> Democracy is more or less giving us what we vote for, we just vote for dumb things.

Education and media are controlled by the rich, and those heavily influence how people vote.

When the mine closes, democracy does not save the town. It still becomes a ghost town. Democracy cannot work upstream against fundamental market forces.

Every industry is being pitched as becoming a ghost town. Democracy will not save us. We will all die in the future and not be replaced. This is the end of our line in this century. I hope you are proud of how far we’ve come because this is the end for us. There will be no economic justification for humanity quite soon and we will likely be slaughtered to eliminate latent variability.

Democracy is also doomed by sufficiently capable AI. When the "meta" military unit was a knight in shining armor, most societies were under feudalism, ie rule by knights. When guns became cheap enough that whoever had the most guys would win a civil war, we got democracy: rule by whoever has the most guys. When whoever has the most robots will win a civil war, what kind of government do you expect?

AI is helping to finish off the job of destroying democracy that the rich started. We are doomed.

You're directionally right, anyway. There's no reason significantly advanced AI (likely to not be developed from LLMs but from some other path) can't completely replace a wide variety of human labor. But replacing human labor with machinery (i.e., capital) is not new, it's been going on for a couple centuries plus some. The thing that happens when you replace wage labor with capital is that the rate of profit (i.e., the ratio of profit to the amount of invested capital) tends to fall, which is a systemic threat to investment. The recurring tech and asset bubbles since the 1990s have each been inflated in an attempt to maintain rising levels of investment in the face of rising productivity and therefore falling profit. An economy of dark factories isn't useful under capitalism, because it produces goods which end up having no sale-value.

Exactly! The rich don't want to see mass starvation any more than the rest of us. We only permit homelessness and food insecurity now because of scarcity and a "just deserts" mentality where we blame people for their lot in life. When AI is doing the majority of labor, there will be no "just deserts" mentality, and there will be massive abundance.

Things young people do if they are bored:

1. Have sex

2. Break things

3. Play videogames

It is extremely naive to think that if remove a fundamental pillar of human society everything else will just continue on as if nothing happened.

It's an informed view for anyone who's spent time around multi-generational welfare-dependent households. Regardless of race or creed, the majority descend into substance abuse and domestic violence.