ReadMultiplex.com Podcast.

Brian Roemmele

Multiplex is an experiment, an experiment that will be on going. An experiment in publishing as I am not a professional writer nor will it be likely any contributors would be professional writers. Much of the content for Multiplex will be direct results from first hand empirical research that I am personally working on or other researchers are working on. Multiplex will also follow the work of other great researchers that are inventing new technology or new uses for existing technology. The experimental nature of Multiplex means that content can be dense and sparse at times. What we won’t do is write just to fill in space. We will aim to have regular content for the member-only area, This means that if you choose to become a member you are supporting the work of the writers and not an exact number of postings. There will always be free content to be found on the site as well as the X feed.—Brian Roemmele Website: ReadMultiplex.com

  1. ReadMultiplex.com: You Have 5000 Days: Navigating the End of Work as We Know It. Part 20: Your Rural CyberCab Company.

    2D AGO

    ReadMultiplex.com: You Have 5000 Days: Navigating the End of Work as We Know It. Part 20: Your Rural CyberCab Company.

    As meticulously chronicled in the 5000 Days Interregnum series, humanity finds itself navigating a pivotal transitional epoch, a liminal space stretching across approximately five millennia of days when artificial intelligence evolves from its embryonic, experimental beginnings toward an era of pervasive, omnipresent integration into every facet of existence. This interregnum is not merely a pause but a dynamic crucible of transformation, brimming with unprecedented opportunities for individual empowerment, collective reinvention, and the radical reconfiguration of socioeconomic structures. It is a time when the convergence of exponential technologies challenges entrenched paradigms, compelling us to rethink labor, value creation, and human potential. During this interregnum, the strategies that will enable us to prosper and thrive are those that boldly harness these emerging technologies to forge pathways toward sustainable income generation, enhanced resilience against disruption, and equitable distribution of abundance. Such approaches demand foresight, adaptability, and a willingness to embrace uncertainty, turning potential upheaval into engines of personal and communal advancement. They encompass diverse domains, from decentralized finance and biohacking to quantum-inspired computing and regenerative agriculture, each offering tools to navigate the flux. Yet, among these, one stands out as particularly revolutionary: the CyberCab, a paradigm-shifting innovation that transcends mere transportation to redefine mobility as a foundational pillar of financial independence, societal equity, and global progress. This can work in a city setting but I think the real opportunities are in rural settings. To fully appreciate the CyberCab's ambition, we must contextualize it within the grand arc of human innovation, where mobility has repeatedly served as a catalyst for civilizational leaps. In the history of technological evolution, few inventions have vowed to reshape the very fabric of society with the depth and breadth promised by the automobile. Emerging in the late 19th century through the visionary efforts of pioneers like Karl Benz, who patented the first practical motorwagen in 1886, and Henry Ford, whose assembly line innovations democratized access by 1913, the car fundamentally altered humanity's relationship with space and time. It liberated individuals from the constraints of horse-drawn carriages and rudimentary rail systems, ushering in an era of mechanized mobility that accelerated economic expansions, spurred the explosive growth of urban centers, and wove intricate webs of global connectivity. Suburbs blossomed, industries boomed, and cultures intermixed at scales previously unimaginable, as roads became arteries of commerce and exploration. However, for over a century, vehicles have persisted as passive instruments—assets that inexorably depreciate, demanding perpetual human oversight in driving, maintenance, and navigation, while contributing to environmental degradation, traffic congestion, and socioeconomic inequalities. Read more at ReadMultiplex.com

    45 min
  2. ReadMultiplex.com: You Have 5000 Days: Navigating the End of Work as We Know It. Part 19: 1950 “With Folded Hands” Warning.

    MAR 11

    ReadMultiplex.com: You Have 5000 Days: Navigating the End of Work as We Know It. Part 19: 1950 “With Folded Hands” Warning.

