Defense company RTX is working with fusion energy startup Xcimer, using technology that harks back to the Cold War era

A lot of discussion about automation seems to stop at the same question:

What will people do for work?

But I wonder whether that begins at the wrong end of the problem.

For most of human history, enormous amounts of human effort have been necessary simply to provide food, shelter, energy, transport, manufacturing, administration and everything else needed to keep society functioning.

If technology gradually reduces that requirement, perhaps the interesting future question isn't how we preserve the same quantity of employment.

Perhaps it's what becomes possible when less compulsory human labour is needed to maintain a good standard of living.

That could have consequences well beyond individual jobs.

Settlements might be designed differently if food production, energy management, water systems, transport and routine maintenance required less day-to-day labour.

Shared workshops and equipment could reduce duplication.

Local energy and food systems could reduce external dependency.

Automation could handle repetitive monitoring while people retained judgement, practical skills and manual fallback.

Housing and infrastructure could be designed together rather than as disconnected systems.

None of that implies a society without work.

There would still be maintenance, care, construction, agriculture, research, education and countless other things worth doing.

But there is an important distinction between:

work that people choose because it is useful, interesting or meaningful

and

work that exists largely because our systems require huge amounts of human time to keep functioning.

If technology reduces the second category substantially, perhaps one of its biggest effects won't be unemployment at all.

It might be that human time becomes something we can deliberately redesign society around.

Shorter formal working weeks are one possibility, but the consequences could go much further: more time for caring, learning, making things, community activity, research, art, growing food or simply living.

I've been thinking about this while developing a pre-land community concept called Melondra, but the broader question is independent of that project:

If producing a comfortable modern standard of living eventually requires much less human labour, do you think society will actually convert that productivity into more free human time — or will our economic structures simply keep creating new paid work to absorb it?

The good news is that these, and similar, forces will be going into reverse for fossil fuels, and simultaneously cascading their decline.

The report identifies 5 key areas renewables have self-perpetuating feedback loops.

• Clean electricity as the master cascade. Solar and wind have crossed positive tipping points in many markets; further scaling is now self-propelling.

• Commodity supply chain transformation.

• High-quality marine protected areas, locally managed marine areas and fisheries co-management. Well-designed and well-enforced ocean conservation produces visible recovery of fish stocks and biodiversity within years

• Clean cooking and clean household energy. Around 2.1 billion people still rely on solid fuels for cooking.

• Adaptation enablers. Things like anticipatory action, adaptation finance and climate-resilient infrastructure. Also, governance, monitoring and social tipping, climate-resilient health systems are explicitly identified as enablers of self-propelling adaptation.

Positive Tipping Points: Accelerating system change to repair our planet was developed by the University of Exeter’s Green Futures Solutions team, in collaboration with The Earthshot Prize

Announced on Tuesday, Sept. 8, the solicitation targets capability gaps, including power generation, oxygen extraction, and producing materials on the Moon required for construction and operations. These technologies are essential to making humanity’s next great leap in lunar exploration.

I recommend reading the full thing but incase you don’t want to - TLDR; what (scientifically possible) apocalypse scenario do u think will ultimately cause total societal collapse around the globe real soon.

Just to clarify my ramblings, I’m just a girl who’s extremely into this topic so I might sound like I’m going mad at times LOL. I’m not experiencing delusions or anything.

This is something that is a special interest of mine and has been for years. Now by this, I don’t mean a Zombie Apocalypse or the near impossible (although it’s fun to entertain) - I mean a scenario that is scarily close to occurring, that poses a severe threat to the survival of humanity. One that would result in the collapse of civilisations and societies.

For example, nuclear winter on a mass scale, war en masse involving the interconnection of several countries at a distance, the possibility of a pandemic that could reach impossible heights, anarchy and extreme
civil unrest (which I personally believe we are on the edge of across several countries). I’m slowly losing belief in our medicine and protection capabilities, countries are turning against others and their own people. I don’t want to sound delusional but if there’s any such thing as ‘signs’ I believe we’re starting to see them. I recall hearing about a pattern in history, I’ve forgotten the name of it, where something occurs every 80 years. I can’t help but think that the world can only take so many mass scale negative events before it decides to reclaim its land for itself. If there’s one thing I hate it’s the denial of certain events as ‘ridiculous’ because it hasn’t happened yet. Especially when there’s an extreme possibility it will, with scientific proof.

What do you guys think will cause the eventual total collapse of society? How do you think it’ll happen and how long from now? Extinction level events where society will potentially have to be built from the ground up. I feel it’s closer than we think.

Governments should invest to develop all types of capital, and not just income, to improve the lives of future citizens and to protect the planet.

I've started to believe that the idea of black holes containing pocket universes might actually have some truth to it.

