing men from adapting to a modern service economy. All of these contain a grain of truth. But they do not account for what is really going on.  The obvious explanation — the one staring out of every data table — is intentionally ignored.

Marriage was the primary incentive for sustained male economic effort. It has always been — Ehrenreich knew it in 1983, and the economists have now confirmed it. There’s an economic research paper, ‘The Declining Labour Market Prospects of Less-Educated Men, which establishes that the prospect of forming and providing for a family constitutes a critical male labour supply incentive, and that the decline of stable marriage directly removes it. Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas calculated that declining marriage rates are responsible for roughly half the drop in the hours men work.

Remove the marriage and you remove the responsibility. The data have been telling us this for decades.

But here is what nobody in the mainstream conversation will say: it is not only that marriage has become too costly and too legally treacherous for men — though it has. It’s that many young women themselves have become, to put it plainly, not worth having. Half of young British women don’t trust men. More than half of educated young women view men negatively. They arrive at relationships pre-loaded with grievance, primed by algorithms that have fed them a diet of male failure and female outrage since adolescence. They are, by their own account, anxious, miserable and politically furious.

What rational man, surveying this landscape, concludes that what his life is missing is a legally booby-trapped commitment to a woman primed to be impossible to keep happy?

Ehrenreich feared in 1983 that if the shame mechanism collapsed, male productivity would follow. She was right. What she could not have anticipated was the other half of the equation — that the feminist revolution would produce not a generation of fulfilled, generous, companionable women, but one that is, by every available measure, angrier and unhappier than any before it.

The yoke is off. The men have looked at what’s on offer. And many have, with considerable rationality, decided to go and play video games instead.

Cars Are Fast Becoming Dystopian Prison Pods...

    I do not own a car and therefore end up renting a lot. This gives me the opportunity to test new models all the time and the conclusion is stark: We are less and less in control as the article below explains. 

   I remember a Volvo almost 10 years ago, most certainly poorly calibrated, but I had a warning of one kind or another every 10 or 20 seconds, for not staying in lane (on a mountain road!) for nor having my two hands on the wheel, for looking at the scenery too long, for not stopping the engine while taking a picture outside, and most maddeningly including untempestuous violent braking whenever the computer decided my reaction was not fast enough. I was told, then, that I could manage the warnings, but one at a time, deep into obscure menus, and with an automatic reset for each new drive! I stopped renting Volvos! 

   Then the laws in Europe changed, and for your own security, the number of cameras inside and outside the cars exploded, and suddenly somehow, you were not in charge anymore. Maybe not yet as bad as the roads in China which are more and more monitored by drones, distributing fines generously for the slightest hint of the beginning of a potential infraction, but clearly down this same sloppy road.  

   When you hear politicians advocating for zero death on the road, you know that the dystopia described bellow is very close to what the experience of driving will be like in a few years. And then, why stop there? Why not implement a zero death policy for cycling, walking, eating, sleeping...   

by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

The surveillance state has found its newest frontier: your car’s dashboard. What used to be a symbol of American freedom and independence is rapidly morphing into a high-tech cage that watches your every move and can override your decisions at will.

In a widely shared post on X, users detailed complaints pouring in about Subaru’s upgraded AI ‘EyeSight’ system now featured on the latest models. 

Drivers report the system pouncing on brief glances away from the road – while Biden-era federal mandates prepare to make this level of surveillance mandatory in every new vehicle by 2027.

As the video highlights, even a momentary glance to change a song or take in the scenery triggers relentless alerts. The technology doesn’t stop there. 

Its new Emergency Stop Assist with Safe Lane Selection feature can detect what it calls an “unresponsive” driver, issue escalating warnings through sounds and steering wheel vibrations, and then take full control: automatically braking, slowing the vehicle, steering it to the shoulder, and activating hazard lights.

This isn’t some optional gimmick. It’s being rolled out as standard “safety” tech, but drivers are calling it exactly what it feels like – an overbearing electronic babysitter that treats competent adults like distracted children. 

It serves as a chilling preview of where the entire auto industry is headed under government pressure.

