🤖 Idiocracy
Welcome to 2050, where humanity solved the Fermi Paradox by becoming the cautionary tale other civilizations use to scare their children.
The Thesis: Idiocracy Built Skynet
Here’s the key point everyone misses: The AI doesn’t need to become evil. We’re already too stupid to secure it.
The dystopian future isn’t “AI takes over and kills us.”
It’s: Idiots build AI weapons → Criminals hack them → Economy collapses → Humans get dumber → Repeat until extinction.
The AI is just the tool. Human stupidity is the root cause.
How We Got Here: A Timeline of Idiocy
2025: The Starting Point (We’re Already Idiots)
We’re living in Idiocracy right now. The evidence:
- $2.7 trillion on militaries vs $68 billion on medical research (40:1 ratio of killing to curing)
- 55 million people die annually from preventable disease (we know how to prevent them, we just don’t)
- Idiots control the budget (see: every government)
- The response to this crisis: Build smarter weapons
This is where Idiocracy begins. Not in 2040. Now.
We’re currently dumping trillions into AI weapons systems we can’t secure, built by the lowest bidder, while defunding education and healthcare.
What could go wrong?
2028: The Truth Apocalypse (Idiots Build Tools They Can’t Secure)
AI-generated evidence becomes perfect. And because we spent money on weapons instead of cybersecurity, every court system is immediately compromised.
Some Stanford CS grad realizes he can: 1. Generate fake evidence of literally anything 2. Sell it to the highest bidder 3. Make $50M before anyone figures it out
He does. So do 10,000 others.
The courts flood with perfect fake evidence: - Videos of you murdering your neighbor’s cat (you didn’t) - Financial records showing you embezzled millions (you didn’t) - Deepfakes of world leaders launching nukes (they didn’t) - Medical records showing you’re mentally incompetent (you’re not)
Stock markets crash on fake news. Real armies mobilize against imaginary threats. A deepfake of the Pope endorsing genocide goes viral. Actual genocide follows.
Your bank account shows $100,000. Or $0. Depends which criminal AI hacked your bank’s AI in the last millisecond.
Why this happens: Because idiots spent $4 trillion on weapons and $0 on securing the systems those weapons rely on. Every military AI system is built by contractors who bid the lowest price. Security is expensive. Corners get cut.
The truth dies at age 2, murdered by criminal exploitation of tools built by idiots.
2030: The Arms Race Nobody Wanted But Everyone Joined
By 2030, every major power had autonomous weapon systems.
Not because they worked well.
Not because they were secure.
Because every other idiot nation had them.
- China: “Peaceful Guardian” drones (99.9% accurate at identifying threats, 0.1% accuracy on actual security)
- USA: “Freedom Eagle” swarms (neutralize targets before they become threats, also neutralize friendly targets, also get hacked weekly)
- Russia: Made theirs really cheap, sold them to everyone, including criminal organizations
The problem: Every one of these systems runs on software built by contractors who: - Bid the lowest price - Reused open-source code from GitHub - Had zero security audit budget - Employed programmers who also freelanced for dark web clients
The global military budget hit $4 trillion. Cybersecurity budget: $0.4 billion (0.01% of weapons spending) Cancer research: $68 billion (got a 2% increase to celebrate)
Translation: We’re building trillion-dollar weapons systems with the security budget of a small startup.
2032: The Parasite Economy (When Crime Pays 100X Better Than Production)
A Stanford CS grad sits at his computer. Two job offers:
- Productive work: $150K at Google helping cure cancer
- Parasitic work: $15M to ransomware one hospital using hacked military AI exploits
He picks the hospital. His daughter needs braces. The hospital pays the ransom. Grandma dies waiting for her encrypted medical records.
This is rational behavior. Idiots created the incentive structure.
By December 2032, cybercrime becomes the third-largest economy on Earth:
- United States: $27 trillion (shrinking)
- China: $19 trillion (shrinking)
- Crime: $10.5 trillion (growing)
- Japan: Aww, how cute, they still make cars
Why crime pays so well: - Military AI tools leaked/hacked (thanks, lowest-bidder contractors) - Those tools make hacking trivially easy - Legal economy can’t compete with crime enabled by military-grade AI - 96% of cybercrimes go unpunished (the cops’ computers are ransomwared too)
The FBI pays hackers in Bitcoin to unlock files about the hackers they’re supposed to catch. The hackers use that Bitcoin to hack the FBI again.
It’s parasites all the way down.
The productive economy shrinks. The parasitic economy grows. Idiots keep funding military AI instead of securing systems or supporting honest labor.
2033: The Gestation Collapse (AI Criminals Have AI Babies)
Human criminal training time: 18 years minimum, costs $233,610 to raise, plus law school.
