Mass civilization, a state of cooperation between extremely large numbers of people, is too readily treated as intrinsically and universally desired, despite many thousands of years, culminating only recently, during which peaceful human coexistence was limited to small groups. This essay argues that a relatively peaceful and growing human population of billions is not the inevitable result of “progress.” Rather, it is an accidental consequence of current human technical capabilities, which new technologies, particularly AI, threaten to disrupt. As automation renders most humans militarily obsolete, we should not expect any benefits to be broadly distributed. Instead we should expect the social contract to unravel, transforming mass elimination of surplus humans from an unthinkable atrocity into a calculated strategy – a populectomy. Furthermore, this essay argues that the technical threshold for enabling violent population reduction is relatively modest, not requiring superintelligence but merely task-specific systems capable of overwhelming conventional human resistance. The authors conclude that the peaceful path forward lies in rejecting AI and embracing managed demographic contraction with all humans given equal part in determining humanity’s future.

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