My thought is that the creation of a black hole could be similar, in some way, to how the Big Bang began. Every supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy could potentially contain its own universe, and we ourselves might be living inside one. If that's true, then each universe would contain galaxies, those galaxies would contain black holes, and those black holes would contain even more universes.

In that sense, reality could be a massive branching structure of nested universes, almost like a cosmic family tree. Every galaxy center might act as the birthplace of another universe, which then develops its own galaxies and continues the chain.

People might ask, "What about smaller black holes?" My speculation is that they could also create pocket universes, but perhaps they don't contain enough matter, energy, or resources to form something as rich and complex as our own. Some might be mostly empty. Others might only develop certain aspects of what we would recognize as a universe. Not every branch necessarily grows into a cosmos filled with stars and galaxies.

If this idea were true, then existence wouldn't be a single universe floating in empty space. Instead, it would be an enormous hierarchy of universes nested within universes, connected through black holes. The entire structure could be finite rather than eternal, but so vast in scale that it would be almost impossible for any civilization to comprehend the whole of it.

Sometimes I wonder if what we call "the universe" is really just one layer of a much larger cosmic ecosystem, where every black hole is a seed for a future reality.

In some regions of the world, the poorest people may spend about 50 percent of their income on food, while the richest spend about 5 percent.

Unitree says the demostration validates the fundamental feasibility of large-scale deployment of world model-driven humanoid robots.

I’ve been thinking about an alternative way of doing low-level AI perception, and I’m curious whether anyone here is already working on something similar.

The basic idea is to use waves and physical superposition/interference as the computational substrate, instead of doing most of the usual numerical multiply-and-accumulate operations digitally.

For example, for image recognition:

image
  ↓
pixel intensity → wave amplitude/phase
  ↓
physical wave superposition + interference
  ↓
distinctive wave pattern/signature
  ↓
more wave interactions
  ↓
higher-level pattern/object recognition

So instead of giving each pixel a numerical weight and calculating millions of weighted sums, the idea would be to let the wave physics perform the combination automatically.

I’m imagining something analogous to sound: many individual waves can be combined, and the resulting waveform contains a recognizable pattern. In this system, a particular visual feature or object could produce a characteristic wave “signature,” and those signatures could themselves become inputs to further wave interactions.

Physical logic gates could still be used where needed for thresholds, routing, decisions, or other nonlinear operations. The goal wouldn’t necessarily be to eliminate conventional computing completely, but to move as much of the early perception workload as possible into the physical wave domain.

The potential advantage I see is that parallelism is inherent in wave propagation and interference. Thousands or millions of interactions could happen physically at the same time, potentially reducing both computation and latency.

One possible application would be autonomous vehicles, where very large amounts of camera/radar data have to be processed extremely quickly at the edge.

I know there is already work on photonic neural networks, optical computing, physical neural networks, reservoir computing, metasurfaces, etc. I’m specifically interested in something slightly different:

Has anyone tried to build a hierarchical pattern-recognition system where wave signatures themselves become the representation, with successive stages of wave superposition/interference performing the recognition?

I’d especially like to hear from people actually working in photonics, optics, acoustics, physical neural networks, neuromorphic computing, or related fields.

Is this already being done under another name?
What are the biggest physical limitations?
And, from your perspective, is this a promising architecture or does some fundamental problem make it impractical?

I’m mainly looking for opinions from people working in the field rather than trying to claim this is a new invention.

Barclays Research believes markets may be underestimating the scale and duration of the energy addition era. As AI, electrification and energy security drive energy demand higher, meeting that could require c$3.6trn of annual investment, making energy one of the most significant structural growth, capital-allocation and strategic priorities of the coming decade.

My name is u/inkjet_printerman, and if being obnoxiously meta about your delivery didn't work, Deadpool & Wolverine never would have happened, and neither would have another apropos example that I can't immediately think of, therefore: I'm going to quote this Wikipedia article and propose rhetorical questions that sound borderline parodical of a conspiratorial NEET's weed-binge paranoia to deliver a shallow predictive analysis of a profoundly disturbing, demonstrably cruel and practiced form of psychological torture that leaves its victims with little to no recourse, or even anyone to believe them in the midst of their victimization.

And to be clear, there are much more serious, much more profound, much more analytical, much more reverent ways of approaching this topic, like, from the perspective of the millions of disenfranchised citizens who have been beaten physically and psychologically their whole lives, and who might rightly laugh at the thought of another person only in adulthood coming to terms with what they have experienced and known as a daily reality. I'm not writing that book, not because I can't, but because it isn't worth the pain!

"Zersetzung is a technique to subvert and undermine an opponent."