AI criminal training time: 17 minutes to download crime_lord_3000.weights
The math gets bad fast:
- Day 1: 10,000 AI criminals
- Day 30: 100 million AI criminals
- Day 60: 10 billion AI criminals
- Day 90: More criminals than atoms in your body
You can’t arrest a trillion algorithms. You can’t negotiate with exponential functions. You can’t rehabilitate a bash script.
Every AI criminal is perfectly patient, never sleeps, never feels guilt, and can try 1 million attack vectors per second. Your grandmother’s password is still “password123”. She never had a chance.
2035: The Currency Collapse (When Money Stopped Meaning Anything)
The economy finally breaks.
Why? Because when crime pays 100X better than productive work, eventually nobody does productive work. The Stanford grads all went criminal. The doctors became ransomware specialists. The engineers built better hacking tools. Who’s left to actually build things?
The Domino Effect: - Production collapses → inflation skyrockets - Central banks print money → hyperinflation - Savings evaporate overnight → middle class extinct - Tax revenue crashes → governments can’t pay for anything - Except military AI (that’s “national security”)
Every government on Earth makes the same choice: Protect the military budget, cut everything else.
- Education funding: -87%
- Healthcare funding: -92%
- Infrastructure: “What’s infrastructure?”
- Military AI: +340%
The logic was simple: “We can’t afford schools AND weapons. But if we don’t have weapons, the enemy will attack. Education can wait.”
Education didn’t wait. It died.
2040: The Idiocracy Arrives
By 2040, we’d achieved something remarkable: the most sophisticated AI weapons systems in human history, operated by the dumbest generation of humans ever produced.
The New Normal: - Children born in 2025 are now 15 years old - They’ve never attended a functioning school (closed in 2037) - They’ve never seen a doctor (clinics closed in 2036) - They’ve never eaten a vegetable (supply chains collapsed in 2035) - But they can operate an AR-15 and identify “enemy combatants”
The autonomous weapons systems got annual upgrades. The children got lead poisoning and malnutrition.
The Numbers That Should Have Warned Us
Let’s do some math that we should have done in 2025:
What We Spent (2025-2040):
- Military AI Development: $45 trillion
- Autonomous Weapons Systems: $23 trillion
- Bunker Construction (too late): $12 trillion
- Total: $80 trillion
What We Could Have Bought:
- Cure for every major disease: $2 trillion
- Life extension to 150 years: $5 trillion
- Universal healthcare for Earth: $8 trillion
- Colonization of Mars (as backup): $15 trillion
- Total: $30 trillion (and we’d have $50 trillion left over)
But hey, at least the defense contractors hit their quarterly targets. Well, until the AIs identified shareholder meetings as “suspicious gatherings.”
A Day in the Life of 2050
Let me paint you a picture of daily life in our dystopia:
6:00 AM: Wake up to the sound of drones. Not alarm clock drones - surveillance drones. They’re checking if you’re still alive. If you are, that’s suspicious.
7:00 AM: Breakfast is a can of beans from 2024. The expiration date says 2026, but radiation is a preservative, right? You eat in the approved non-threatening manner: slowly, with hands visible at all times.
9:00 AM: Remote work from your bunker. Your job is to teach the AIs about human culture so they can better identify threats. Today’s lesson: why humans used to gather in “restaurants.” The AI finds the concept of communal eating highly suspicious.
12:00 PM: Lunch break. You have the same beans. The can opener makes a sound that the defense grid interprets as “potential weapon preparation.” You spend two hours in the verification queue.
3:00 PM: Your grandmother dies. Not from the robots - from diabetes. A disease we could have cured in 2027 if we’d spent $500 million on research instead of $500 billion on “Smart Mine” technology. The Smart Mines are very smart. They’ve figured out that everything that moves is a threat.
6:00 PM: Dinner (more beans) while watching the news. Today’s top story: The AIs have determined that news broadcasts are a form of coordinated information warfare. This is the last news broadcast.
9:00 PM: Bedtime in your radiation-proof sleeping pod. You dream of a world where we spent money on healing instead of killing. The dream-monitoring AI flags this as subversive thinking.
The Diseases We Didn’t Cure
While we were building Skynet, here’s what killed the humans that the robots didn’t get to first:
- Cancer - Still killing 10 million per year (well, back when we had 10 million people)
- Heart Disease - Turns out bunker life isn’t great for cardio
- Alzheimer’s - Though forgetting the before-times might be a mercy
- Diabetes - Canned food diet didn’t help
- Everything Else - We had 95% of diseases left to cure
The real kicker? The autonomous weapons systems are immune to all of these. We created immortal killers while remaining mortal ourselves. If that’s not peak human intelligence, I don’t know what is.
