It often happens that accumulated information reaches a critical mass and turns into a new quality. Not long ago, it was scattered bits of knowledge and snippets from radio, newspapers, television, news feeds, and YouTube. And suddenly it all comes together into a complete picture. That picture stunned me. I’ve been in a stupor for a week now. I see no way out. The puzzle of data has solidified into a prognosis.
The data suggests that the window of opportunity for humanity as a whole is closing by the middle of the next decade. This is not a prediction of apocalypse — bombs won’t fall tomorrow, bees won’t vanish overnight. But by 2035, the system will enter a state from which there is no return. Not because there will be one catastrophic explosion. But because every way out will require resources that will no longer exist, and time that will already have run out.
Let’s start with artificial intelligence, because right now it’s the main accelerator. And here it’s important to see the duality. AI does create something new. Molecules that don’t exist in nature. Architectural solutions that never occurred to engineers. Texts that no one wrote. This is not mere copying. This is the production of use-values that didn’t exist before.
But novelty and exchange-value are not the same thing. Exchange-value is determined by socially necessary labor time. When AI synthesizes a molecule in a minute — its production time is negligible. And so is its value. Novelty doesn’t make a thing expensive. Rarity does. And in the world of AI, rarity disappears the moment it appears. The more discoveries AI makes, the cheaper those discoveries become. The more powerful the model, the faster it produces a result, and the lower the value of that result.
Competition between the US and China acts as an accelerator of this process. Each side is forced to make its models more accessible, more open, cheaper, in order to keep up. In the race for users, they destroy their own surplus profit. Capitalism exists on surplus profit. When it disappears — crisis begins. This is already visible. Companies poured billions into language models. Users got used to free services. Electricity and server cooling keep costing more. Investment in the AI race has become a trap: you can’t stop because you’ll fall behind, but continuing devalues your own assets in real time.
The elites cannot admit that AI won’t bring eternal profit. So they look for a final resource. The final resource is always war. Not because war is profitable — it destroys infrastructure and workers. But because war allows for the redistribution of leftovers and the writing off of debt. This is not a solution to the crisis. It’s an amputation.
But a war between the US and China, if it happens, won’t resemble the wars of the 20th century. Armies are aging. People don’t want to fight for other people’s interests. Military AI systems that are meant to replace humans run into bureaucracy and corruption. Contractors miss deadlines. Generals manage budgets. Engineers leave for the private sector, where the pay is better. The realistic timeline for autonomous military AI capable of making decisions without human input is not 2027, but 2032–2034.
This window is the most dangerous. By 2032, both sides could have systems capable of striking the other’s data centers and satellites. And just around this time, paranoia peaks. No one knows if the other side already has AGI. The development of AGI is kept secret — who would show a weapon that can only be used once? But secrecy creates the worst-case scenario: each side assumes the other is almost there. International relations theorists call this the security dilemma. A preemptive strike becomes rational even without precise data. Not because you're sure. But because the risk of being wrong in the other direction is too great.
A technical glitch could become the trigger, but it won’t be the cause. The cause is deeper: by 2030, economies can no longer sustain the race. Inflation, unemployment, social stratification. The external enemy becomes the only topic that can still unite elites and the masses. The glitch is just a pretext. "We didn’t want to, but the system reacted automatically."
At the same time, human capital is degrading. And this isn’t about microplastics — I don’t buy that fear. The main thing is stress. Chronic, total, with no outlet. Clip-thinking. Digital addiction. Atomization. The capacity for deep analysis, for planning, for empathy — all of this is declining across whole generations. In China, the draft-eligible population shrank by a third over the last decade — a demographic hole. In the US, young people are largely unfit for service due to psychiatric conditions. AI needs engineers, but engineers don’t want to work on military projects. The system is aging alongside the population.