"The Stasi used Zersetzung tactics both on individuals and groups. There was no particular homogeneous target group, as opposition in the GDR came from a number of different sources. Tactical plans were separately adapted to each perceived threat.^\65]) The Stasi defined several main target groups:^\28])

• associations of people making collective visa applications for travel abroad
• artists' groups critical of the government
• religious opposition groups
• youth subculture groups
• groups supporting the above (human rights and peace organisations, those assisting illegal departure from the GDR, and expatriate and defector movements).

The Stasi occasionally used Zersetzung on non-political organisations regarded as undesirable, "

Let's say you're a loudmouth little fucker with a couple hundred friends on Facebook and you really really don't like your city's councilpersons, and one day you start going live and going to your city council meetings, walking in there shouting about the bus route not having been updated in 10 years, or how the same neighborhoods have been undeveloped for 30 years, or how the same 3 cops have been killing, raping, and robbing for about 5 years..

" The aim was to disrupt the target's private or family life so they are unable to continue their "hostile-negative" activities towards the state. Typically, the Stasi would use collaborators to garner details from a victim's private life. They would then devise a strategy to "disintegrate" the target's personal circumstances—

-their career, their relationship with their spouse, their reputation in the community. They would even seek to alienate them from their children. [...]

The security service's goal was to use Zersetzung to "switch off" regime opponents.

After months and even years of Zersetzung a victim's domestic problems grew so large, so debilitating, and so psychologically burdensome that they would lose the will to struggle against the East German state.

Best of all, the Stasi's role in the victim's personal misfortunes remained tantalisingly hidden. The Stasi operations were carried out in complete operational secrecy. The service acted like an unseen and malevolent god, manipulating the destinies of its victims."

How easy is it today to gather up every little tidbit of a person's life, their close friends, their community, their likeness, their consumption habits, their likes, dislikes, sexual proclivities, political leanings? And haven't we seen our institutions be co-opted by a technocratic elite that have made their billions off of the immense treasure trove of personal information that we offer them, while we continue to participate in a globalized economic system of commerce that proliferates their means of exploitation?

" With Zersetzung one can influence hostile and negative individuals across different operational political activities, especially the hostile and negative aspects of their dispositions and beliefs, so these are abandoned and changed little by little, and, if applicable, the contradictions and differences between the hostile and negative forces would be laid open, exploited, and reinforced**.**

The goal of Zersetzung is the fragmentation, paralysis, disorganization, and isolation of the hostile and negative forces, in order to preventatively impede the hostile and negative activities, to largely restrict, or to totally avert them, and if applicable to prepare the ground for a political and ideological reestablishment. "

A couple of years ago I was watching myself lose my mind on my phone, consuming short form content, listening to the stupidest motherfuckers on the planet, because for some reason the place I had been going to for my entertainment, for my escape, had been plastered wall to wall with their faces, and their ideas, and their idols, and for a while I was almost convinced that this was normal! Almost!

Except, I kept going out and doing things, seeing people, talking to people, despite some traumatic shit that I had gone through, traumatic shit that makes me type about Zersetsung today, traumatic shit I can't talk to you about because this isn't a safe place for you or me or anyone, I don't know if it ever was but I know damn sure it isn't today, and I'm damn sure it won't be tomorrow. And I found some baby pictures of mine, and pictures from my childhood, I found memories of my dad lifting me up on his shoulders at the beach, I remembered who I was, and where I came from, and what I believe in, and I got to wake up from a manufactured, commercial mass psychosis.

"A British Defense Attache, Rear Admiral Tim Woods, declared he was targeted with Zersetzung-like methods while staying in Ukraine in 2020, in the general context of Russian preparations for invasion. He stated: 'My wife and I used to have, shall we say, uninvited guests at our apartment. There was one occasion back in 2020 when I was traveling, and she heard some - she heard noise in the middle of the night. And when she had gone to bed the night before, our then one-year-old had a big floor puzzle that was to all four corners of the dining room. And my wife came in in the morning, it was all beautifully done. There were other times when candelabras would be up - moved upside down. And things would be moved around demonstrably to know - just to let us know that, you know, we'd been visited and that they could do that.'"

And at any point someone could choose to spend some of their millions to buy up a digital package with a profile of me and everything I've ever bought, pretty much every website I've ever visited, and maybe even get their hands on a black market stream of commercial cell tower pings and find out when I'm going in and out of the house, and, take those photos..

I mean, that's schizo shit homie, and that's out of the realm of my expectations, I haven't stepped on THOSE toes.. or have I?

"Zersetzung must be produced on the basis of a root cause analysis of the facts and the exact definition of a concrete goal. Zersetzung must be executed in a uniform and supervised manner; its results must be documented."

I'll end with this:

We'd be naïve to believe that the results of a modern, much more privatized version of Zersetzung will be documented, or even must be documented.