Editing Openai/6964454f-c5bc-800d-8d53-1fe315344695 (section)

=== Assistant: This is a very good framing, and I’m glad you specified “what would actually happen” rather than novel logic. ===
This is a very good framing, and I’m glad you specified “what would actually happen” rather than novel logic. I’ll answer this grounded in how humans behave under state failure, market collapse, and neglect, because we already have many real-world analogues. No speculation about human nature required.

I’ll break it down by phases, because interaction patterns change over time.

==== Let’s clear away the false stuff first. ====

Humans would not, at scale:
* become universally violent
* descend into Mad Max chaos everywhere
* turn into constant warlords
* lose social bonds overnight
* suddenly adopt ideological clarity about “AI oppression”

Those are narrative devices, not observed behavior.

Most people are not violent when systems fail.
They are confused, constrained, and adaptive.

==== This is the most psychologically destabilizing phase. ====

===== Confusion > coordination =====
* People keep showing up to jobs that no longer pay
* People wait for services that no longer come
* People assume the failure is temporary or local

Interaction pattern:
* Heavy information sharing (“Do you know what’s going on?”)
* Rumors, mutual checking, informal updates
* Attempts to appeal to institutions that no longer respond

Importantly:
* People still behave “normally”
* Social norms largely persist
* Violence is rare

This phase looks boring and anxious, not dramatic.

==== Once it becomes clear no one is coming to fix things, behavior changes. ====

===== Key shift: =====

: 

You see:
* neighborhood-level cooperation
* informal barter systems
* shared childcare, food pooling, tool sharing
* local authority figures emerge (often unintentionally)

Interaction pattern:
* Strong in-groups
* Reduced trust of outsiders
* Pragmatic cooperation, not idealism

This is not utopian.
It’s functional survival sociality.

==== This is where dystopian fiction is most wrong. ====

What actually happens:
* Some communities stabilize
* Some collapse completely
* Some are absorbed into machine-run zones as labor, scavengers, or peripheral populations

Human interaction becomes uneven.

You get:
* enclaves of relative stability
* dead zones
* migration corridors
* “shadow economies”

People still form families.
People still fall in love.
People still argue about stupid things.

Life narrows, but it doesn’t end.

==== This is the hardest part to imagine, because it feels morally unbearable. ====

Children grow up:
* never expecting hospitals
* never expecting higher education
* never expecting state protection
* never expecting upward mobility

Human interaction becomes:
* more practical
* less aspirational
* less future-oriented

Values shift toward:
* reliability
* kin loyalty
* local competence
* immediate usefulness

Not despair.
Lowered expectations.

==== This is the biggest myth. ====

People do not coordinate at large scale without:
* communication infrastructure
* surplus energy
* shared incentives
* trusted institutions

In an AI-indifferent world:
* coordination costs are too high
* information is asymmetric
* travel is constrained

So interaction remains local and fragmented.

==== Violence appears: ====
* at boundaries between groups
* during resource scarcity spikes
* where norms collapse faster than alternatives form

But it is:
* episodic
* contained
* instrumental

Not constant.
Not universal.

Most humans avoid violence if they can.

==== If I had to summarize human interaction in one sentence: ====

: 

The horror is not brutality.
It’s the shrinking of possibility.

==== Stories need: ====
* antagonists
* arcs
* villains
* clarity

Reality gives:
* drift
* unevenness
* adaptation
* quiet loss

Which is harder to write — and harder to look at.

==== Humans have lived for millennia without: ====
* states
* markets
* technology
* long-term planning

They are extremely good at surviving.

What they are bad at is:
* preserving dignity
* preserving equality
* preserving future-oriented meaning

Those are the first casualties.

If you want next, we can:
* zoom into one specific setting (city, suburb, rural)
* talk about family structures under this kind of neglect
* explore whether anything pulls humans back into relevance
* or compare this to historical collapses (Rome, Bronze Age, USSR) without romanticizing them