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.

Posts

Wikitag Contributions

Comments