Consider that the global community is in a vicious cycle driven by three converging factors:

• Labor Decoupling: AI and Automation are reducing the elites' need for human labor.
• Security Decoupling: Drones and Surveillance are reducing the elites' need for human consent.
• A competitivist environment which creates a race condition, accelerating this decoupling.

Applied Game Theory Research

• Selectorate Theory (Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, NYU Professor of PoliSci)
  • Logic of Political Survival (seminal game theoretic text)
  • Rules for Rulers (18-minute CGP Grey layperson's youtube cartoon explanation)
• Geopolitical Realism
  • Wikipedia article
  • Simple explanation of how the world works (John Mearsheimer podcast with Lex Friedman)

Global and Local/National Race Conditions

• In a global competitivist environment, there is a current prisoners' dilemma.
  • Elites may try to coordinate by trying disarmament and providing public goods
  • Or, elites may defect by amassing autonomous coercive power:
    • AI for cyberwar and infowar
    • Drones for conventional war
    • WMDs for unconventional deterrence
  • Under current geopolitical norms, many elites are defecting.
• Under local or national competitivism, this will pop the "rich nations" wage bubble
  • "Defecting" elites prioritize investment into research and scale-up of autonomous systems for coercion
  • This displaces spending on human infrastructure and human services
  • Forecasted threats of labor strikes to demand human infrastructure and services creates a quiet race condition to scale-up autonomous production systems to break the strikes.
  • When autonomous coercion and production reach a tipping point, then capital can change the terms of trade.
  • The wage bubble pops:
    • The status quo unpopped wage being a weighted Nash equilibrium wage still giving some weight to the marginal product of workers' tech-enhanced labor
    • the new popped wage being the bare marginal cost of workers' autonomous replacement.
• Local elites are forced to pop the wage, under competitive local governance game theory.
  • Potential coup coalitions realize how much loot they can grab if they can seize the autonomous dictatorship.
  • If the incumbent doesn't pre-emptively self-coup and implement autonomous dictatorship empowered by savings from popped wages, then some key members of their coalition may defect to a challenger and defeat the incumbent, trying to win some of the spoils.
• Aloha Dystopia.

Conclusion

Therefore, let us consider that EA's and everyone else should be looking into deescalating competitivism, both locally and globally, to prevent iCAPES enshittification?  Any other ideas related to this modeling exercise? 🙏