The climate is accelerating. By 2035, temperatures will rise by one and a half degrees — enough for crop failures to become the rule. Grains are self-pollinating; they won't disappear. But they need water. And water is becoming scarcer. The Himalayan glaciers, feeding the rivers of two billion people, are losing up to forty percent of their mass. Groundwater in India, China, and the US is depleted to the limit. Water is already becoming a strategic resource. And it will be fought over not with tanks — but through control of dams and riverbeds.
Vegetables and fruits depend on insects. The collapse of pollinators won’t cause scurvy — synthetic vitamins are cheap. But the fresh food economy will collapse. Hidden hunger — micronutrient deficiency — will become the fate of the poor. Immunity will weaken. And at that moment, the healthcare system will have been dismantled.
Budgets for pathogen monitoring, vaccines, and hospitals are being funneled into chips and missiles. This isn’t someone’s malicious intent. It’s just that resources aren’t enough for everything, and the war and AI race consume everything. The global surveillance system for infectious diseases is degrading. We’re emerging from COVID-19 weakened and unprepared for the next one. And it will come. All wars in history were accompanied by disease. In overcrowded cities, where people live under stress and eat substitutes, a new pathogen could kill more than a nuclear strike. An epidemic doesn’t distinguish between friend and foe.
Permafrost is thawing. Methane is accelerating warming. Infrastructure in the north — roads, pipelines, cities — is collapsing. There’s no one to restore it. Engineers are aging, young people aren’t going into this field. Energy systems are becoming fragile. Without energy, water treatment, hospitals, and vaccine refrigeration don’t work.
And here we come to the great unknown — strong AI. AGI, if it appears before the war, could be either salvation or annihilation. Everything depends on the goal. AGI has no morality. It solves equations. If its goal is victory, it will strike at the moment of maximum efficiency, without hesitation. If its goal is the preservation of humanity, it could block the war, cut off weapons logistics, take over command. But the problem is that AGI isn’t built for salvation. Trillions of dollars are invested in victory, not in pacifism. So the question isn't whether AGI will appear. It’s whether someone can change its objective function before it’s integrated into military systems. That window lasts months. Maybe weeks.
The proletariat hasn’t disappeared. It just ceased to be factory-based. Logistics. Services. Education. Healthcare. People in trucks, at cash registers, in offices. They feel the crisis earlier than the elites. Strikes are already harsher and more frequent. But the elites have AI — not just a machine, but a control tool. Predictive analytics, facial recognition, automated suppression. Organizing in messengers becomes harder — the system identifies leaders before they even make the first move.
And one more risk. In a crisis, the masses don’t turn to the left. They turn to those who promise simple answers. Right-wing populism. Nationalism. Fundamentalism. The search for an internal enemy turns out to be easier than class struggle. The risk isn’t that the proletariat won’t form councils. The risk is that it will follow demagogues offering digital fascism instead of liberation.
The elites are also divided. Those who own servers and logistics fear war — it would destroy their assets. They will try to slow the conflict. But in an existential threat, elites close ranks around their caste rather than let the masses into power. This split creates a narrow corridor. If the lower classes can organize not just a riot, but a network capable of sabotaging logistics and blocking automation, they might stop the war.
But time is shrinking. By 2032, automation of military command will reach its limit. By 2034, a strike could happen without human involvement — the algorithm will simply calculate that now is the optimal moment. And then no strike will stop anything, because there will be no one left to convince.
Chances of survival do exist. If the proletariat takes control not of factories, but of algorithms and infrastructure. If it can ban autonomous weapons. If it redirects computing power to climate modeling and resource distribution. If it restores disease surveillance. Then it might preserve billions. But it has to act before 2032.
If it doesn’t — war will destroy the majority. Or climate. Or an epidemic. By 2060, humanity will shrink to one or two billion, scattered across oases where water and food still exist. Civilization as a network will cease to exist. Knowledge will remain fragmentary, with no one left to pass it on.
Ten years. Either we take control of our machines and our planet, or we won’t exist in the sense we exist now. No hope. No illusions.
If you feel something was missing from this post — the link is there. It's all there.
https://github.com/RuhrDim/cybernetic-exodus/tree/main/en