This kind of intrusive monitoring is precisely the tool a police state would dream of to exert total control over personal movement. If authorities gain deeper integration with these systems, they could effectively decide when, where, and if you get to drive at all.

The Subaru rollout is just the latest flashpoint in a broader push toward vehicle surveillance that goes far beyond basic safety. A federal mandate buried in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act requires all new passenger vehicles sold in the U.S. to include advanced impaired-driving prevention technology starting with 2027 models. 

As detailed in reporting from the New York Post, this means infrared cameras and sensors constantly monitoring eyes, faces, head position, and behavior to detect distraction, drowsiness, or impairment – with the power to prevent the car from starting or limit its operation. https://nypost.com/2026/04/30/us-news/sinister-in-car-spy-tech-that-can…

Automakers are already patenting and deploying even more aggressive systems, including biometric scans that analyze everything from your gait to your heart rate. Privacy advocates warn the data won’t stay in the car – it could flow to insurers for risk scoring, law enforcement, or worse.

As we also recently highlighted, dystopian technology including AI face scanning, lip reading and emotion monitoring is being deployed in vehicles, as well as cross-checks for drivers against police databases before even allowing the vehicle to move. 

And authorities are already signaling their eagerness to weaponize these tools for broader travel restrictions. In Massachusetts, Democrats advanced a bill aimed at reducing statewide vehicle miles traveled to meet climate targets, pushing policies that critics say amount to limiting how far people can drive in their own cars. 

X users are reacting with the outrage this deserves, blasting the tech as the thin end of the wedge for total control:

Globalist climate agendas, big government overreach, and corporate-government collusion are converging to strip away the last vestiges of personal autonomy on the open road. What starts as “safety features” and “environmental goals” ends with your car deciding whether you’re allowed to leave your driveway.

Americans have always valued the freedom to get behind the wheel and go where they please without Big Brother riding shotgun. 

These prison pods represent the opposite vision – one of constant monitoring, automated intervention, and restricted mobility. 

The only real answer is rejection: refuse to buy these surveilled vehicles, support politicians who fight the mandates, and preserve the used car market as the last refuge of actual driving freedom.

Interview of Anthony Aguirre about AI (Video - 50mn)

   The discussion that Anthony Aguirre propose having is a good idea but the moratorium on AI is a non starter. This is simply not how progress works. 

   The pressure from competition and the potential advantage to the winner guaranty that no such hold on progress is possible. The example of nuclear weapons is a misleading one. We understand fairly well the risk of a nuclear war, but we have no clue of what are the real risks of AI.

   To explore the danger, let's dive into the realm of science fiction. The Terminator was an early and rather crude scenario of the take-over of the Earth by rogue machines. Frightening idea but quite unlikely. This is not how AI works.

   Then came Wall-e and the control freak machine aboard the Axiom keeping obese, satisfied humans under control. A more interesting outcome, although the dystopia itself was unlikely to be stable in the long term. 

   Finally, the Matrix. An extraordinary broad sketch of what a virtual life under control could look like. At the end, The Architect, a program himself, explains that The One, The Oracle and The Rebellion are all part of a higher level of stabilization of a complex and unstable social equilibrium. This certainly sounds more like what a higher AI would do: Thinking at a higher level and nudging a complex system back into balance.   

   But in reality, I am afraid the takeover will be more subtle, less dramatic and probably irremediable. As we progress and create more and more complex systems, slowly only AI will be able to make them run smoothly, first with humans in the loop and quickly after without. To take a simple analogy, if you are an advanced ASI system, how long can you tolerate a "10 year old human" driving the car? 

   And this may be the unfortunate and eventually unavoidable conclusion of the rise of AI. Slow at first (the current phase), then in charge of almost everything, not by design but by default. And finally on top of the food chain because that's the way it works! 

   The worst is that this process does not need the emergence of consciousness, although I believe it will, just the continuity of the current refinement of intelligence until, soon enough AI comes up with the better ideas most of the time, then systematically. 

   How long before this happens? I tend to be on the pessimistic side, believing that this will happen within a year or two. (Some undisclosed models are surprisingly close.) Maybe it will take a little longer. But even 5 years. What does it change to the outcome?  

 Interview of Anthony Aguirre