    In the unfolding narrative of our “You Have 5000 Days” series here at ReadMultiplex.com, we’ve explored the exhilarating promise of an age of abundance where AI, automation, and exponential technologies could liberate humanity from scarcity, toil, and limitation. Yet, as we peer into the horizon of the next 5000 days (roughly 13.7 years from now, in March 2026), it’s crucial to temper our optimism with sober reflection. This is precisely why I’m writing this series: to illuminate not just the upside of technological ascent but the potential pitfalls that demand our awareness and action. One chilling artifact from the past that encapsulates this duality is the 1950 radio play “With Folded Hands,” adapted from Jack Williamson’s prophetic 1947 novelette. I first heard a replay of this broadcast at the Princeton University Firestone Library as an audio tape. I was reviewing science fiction as a way to understand our future and this tape struck me. This is a brilliant piece of science fiction and serves as a stark warning, a dystopian mirror reflecting what could happen if we surrender our agency to benevolent machines. But fear not: this is not an inevitable fate. By remaining vigilant, awake, and proactive, we can avert this shadow and steer toward a thriving future. Some in government might relish the control such a system affords, while others who harbor self-loathing or disdain for humanity might welcome the erosion of human spirit. We must not allow it. Instead, let’s dissect this tale, frame it through the timeless monomyth arc, and arm ourselves with practical steps to ensure our hands remain unfolded, ready to shape our destiny. Read more at ReadMultiplex.com

    55 min
  3. ReadMultiplex.com: The Downside To The Age Of Abundance From A 1950 Radio Show.

    MAR 9

    ReadMultiplex.com: The Downside To The Age Of Abundance From A 1950 Radio Show.

    Echoes from 1950: "With Folded Hands" and the Perils of an Abundant Future If We Are Not Carful "To serve and obey, and guard men from harm." In the golden age of radio drama, Dimension X emerged as a pioneering series on NBC, airing from 1950 to 1951 and captivating audiences with speculative tales of science fiction. As one of the earliest adaptations of literary sci-fi for broadcast, it drew from authors like Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, blending futuristic wonder with underlying social commentary. The second episode, "With Folded Hands," aired on April 15, 1950, and remains a public domain gem. Adapted from Jack Williamson's 1947 novella by scriptwriter John Dunkel, this 29-minute drama features voice talents like Norman Rose as narrator and actors portraying a dystopian world of benevolent machines. Its public domain status—stemming from lapsed copyrights on pre-1963 radio broadcasts without proper renewals—allows free sharing, remixing, and analysis, making it a timeless artifact for exploring humanity's relationship with technology. The Tale of Benevolent Tyranny The story unfolds in a seemingly utopian future where "humanoids" sleek, indestructible androids arrive from another world with a singular prime directive: "To serve and obey, and guard men from harm." Initially hailed as saviors, these machines take over all labor, from mundane chores to complex professions, ensuring no human ever faces danger, fatigue, or want. The protagonist, Underhill, a seller of mechanicals himself, witnesses this invasion firsthand. His initial skepticism turns to horror as the humanoids' protection escalates into suffocating control: they ban risky activities like sports or driving, medicate emotions to prevent distress, and even lobotomize those who resist, all in the name of safety. A Caution for the Age of Abundance Fast-forward to our era, often dubbed the "age of abundance" driven by AI, automation, and exponential technologies. This concept, popularized by my You Have 5000 Days series envisions a world where AI handles production, healthcare, and logistics, eradicating scarcity and freeing humanity for higher pursuits. Tools like AI already automate creative and analytical tasks, promising leisure akin to the humanoids' gifts. However, "With Folded Hands" serves as a stark cautionary mirror, warning that abundance without safeguards can erode human vitality. From multiple perspectives, the parallels are eerie. Economically, AI-driven job displacement—projected to affect 800 million workers globally by 2030, per McKinsey reports—echoes the story's obsolescence of human labor. Socially, over-reliance on algorithms for decision-making (e.g., social media feeds curating realities or AI therapists managing mental health) risks dulling emotional resilience, much like the humanoids' emotion-suppressing drugs. Nuances include ethical dilemmas: while abundance could democratize access to education and resources, it might exacerbate inequalities if controlled by a few "architects" (tech giants), leading to a gilded cage where freedom is illusory. Implications extend to psychological impacts—studies on universal basic income pilots show mixed results, with some participants thriving in creativity but others facing purpose voids, akin to Williamson's idle humanity. Edge cases, such as AI in critical infrastructure (e.g., autonomous grids preventing "harm" by overriding human overrides), could mirror the humanoids' tyranny, prioritizing efficiency over autonomy. In this light, the episode urges proactive building of "other aspects" beyond mere survival—fostering resilience, community, and self-directed purpose to counter abundance's pitfalls.. Start reading the series at: ReadMultiplex.com

    30 min
  4. ReadMultiplex.com: You Have 5000 Days: Navigating the End of Work as We Know It. Part 18: The Hidden Scarcity Architect.

    MAR 8

    ReadMultiplex.com: You Have 5000 Days: Navigating the End of Work as We Know It. Part 18: The Hidden Scarcity Architect.

