Rambling thoughts: the internet is a terrible place

The modern day iteration of the internet sucks.

We already knew that too much TV rots the brain.

Then we replaced the TV with computers and the internet.

Then we replaced the computers and the internet with internet in our pockets.

Then we made social media that was focused internet in our pockets that locked us into specific echo chambers.

Then we created the next generation of even shorter attention span internet resulting in children only ever scrolling through 10 second long video posts all day.

Assuming that every invention down this line ended up being 2x worse for the brain than the one before it we now have technology that is rotting our brains 16 times worse than the TV ever did, and it is given to children since the age of 3 or 4 in the developed world, and since the time children are teenagers in the developing world.

16 times the power of making children grow up stupid and we are wondering why developed societies stopped getting smarter as fast as the previous century. It is a miracle that society today is even able to remain stagnant in terms of capabilities today, which is also only possible due to the constant influx of competent workers from the developing world.

There is also another irony in the population demographics of the developed world. All the smartest people appear to be dying out at far faster rates than the dumber people. Most of them unable of unwilling to have more than one child if any at all. It is only the poorest of a community, those who aren't actually capable of having enough intelligence to develop society any further, that are reproducing at the highest rates across the world.

Human civilization and the human species has pushed itself into an intelligence blackhole where only the dumbest are successfully reproducing or coming the closest to successfully reproducing, meaning that the only way for society to survive is for the dumbest populations to be less dumb than the dumbest populations in the previous generation.

The future quality of a society is thus not dependent on the quality of the average citizen, but on the quality of the bottom 10% of its citizens.

Which suggests that the developed western world is meant to fall back to 80 IQ if it weren't for the fact that there is a constant and consistent effort to make people smarter over time.

Society has pretty much split into two distributions, the high intelligence group that runs everything, and the low intelligence group that provides the consumer base. The high intelligence group dies out after providing high levels of intellectual input to society, and the low intelligence group then catches up over the course of 3-5 generations.

As of now the global population numbers around 8 billion humans. It is expected by now that we may not even cross 9 billion humans at the end. Of these 800-900 million humans are helping build society up further, meanwhile the bottom 800-900 million humans will occupy that future in a fully globalized system.

The primary environmental adaptation challenge for humans today exists in the form of being able to survive social media and rise above it. As of now, the average social media user ( 63.7% of the world uses social media ) spends more than 140 minutes per day on social media. This means spread across the entire species, humanity is spending more than 1 hour per day on social media every single day across the planet.

1 hour spent on doing things that cause 16x the brain rot that television does.

It is recommended by experts that adults should spend less than two hours a day on their screens outside of work.

As of now we are watching entire nation states stagnate but the species as a whole is still on the rise, because when the average time spent getting brain rotted is spread across the species, humanity is still able to consistently spend less than two hours a day on social media.

If companies like facebook and Sony were actually able to hook people fully into VR and the metaverse, to the same degree as social media usage today, then it would probably be the collapse of human innovation, as humans would be spending more time getting brain rotted on average than they are capable of surviving. Which is to say, humanity is not capable of surviving another 2 - 3 more generations of social media evolution. The algorithms are simply too good at taking away the attention span and survival and prosperity interests of humans away and redirect them towards clicking more buttons and staying glued to the screen. I know, because I too was a victim of it.

There is a reason why after a certain level of addictiveness of a substance it goes from being a bad decision making problem to being a victim of addiction problem. Social media is almost at the cusp of reaching that point in another 20-30 years for the entire species, and has already reached that point in the case of individual nation states, including the developed world.

China is the only major world power who has tried to do something actively about it, but China itself suffers from other issues which means instead of getting destroyed by social media, they would get destroyed by other internal issues.

Even the US is not capable of surviving the waves of social media evolution as can be seen by the explosion of extreme ideologies and social movements that are resulting in taking focus away from a good education and getting a job.

Humans rose above death by nature to only slam into the wall of death by technological evolution and humans not being able to keep up their mental defenses any longer.

It is only a matter of time until humans die out by their hundreds of millions to billions due to meme viruses that take their minds away from living their own lives and valuing their own lives enough to do something to improve them.

The only way to survive is to become more boring and uninteresting than the average person. To focus on distancing oneself from the techno-social black hole, where our experiences on the web and our interactions on the web are considered as real as actual lived experiences.

