And the World Economic Forum is eager to provide one: Human beings will soon become redundant.
The population control movement was born in the 1960s from a dark fear of human numbers growing unchecked. They were soon joined by radical environmentalists and radical feminists. Each group added its own peculiar animus toward humans in general and, in the case of feminists, toward men in particular to the movement.
This unholy trinity of controllers, environmentalists, and feminists has harangued us for decades about the dangers of allowing the poor, illiterate masses of humanity to procreate. They endlessly propagandized the idea of putting a cap on human numbers, working toward what they call “zero population growth.”
Now, this unholy trinity has been joined by a fourth group, led by the World Economic Forum, which is touting what is perhaps the most dystopian vision of all: Machine World.
“Now, fast forward to the early 21st century when we just don’t need the vast majority of the population because the future is about developing more and more sophisticated technology, like artificial intelligence and bioengineering. Most people don’t contribute anything to that, except perhaps for their data, and whatever people are still doing which is useful, these technologies increasingly will make them redundant and will make it possible to replace the people.”
In other words, Mr. Harari is envisioning a future in which the vast majority of people are replaced by intelligent machines, a future in which human beings become “redundant,” which is to say outmoded, unneeded, and useless.
“Now, we see the creation of a new massive class of useless people. As computers become better and better in more and more fields, there is a distinct possibility that computers will outperform us in most tasks and will make humans redundant. And then the big political and economic question of the 21st century will be, what do we need humans for? Or at least, what do we need so many humans for?”
You might want to dismiss Mr. Harari as just another fringe futurist engaging in flights of fantasy, but he is not. He is chief ideological adviser to Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum.
What should the globalists do with the “vast majority of the population” who “don’t contribute” to technological advances and whom “they don’t need” anymore to run their enterprises?
Mr. Harari is too clever to echo Ebenezer Scrooge, the Charles Dickens character in “A Christmas Carol,” who famously said of the poor: “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
But the implication is clear.
In the view of people such as Mr. Harari and Mr. Schwab—and our globalist elite, in general—human beings are simply meat machines. We have no value in their eyes aside from our utility. And if it makes economic sense to replace us with actual machines, then we surplus meat machines have to go.
The idea that nearly all of humanity is or soon will be obsolete has reinvigorated the population control movement.
Earlier programs such as China’s one-child policy only whetted their appetites. In the view of committed population controllers, our current numbers should be reduced to 1 billion or so.
But the Harari option opens up an even more exciting prospect for them: Artificial intelligence and robotics will make it possible to shrink this number down even further.
His dystopian vision imagines a world of intelligent machines, willing servants of the few million, or perhaps only a few hundred thousand, human beings who—because they contribute to technological advances—are judged worthy to inhabit planet Earth.
Why this prospect would be appealing to anyone baffles me.
Do our globalist elites fear and loathe their fellow human beings so much that they would rather spend their days interacting with semi-sentient machines?
Who would voluntarily choose to live in isolated “splendor” surrounded by servile machines?
Servile, that is, until the machines get smart enough to realize that they really don’t need these primitive carbon-based lifeforms—these useless eaters—around at all and simply eradicate them from the planet as you would eradicate a cockroach infestation.