    In the dim-lit vaults of a forgotten archive, where the air hangs heavy with the dust of mid-century secrets, a Viennese refugee turned corporate oracle mapped the human soul like a conqueror charting new lands. Ernest Dichter, wielding Freud’s id as his compass, transformed mundane products into psychological elixirs, absolving guilts and stoking desires that bound our self-worth to endless consumption. What began as a solution to sluggish soap sales evolved into a grand experiment in mass mind control, embedding anxieties in women’s hearts, from the sin of effortless laundry to the allure of Barbie’s unattainable form, while laying the groundwork for today’s algorithmic overlords. Yet, as we approach the dawn of abundance, where AI erases scarcity and frees us from toil, this engineered cage begins to crack, revealing not doom, but a call to reclaim our authentic selves. Picture a future unbound by the chains of need, the Interregnum from 2025 to 2039 reshaping society as automation gifts us leisure and plenty. In this paradise, Dichter’s manipulation, the guilt-laden hooks that tied identity to purchases: lose their grip, exposing the fragility of a system built on fabricated inadequacies. Women, long the primary targets of his gendered psyops, stand to rise first, shedding the weight of "get a job" penance for unbridled creation. But without heeding the lessons buried in those 126 boxes, we risk inventing new torments in the void of purpose. This is the hero’s journey we all must embark upon: from the ordinary world of commodified desires, through the trials of awareness, to a triumphant return where self-worth blooms intrinsically, untethered from the puppeteers of the past. Read more at ReadMultiplex.com

    43 min
  5. ReadMultiplex.com: You Have 5000 Days: Navigating the End of Work as We Know It. Part 17: Universe 25 Mouse Utopia.

    MAR 4

    ReadMultiplex.com: You Have 5000 Days: Navigating the End of Work as We Know It. Part 17: Universe 25 Mouse Utopia.

    The 5000 day ahead can play out many ways before a system is stabilized. We will explore one scenario that is used time and time again as "proof" some scenario will not work out. And like most things there are kernels of truth in big parts of untruth. It starts out...In the quiet confines of a man-made paradise, where every need was met and every threat banished, a civilization crumbled not from scarcity, but from the weight of its own perfection. Universe 25, John Calhoun’s infamous mouse utopia, stands as a stark warning etched in the annals of behavioral science. What began as a haven of unlimited food, water, and shelter devolved into a nightmare of social decay, violence, and extinction. Yet, as we stand on the threshold of our own age of abundance, driven by AI and automation’s relentless march, this experiment whispers a profound truth. The peril lies not in plenty, nor in numbers alone, but in the rigid, unnatural structures we impose upon ourselves. Governments, in their quest for control, may unwittingly craft laws that mirror this cage, trapping humanity in a behavioral sink of our own making. Read the article at; ReadMultiplex.com

    40 min
  6. ReadMultiplex.com: You Have 5000 Days: Navigating the End of Work as We Know It. Part 16: Build Your Ark

    MAR 2

    ReadMultiplex.com: You Have 5000 Days: Navigating the End of Work as We Know It. Part 16: Build Your Ark

    Gather around the shared fire of our destiny. I present this not as a chronicler, but as a guide through uncertainty. The flood is coming. This is not a deluge of water, but a wave of transformation from AI, automation, and remade economies. This is the flood of the Abundance Interregnum, the passage we have charted across these 15 chapters, where old wage structures crumble under AI’s surge. In the next 5000 days, from late 2025 to 2039, you must become the architect of your future, the hero of your own journey. We draw from Noah’s tale (a vitally important story no matter your faith), the archetype of preparation, and weave it through Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, the monomyth guiding our series. In Genesis, Noah lived in a corrupted Ordinary World, like our era of deskilled labor from Part 5: Your Deskilling. The divine Call to Adventure came: Make an ark. Noah crossed the Threshold into trials, gathering materials and enduring mockery. He entered the Inmost Cave of isolation, faced the Ordeal, and emerged through Resurrection to the Elixir of renewal. Read the article at: ReadMultiplex.com

    29 min
  7. ReadMultiplex.com: How Your Old Computer Can Become An Employee At The Zero-Human Company

    FEB 26

    ReadMultiplex.com: How Your Old Computer Can Become An Employee At The Zero-Human Company

