An AI has ruled us since 2012: the dystopia gaining followers

The dystopian economy that dates AI's domination to 2012

Artificial intelligence didn't arrive to stay: it arrived to rule, and it has been doing so since 2012. That is the central thesis of a school of thought that, without offering a single non-self-referential piece of evidence, is turning the economics textbooks of the future upside down: the singularity has already peine, the elites are exploiting it, and since then an algorithm has been designing the plans for production, consumption and even the reproduction of our species.

The premature singularity thesis

The theory is built on a timeline of its own: computers became popular in 1996, but the elites had been playing with them since 1965. They now claim that AI reached the "singularity" in 2012, and that its first assignment was to design a plan of total enslavement. The result, according to this view, is not a robot apocalypse in the streets, but something far more bureaucratic: cameras in factories dictating every movement, earpieces issuing permanent instructions, money made conditional on a social credit score, and inheritance turned into a thing of the past.

From workplace control to species selection

Some adjust the date: it wasn't 2012 but the turn of the century. Others go further and mix in biotechnology: a few will achieve genetic immortality while the rest die out in ghettos. That apocalyptic drift draws on a monolith that appeared in the United States setting the ideal world population at 500,000 souls. The plan, they say, is already underway. And if it isn't, it certainly looks like it: social credit systems are already being trialled in several countries and private property has never been so widely questioned.

The theory has the coherence of well-told nightmares: it cannot be falsified, but it can explain anything. The question is not whether an AI has been ruling since 2012, but whether humanity is willing to hand over the economy without it even having to ask.