I love automation. And I am convinced it will die a slow, humiliating death in cities like Brussels and Paris.
Here’s why.
Delivery robots gliding down boulevards, stores without cashiers, vehicles without drivers, factories that hum through the night with the lights off. This is the future we were promised, and technically it is magnificent.
But I have watched these cities long enough to know how the story ends. Most of it will crash and burn here. Not because the machines are flawed, but because something has changed in our societies.
Automation rests on a foundation nobody dares to name: trust.
The quiet, invisible agreement that what belongs to everyone belongs, in some small way, to you, and is therefore worth protecting.
And we have already run the experiment. We ran it with e-scooters, and the verdict was a bonfire. In Brussels and Paris, they burn at every occasion the calendar provides: football victories, football defeats, New Year’s Eve, protests over anything and nothing. Machines built to carry people through their cities, repurposed as kindling for street fires and projectiles hurled at the police.
Look at the shared cars. Gutted and battered the moment no one is watching, and even when they are used as intended, they are returned in a state that tells you everything: trash ground into the seats, stains nobody claims, the casual filth of people passing through something they will never have to face again. Nobody owns it, so nobody honors it.
Now place those exact same machines in Tokyo or Singapore and watch them work flawlessly, year after year, untouched. Same scooters. Same cars. Same apps. Only the people changed.
These systems only flourish in high-trust societies. Strip the human out of the loop in a low-trust world and watch the rot spread: self-checkout becomes a shoplifting subsidy, the unattended machine becomes a target, every edge case becomes an invitation.
If we cannot keep a scooter alive for six months, by what miracle would a fleet of autonomous delivery robots survive a single winter on our sidewalks?
So here is how it ends. Companies deploy automation with the best pf intentions, the losses pile quietly upward, and one by one the humans are smuggled back in: the guard, the attendant, the supervisor. And with each returning salary, the economics that justified the whole adventure collapse. The ROI was calculated for Singapore. The deployment happens in Brussels and Paris.
The uncomfortable truth is this: automation does not replace humans. It replaces trustworthy humans. And no algorithm, however brilliant, can manufacture the one resource a society has stopped producing.
The bottleneck is trust.
@Sagiel_X@visegrad24 Your AI slop was ok until the "fun fact".
He can not "spend" net worth linked to his stake in his companies.
He is worth that much because his companies are extremely valuable.
🇮🇪 A five-year-old girl was left wheelchair bound, non-verbal and brain damaged after a stabbing by an Algerian migrant outside a creche in Dublin.
Ireland's Central Criminal Court heard that her attacker, Riad Bouchaker, was "upset" over a social welfare refusal letter when he attacked her, two other children and their care worker.
The attack sparked the 2023 Dublin riots.
Follow: @europa
The streets of Paris should currently be filled with white French speaking men wearing PSG football shirts and toasting glasses of wine in the numerous cafes that line the streets.
Instead it’s full of Africans setting fire to everything.
@WildcardGamez@DVanLangenhove Zucht, nee man, leer denken.
Het is niet omdat mensen een bewering als schokkend ervaren dat je daarvoor moet worden veroordeeld.
Vrije meningsuiting bestaat enkel indien iemand die je niet graag hebt iets mag zeggen waar je niet mee akkoord bent.
Al de rest is wind.
SO theoretically, what would get you condemned for “hate speech”?
A judge’s appreciation that certain words you used could result in harm or violence against a certain group.
BUT, today we’ve learned facts are totally irrelevant and no actual harm or violence is required. So what is the last parameter? A judge’s personal appreciation.
As a reminder, in history the people opposing free speech were never ever on the right side.
These two paragraphs of my verdict are crucial for everyone to read and understand.
"Even if all of the statements made by Van Langenhove are based on scientific evidence and statistics, it makes no difference to the criminal intent. Van Langenhove is not charged with spreading false information. He is charged with presenting facts in a way that incites hatred against persons on the grounds of one or more of the protected criteria in the Anti-Racism Law.” 1⃣
"For Van Langenhove to have committed a crime, it is not necessary for him to have incited concrete acts of hate or violence. It suffices that others are incited to take on a general attitude of intolerance or disapproval regarding a group protected under the criteria of the Anti-Racism Law." 2⃣
This means you can go to jail for "inciting hatred" even if your statements were 100% factual (see 1⃣) and even if you did NOT incite concrete acts of hate (see 2⃣).
The benchmark of "inciting hatred" , a crime punishable by prison, is thus "saying something that has the potential of inciting someone to have a general attitude of disapproval regarding a protected group". This means literally any criticism of mass migration is now a punishable offence. If you cite a statistic, and someone could potentially think less of a protected group (like migrants) because of it, you can be jailed.
The craziest part is that there is no defence possible against this. I brought the scientific studies that I cited to court, but the judge didn't care 1⃣. I also proved that the hundreds of students present at the lecture included students of all different political affiliations, and everyone was able to voice their opinion or ask questions. The lecture went very calmly, so obviously nobody was incited to hatred. But this too did not matter 2⃣, because if the judge says he believes there is the possibility that someone COULD be incited to "a general attitude of disapproval", this is enough for the judge to send me to jail, even without any evidence.
I'm telling you this to warn you that by the time these hate speech laws have come into place, it's already too late. You will NEVER be able to beat these laws in court. You have to stop them before they are implemented. Let my fate be your warning.