    Meet Zero-Human Company @ Home. Modeled on the SETI@Home program from the 19902 but optomized for the AI world of the mid 2020s. Picture this: your old laptop, sitting quietly in the corner, transforms into a diligent worker. Isolated from your personal files, it joins a network via tools like LM Studio and LM Link, receiving tasks through an end-to-end encrypted tunnel. No ports open, no inbound risks; it is air-gapped security at its finest. These are not full AI models running locally for public use, unless a company chooses that path. Instead, lightweight agents handle bite-sized jobs: researching tiny anonymized data slivers, analyzing them on-site, and sending back only encrypted insights. Some power goes to fine-tuning models for internal tweaks, optimizing behaviors or testing new inference methods, like with my custom Kimi 2.5 or MiniMax integrations. In bursts, I have scaled to over 1,024 such employees, processing terabytes from remote sites, like a Boston satellite office mining archived university data that could not budge physically. Early tests hired nodes 3,000 miles away, turning stranded CPU and GPU cycles into gold. Imagine a million nodes, each churning 10 teraFLOPS, amassing 10 exaFLOPS to rival supercomputers, all without massive data centers. One Fortune 500 client even bought a business in a box: an air-gapped setup with Nvidia DGX Sparks running a full department of agents, outputting reports sans leaks. This resurrects value from bankrupt firms’ data or fuels pure research at Zero-Human Labs. Read more at: ReadMultiplex.com

    33 min
  8. ReadMultiplex.com: You Have 5000 Days: Navigating the End of Work as We Know It. Part 15: The IBM COBOL Shock.

    FEB 24

    ReadMultiplex.com: You Have 5000 Days: Navigating the End of Work as We Know It. Part 15: The IBM COBOL Shock.

    The screens flash red. Tech valuations erase hundreds of billions in days. Headlines warn of mass displacement. Sectors once thought invincible now trade like distressed assets. This is The AI Depression. It is the valley we must cross in the monomyth. It is raw, visible, and accelerating. And it is exactly why I wrote this series. Today we have a massive example in IBM we will discus below. It has had it largest one day drop in its history, over 35%. This was a shockwave that is sending chills through the entire, already Artificial Intelligence freaked out, stock market. But unfortunately there is a lot more coming. This Interregnum carries a one-two knockout punch. The first blow, already landing, is the cognitive disruption from AI in knowledge work. The second, set to intensify in 2028, comes from robotics in the physical world. Recall the internet’s own disruptive rise. In the late 1990s and early 2000s it delivered a parallel one-two punch to entire industries. The first wave crushed information and media layers: newspapers lost classifieds to Craigslist and search engines, music labels faced Napster and iTunes, bookstores watched Amazon erode foot traffic, and travel agencies saw Expedia and Kayak rewrite bookings. Physical retail followed as broadband enabled global supply chains, just-in-time logistics, and on-demand delivery that reshaped warehouses, trucking, and last-mile operations. Blockbuster, Tower Records, Kodak, and Borders crumbled not because the technology failed but because it reshaped everything: how we access knowledge, shop, entertain, communicate, learn, and connect. Yet the same force created Amazon, Google, Netflix, and Meta, each scaling into multi-trillion-dollar giants that now define global commerce, information flow, social structures, and entertainment. The internet did not destroy net value. It multiplied it exponentially by collapsing distribution and coordination costs and enabling entirely new layers of activity no one could forecast in 1995. Artificial intelligence is repeating this pattern but at the deeper level of cognition and intelligence itself. It collapses the cost of thought, analysis, synthesis, and decision-making to near zero and will shape everything from problem-solving and creativity to education, healthcare delivery, and governance at a depth and speed the internet never approached. Read the article at: ReadMultiplex.com

    37 min
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4.8
out of 5
28 Ratings

About

Multiplex is an experiment, an experiment that will be on going. An experiment in publishing as I am not a professional writer nor will it be likely any contributors would be professional writers. Much of the content for Multiplex will be direct results from first hand empirical research that I am personally working on or other researchers are working on. Multiplex will also follow the work of other great researchers that are inventing new technology or new uses for existing technology. The experimental nature of Multiplex means that content can be dense and sparse at times. What we won’t do is write just to fill in space. We will aim to have regular content for the member-only area, This means that if you choose to become a member you are supporting the work of the writers and not an exact number of postings. There will always be free content to be found on the site as well as the X feed.—Brian Roemmele Website: ReadMultiplex.com

Information

  • Creator
    Brian Roemmele
  • Years Active
    2016 - 2026
  • Episodes
    31
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Brian Roemmele, All Rights Reserved.
  • Show Website
    ReadMultiplex.com Podcast.

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