Demographics, the West, and the Singularity

Something incredible has been happening for the past two hundred years. Slowly but surely, more and more people survived childhood, and subsequently, more and more people lived to reach adulthood. For centuries, a person could be assured of a relatively long life span if that person could only survive the perils of childhood, and most importantly of childbirth itself. That, in and of itself, is one of the primary reasons for the mass demographic shift that is only just now becoming apparent. It is like the iceberg, who's size is masked by the water in which it rests. Now that most people survive into adulthood, and have been surviving into adulthood for the better part of a century, we are now facing a catastrophic change: the West, for the most part, will become a collection of national retirement homes. Most of Western Europe will be much older, with perhaps as much as forty percent of their populations over the age of fifty by 2050. Japan will face similar prospects much sooner--only the United States and Australia will have much the same demographic distributions that they have today. The consequences for such a drastic and dramatic change are almost unimaginable. Europe, despite the hoopla over the EU and the euro will quietly begin to realize that not only will their native populations all be too old to take care of themselves but a significant majority of the younger population will be one that probably won't care too much--especially for most of Western Europe, Muslims will make up a significant minority of the population, in some places such as Sweden, as much as forty percent by 2050.
What to do then? Close down shop and quit the hell out of Europe as quickly as possible before it officially becomes Eurabia? Not quite--because there is an enormous opportunity to turn the collapse of the First Customs Union (known now as the EU) into a much different transnational organization, one that will be much smaller in scope, but much larger in geographical size. Wait a second there Maley, you say, the First Customs Union hasn't collapsed, let alone the EU, why they're the world second largest economy if you count the whole thing and ignore the irrational rise in value of the euro relative to the dollar and the yen, but the whole currency system is so screwed up anyway that that's at least twenty-seven different posts over the course of about a year just to get that thing explained right. Anyway, the EU hasn't collapsed...or is it? Well, let's keep in mind that:
1)only one country has to reject the new Omnibus Recognition of Ridiculous Rights, Priveleges and Responsibilities of the massive new EU bureaucracy to take over the free peoples of Europe, or, what that hack who thought that Jefferson wrote the constitution calls a "constitution." The new constitution of Europe is not a constitution, it reads like a university diversity manuscript with some budget addendums tacked on just for good taste. Do you really think that Vaclev Havel is going to let the Czech Republic or that the Slovaks or the quite libertarian Baltic states or Poland or any of the other newly liberated countries are going to want to subject themselves to that kind of frivolous regulation without even letting them have any say in the matter? The EU is one of the most undemocratic organizations on the planet right now, and how much longer do you think that's going to last once the people in all those newly liberated Eastern European countries and maybe some of the native populations in the western ones get a little angry when the imans start demanding more and more of the public dole?
2)Let's say that it actually get ratifies. How long has it been since any one power controlled Europe? Or, put more accurately, has long has any one power controlled Europe? Because no one has ever controlled all of Europe--you could say that for all intensive purposes that the Little General controlled all of Europe, but for what, a decade at most, and it wasn't as if the whole continent started speaking French all of the sudden. The Germans? The Mustache wasn't able to keep that little thing going for not even half a decade before our boys pushed them back over the Rhine and turned them into the little wusses that they are today. And, no, the Romans never crossed the Rhine either, preferring to have satisfied themselves that there wasn't anything over there worth having--pretty much the same attitude they took toward Ireland after seeing the Irish. Thank blarney for that. So, if the EU constitution goes into effect, it won't last very long, especially since....
3)Countries are already seriously flaunting such things as the Stability Pact--how long before the EU Central Bank or whatever it's called starts letting nations like Portugal and Italy and Spain which have been economically punished because they have been unable to change their interest rates do so? And then the whole reason for having a single currency goes out the window--if different regions have different monetary requirements, how do we mesh that with the idea that we can have one rate, one currency, one rule applied to twenty-five nations? And sooner rather than later people in Europe will realize that they liked it much better when they had their lira or marks or francs or guilders because at least they knew what it was really worth.
So, sometime in the near future, the EU starts to unravel. And here are the seeds for genuine opportunity. If the populations of migrant Muslims within the EU (thanks mostly to the democratization of their ancestral homes, Turkey, Iraq, now Lebanon, and possibly Egypt and Syria next) are able to accept the blessings of modernity, free enterprise, the rule of law, separation of church and state, and representative government, than that new entity that has been scarily called EURABIA might actually become a potent force worldwide. In other words, if the enthusiasm for freedom in other countries can reinfluence the stale democracies of primarily western Europe than so much the better, because only an energized, motivated West can accomplish the goal of defeating the nexus between blind, inarticulate rage and religious fanaticism, and imagine how much more powerful the West would be if joined by Muslims who are as much heirs to the traditions of the West as Christians and Jews are--even more so because of the debt that the West owes Islam for it's maintenance and preservation and expansion of ancient ideas and books during the height of Islamic power and influence, sometime around the 13th century. And what better way than to do so through a genuine Customs Union, which is really all that the EU is and if was just a Customs Union honorably and openly, it would function as it should--opening the borders for trade between member countries and restricting it for those outside of the Union. The EU is a huge market, one that would usually be fettered by language, custom, and tariffs. By removing the tariffs and ensuring free trade and a slightly regulated labor market, the Second Customs Union could cement the new democracies of the Middle East to the West, thus making Eurabia a genuine area of convergence between civilizations, making such a possibility unique.
Finally, this relieves the demographic timebomb question by assimiliating the migrant populations and completely Westernizing them.
But what about the Singularity--heres the thing. If you don't know what the Singularity is you need to reread yesterday's post and get back to me right here. If you did read it you know that the Singularity is the moment when we, humans that is, create a genuine artificial intelligence. Snicker snicker, computers thinking hahahaha. The truth is though that we are much closer to it than ever before and in many ways, all the more unprepared for it because we've been hearing about it for so long that we almost have lost the will to believe in it. It's like lasers--we've seen too many movies to ever believe that anyone will ever use a laser in combat, but that too is coming. In my lifetime someone or something will successfully create a genuine AI and by genuine I mean one that is truly self-aware, one that can defend its own existence and one that we will not be able to directly control. The possibilities for this development are endless. Already the infrastructure is in place that a genuinely intelligent enough program could make use of--billions of 'nodes' already exist worldwide, in the form of personal computers, servers, supercomputers and the overhead satellite network and the underground fiber optic network. Each 'node' can be relatively equated with one or more neurons--indeed who knows whether we can even calculate the actual processing power of the human brain, but the point is that their exists already a vast network of processing power that if programmed properly might unleash electric hell upon humanity. The thing is that the faster we progress towards demographic change, the more automation and technology old-age nations such as Japan and Germany will require to take care of their aging populations. This means that there will only be more incentive to make things smarter, faster, more independent, more like us with each succeeding generation until finally boom. So really, we've double-blind-sided ourselves--not only was the Singularity inevitable, but now we've accelerated our need for very high-tech gear, and that means that very very soon, somewhere, a computer will be talking to you. And you won't have any idea what to say to it.