Even the quality of media and creations by multi billion dollar companies appear to be falling in quality and capability this decade. There is simply no more space left for humanity to be consuming anymore data slop without falling in on itself. Even entertainment systems have begun to noticeably stagnate.

Only the Eastern creators have been able to delay this effect due to their artists and creators continuing to work well into their 50s and 60s till they drop dead, delaying the quality decline in the global content creation machine. Even that will come to an end by the time this generation is complete.

The zoomer generation is really the last opportunity for competency decline in humans to be stopped after which we are going to get screwed for the next few hundred years until a new civilization springs up better than any other civilizations that sprang up before it.

America is at risk of becoming a failed system simply due to its inability to stop its citizens from getting dumber over time. in terms of the quality of product that they can produce. At current rates of drop in average quality of global immigrants, the increasing dependency on them over time, and the stagnation of national intelligence in comparison to the previous century, we can expect the US civilization and hegemony system to begin failing by the 2050s in very noticeable and powerful ways.

The growth of the 20th century was based on burning through the intelligentsia of the world and we are finally reaching the point where we reap what we sow. With all the intelligentsia who worked 12-16 hour days to move humanity forward or to increase profits dying out without leaving any progeny behind.

Today, there are barely enough humans left of the desired competence to be able to keep up with the cutting edge in the sciences, with most of the heavy lifting having to be shifted to AI algorithms and systems, hoping that their rapid evolution would continue without slowing down and allow for human civilization to be able to make up for the losses in the quality of intelligence and capabilities of the average human.

We are reaching that point where either AI will be able to replace the best of humanity and take us further, or we will stagnate entirely and be stuck at the limits of human capabilities as there are no more low lever fruit to be plucked in terms of easy gains.

The US, Europe, South America, Oceania, and Asia have all already been strongly connected to global trade systems. Even with Africa being added in it would at best result in a 20-30% addition to the world GDP in addition to annual gains already made over time.

Our species is simply not in a position to grow at the rates that we did in the 20th century, and likely isn't in a position to even grow at rates that it did in the first two decades of the 21st century. We have reached the point of diminishing returns of globalization, human research investment, and immigration, and the final piece remaining is technological innovation, where only the top 5-10 nation states across the world are able to keep up to any degree.

Simply put, Japan, South Korea, China, USA, Germany, Singapore, UK, Switzerland, Taiwan, United Kingdom, and India are the only places moving the species forward beyond its current peak anymore.

Of these Japan, and United Kingdom are already noticeably stagnating and falling behind, with South Korea, China, and Germany expected to join them within the decade.

Even the last sector of human development, technological innovation is reaching its limits, putting all of its points into medical innovations, automation, and AI. Medical innovations remain slow to move due to the amount of bureaucratic red tape ( Not necessarily a bad thing ) around new medical developments put into the market. In this manner medical innovation cannot grow the economy but add to it slowly over time.

Automation has continued to reduce the number of workers required in a factory to run things, and is going to continue at its current pace which has already crossed more than 150 robots per 10,000 workers in the manufacturing industry globally.

South Korea has already reached the point of more than 1000 robots per 10,000 workers in the manufacturing industry which gives us an upper limit for how much growth can take place. South Korea's robot density also continues to increase at an approximate rate of 50 robots per year and may be able to make up for the loss of workforce over time due to aging population and lack of new replacement population.

AI has shown the most resilient growth in current year and is expected to be what leads humanity into the next generation of growth and innovation, becoming the most important industry of all time and the backbone of all of society in the future, similar to how the internet became the backbone of the world over time, followed by the smartphone.

Conclusion:

Humans are at risk of global population intelligence falling into decline within 10-30 years if social media evolves further to take away the attention of humans from other endeavors. Humanity's future does not depend on the intelligence of the top 10% but the bottom 10% as the bottom 10% are the ones who reproduce the most. If and when the US fails, we will be in another dark age that lasts for centuries until an even more advanced civilization emerges and replaces the US. Economic growth is in a state of global diminishing returns and global GDP growth will only keep slowing down over time. The world is no longer improving meaningfully because of investment into human research, globalization, and immigration, and now the growth of the top societies relies upon automation and artificial intelligence to continue to grow. If these endeavors fail then the peak of the species has been reached. If they succeed then humanity can keep growing for another 30 years. Only the top 5 nation states in terms of technological capabilities and innovation are going to remain relevant for the future of the species.

Writing IQ : 111 ( above average )

Writing gender : 75% Male

Voice level : 151 Hz ( Voicecel )