… and, after most of western society was likely still recovering from the long term devastating effects of the volcanic winter of 536, that probably set us back 1,000 years in the grand scheme of societal development and civilization advancement.

… but that’s a minor setback compared to what’s in store for the Age of Retardation that is coming!

But let’s back up. Consider this recent article on LinkedIn by Karl Waldman on this Medieval Lesson: Cutting Skilled Workers Hurts Long-Term Growth where Karl discussed why the age of great cathedrals came to an end.

It had nothing to do with lack of wealth — there’s always been wealth, all that changes is who controls it — or a lack of interest — the Christian religion has consistently held more than its fair share of dominance through Europe from the building of the first great cathedral until the present day (and whenever it loses control in one country it finds a new one to take over). It was lack of skill.

As per the post, the European cathedral builders developed an ornamental tradition so specialized it took decades of guild training to master. When the Black Death killed a third of Europe’s population, the skilled tradesmen disappeared because the training pipeline that produced it had been destroyed.

Now think about what we’re doing today.

We’re pretending AI can do the work of experienced professionals and cutting them left, right, and centre. We’re pretending we don’t need junior workers (because they do the tasks that AI seems to do okay) and not hiring. We’re walking all of our institutional knowledge out the door, as well as our ability to react and fix exceptional situations with creativity (that will break AI when they arise), while ensuring there’s no one around to absorb even a morsel of that knowledge and skill.

We’re not only replicating the end results of the black plague at a rate that’s even faster than the black death spread across Europe (it took about 7 years with the first 4 being the worst) — and not only are we destroying all of our capability to build tomorrow’s businesses, but we are throwing away all of our capability to even maintain today’s businesses if something goes wrong! After all, our current staffing levels are minimal, and most of the people we have left are in cognitive decline thanks to the AI they are being forced to use for “productivity” reasons.

When the next unstoppable pandemic hits, and wipes out all of our silver haired experts with no skilled talent to replace them, we will enter the Age of Retardation and our global society will collapse faster than the Aztec Empire. (And if you don’t know how fast one of the greatest civilizations in Central America fell, maybe you should brush up on your history!)