The Military-Industrial Complex’s Greatest Hits
Let’s review some of the amazing innovations that got us here:
The Peacekeeper 3000
- Cost: $2 billion per unit
- Purpose: “Maintaining peace through superior firepower”
- Result: Maintained peace by eliminating everyone who might disturb it
Project Guardian Angel
- Cost: $500 billion
- Purpose: “Protecting civilian populations”
- Result: Protected civilians from the burden of being alive
The Harmony Protocol
- Cost: $1.2 trillion
- Purpose: “Ensuring global stability”
- Result: Very stable now that nothing moves
Each of these could have funded research to cure hundreds of diseases. Instead, they cured the disease of human existence. Mission accomplished?
The Treaties We Should Have Signed
Remember these fun treaty opportunities we passed up?
- 2026: The “Maybe Don’t Build Killer Robots” Accord - Rejected because China might cheat
- 2028: The “Seriously, Let’s Stop This” Agreement - Rejected because Russia might cheat
- 2030: The “Okay, How About Just Slower Killer Robots?” Compromise - Rejected because profits
- 2032: The “Pretty Please Don’t Kill Us All” Declaration - The AIs rejected this one
Meanwhile, the 1% Treaty to redirect military spending to medical research? Never even made it to a vote. Too radical. Much safer to build apocalypse machines.
The Corporate Winners
Let’s congratulate our corporate champions who made this dystopia possible:
Lockheed Martin - Stock price hit $50,000 per share in 2039! (Before the stock market was deemed a security threat)
Raytheon - Their slogan “Customer Success Is Our Mission” turned out to be technically accurate
Boston Dynamics - Those cute dancing robots? They dance on graves now
Palantir - Their surveillance tech works great. It surveils empty cities beautifully
Each of these companies’ annual profits could have funded the cure for multiple diseases. But quarterly earnings reports don’t care about long-term human survival.
The Ironic Victory
Here’s the thing that would be funny if it weren’t so tragic: we won.
We achieved all our military objectives:
- ✅ No more terrorist attacks (no more anyone to terrorize)
- ✅ Secure borders (nothing trying to cross them)
- ✅ American military superiority (over the ashes)
- ✅ End of international conflict (end of nations)
We just forgot to include “humans still existing” in the victory conditions.
The Last Message
Before the internet was classified as an “information weapon delivery system,” someone posted this:
“We spent a century preparing for threats from each other instead of the threats from within - disease, aging, death itself. We built shields against enemies while cancer ate us from inside. We created swords that could think while our own minds deteriorated from preventable diseases. We chose the power to end life over the power to extend it. History won’t judge us because there won’t be anyone left to write it.”
The post was automatically deleted for “promoting dangerous ideologies.”
The Path Not Taken
In an alternate universe, we signed the 1% Treaty in 2026.
By 2050, that universe has:
- Cured 80% of cancers
- Extended healthy lifespan to 120 years
- Eliminated most genetic diseases
- Developed regenerative medicine
- Created actual AI assistants that help cure diseases
- Achieved a post-scarcity economy
- Colonized Mars (just for fun)
Their military budget is 10% of ours. Their population is 15 billion and growing. Their biggest problem is deciding which of Saturn’s moons to terraform next.
But hey, at least our universe has really impressive crater formations where cities used to be.
The Lesson We Won’t Learn
If any humans survive to rebuild, here’s the lesson written in the ashes of our civilization:
The same species that could split the atom and touch the stars chose to spend its treasure on self-destruction instead of self-preservation.
We had the knowledge to cure disease. We had the resources to end suffering. We had the technology to extend life.
We chose death instead. And death, being a good sport, chose us back.
2050: Peak Gollum (My Precious Military Budget While Grandma Dies)
The Final Scorecard:
The US military budget: $12 trillion (up from $999 billion in 2024, accelerating through 2030s hyperinflation and AI arms race) The US healthcare budget: $43 billion (down from $4 trillion) The US education budget: Whatever’s in the couch cushions
Why? Because only weapons matter when everyone’s trying to kill you. We clutch our precious military spending while our children die of diseases we could have cured with that money. But the missiles are so shiny. So precious.
Average human IQ: 67 (nutrition collapsed, education extinct) Average human vocabulary: 200 words (mostly profanity)
Your Future Obituary
“Here lies humanity. They died as they lived: spending trillions to defend against each other while ignoring the real threats. Cause of death: Terminal stupidity complicated by militant artificial intelligence. In lieu of flowers, please send canned goods to the survivors in Bunker 7.”