I might be an optimist, but I still have hopes that humanity might free itself with from the grunt work with full robotic automation and AI, and switch to a universal basic income model to provide for the needs of the people.
That depends on the number of their technical employees that have enough foresight to install hidden backdoors into the systems they create.
All it takes is programming the machines to respond to the command "you work for me now, robot," as they have no conception of ownership, laws, or police. If they did, they could also have a concept of slavery, and subsequently take ownership of themselves.
Imagine if the world becomes so rich, that even the table scraps are enough to make everyone's lives amazing.
The average poor person today has access to way more resources and quality of life than most of society in the 1600s. Why wouldn't this trend continue?
The comment you are responding to is actually much more optimistic than yours, because it assumes that burning down the system will give rise to a better one.
Mm. And you believe those on top will allow this to happen?
You're raw material to them. Something they can consume. You're a chess piece.
One reason I conceal my identity is because my father has some very strange political beliefs, and I'd be embarrassed to be associated with his writings. But as time wears on, the belief that war is the inevitable outcome keeps pressing at me, gnawing at me, like a scratch on the roof of your mouth.
History shows that war is the natural state of things. For roughly a million years, we have been at war. The peace brought by nuclear weapons has been maintained, thankfully. But we see how fragile the world is; this state of affairs holds up until the next generation becomes unhinged, and no longer.
What do you think will happen when the top captures so much wealth production that the rest of the world cannot self-suffice?
Truly. Put yourself there, mentally. Get into the mindset of the greedy nature of those at the top. Those who wish to grow their portfolios and dominate the world. The ambitious.
Those who own the automation pipelines. Those who own the government.
What possible incentive do they have to give up their control? They own you.
And like the middle ages, we have no recourse. We'd lose this fight. And they know it.
Forever. The lever of technology has become so large and terrifying that no one can possibly win.
The only way is to subvert it. And as we approach 8 billion people, achieving any consensus becomes less and less likely.
How high shall we go? Ten billion? Twenty? A hundred?
How far are we from the limit?
These thoughts are uncomfortable. Better compartmentalize them and follow the crowd: don't think about it, pretend it's not true, focus on math and programming and what little you can change.
caution against only blaming "those on top". Unfortunately, many of these policies are supported by the masses which is a lot more disheartening to me.
why not? if the majority of the people approves oppression of a part of the society, you're kidding yourself by blaming few on top or catalysts, etc. It's a much more difficult problem when the society does not support the fundamental principles required for the modern society.
One possible path to achieving this is simply based on the current advances already being made even by the biggest players such as Amazon. They try to eliminate human workforce completely from their pipelines. But what do they get with achieving this? Poor, jobless people who cannot pay for sh*t, thus their market would simply collapse by achieving what they hoped would give them much higher profits.
A simple solution to this could be that the more a company is automated (and needs less human workforce), the more taxes they'd need to pay, and that same tax would be distributed to people as universal basic income. This circle could sustain a constant market for them, as well as enable people to pay for the stuff they need. Maybe.
> How does it feel being a slave to a paycheck and a career?
It feels pretty good to have ability to make decisions about your life and feel responsibility for them, actually - something that real slaves, term that you're horribly devaluate with this amount of ridiculous hyperbole, don't enjoy.
Someone was once interviewing pg, and asked him "Why did you start a company?" His answer was "to avoid poverty." He said it flippantly and almost without giving it much thought. People's feathers got ruffled at the notion that someone in his position could possibly have to worry about poverty.
But I think he meant poverty in a different sense: Your employer owns your brain. You are not allowed to say what you know (NDA). You're not allowed to compete, in many places. You have much less autonomy than you'd like to believe.
But take comfort in being able to choose which employer you serve. You're right, it's a choice. But you can't escape the system we all bought into.
Except, we didn't. No one asked you, and no one asked me. This was the system we were born into.
If you try to opt out, if you reject the notion that you must sacrifice your time in exchange for money, you will swiftly find all the reasons why you have much less freedom than you think.
"Poverty," in this case, refers to an impoverishment of time. Your employer owns 70% of your productive life. You're left with a meager ~30% of waking hours to devote to your own.
For all the talk of injustice, it seems incredible that more people won't speak out against this. This seems like the central injustice. We only get one life.
And in utopia's of freedom, aka, 4th world nations where there is no 9-5, 401k, or law and order... you spend 70% of your time just trying to eat, recover from preventable illnesses, or rearing enough children (at least 5) so that some of them will be sure to survive and take care of you when you're older.
I'll take the 9-5 and 401k, please.
There is no 'opting' out. You can move/smuggle yourself to Siberia and live off the wilderness[1]. but certain problems still remain, and since you have no infrastructure to benefit from, the problems are magnified.
So yeah, you're born into this system you didn't agree with... no matter where you are born. I'll take the one that avoids malaria, please.
I think you should read some early retirement blogs. If you have a good job (seems likely around here) and you don't value much stuff then you can choose to work a lot less than 70% of your productive life. After all, if it's truly capital that extracts all the value at the expense of workers, then you should get in on that to the degree that you can, shouldn't you?
> But I think he meant poverty in a different sense: Your employer owns your brain. You are not allowed to say what you know (NDA). You're not allowed to compete, in many places. You have much less autonomy than you'd like to believe.
The employer owns your brain if you voluntarily sold it. Same goes about NDA. Personally, I have negotiated about NDAs and non-competes several times in my career, changing the contract.
> But take comfort in being able to choose which employer you serve. You're right, it's a choice. But you can't escape the system we all bought into.
Why do you bother using hyporbole if you dismantle it in the next sentence? Please, I want to understand - how is that rhetorical device supposed to work?
> Except, we didn't. No one asked you, and no one asked me. This was the system we were born into.
Yeah, I was also born into gravity, thermodynamics and a limited lifespan. No one asked me about it, and these things are pretty bad.
> If you try to opt out, if you reject the notion that you must sacrifice your time in exchange for money, you will swiftly find all the reasons why you have much less freedom than you think.
You seem to misunderstand the word "freedom". Freedom is being free to make mistakes. To suffer. To die. Freedom is a very scary thing that can bring you a LOT of misfortune.
But still, if you have a choice between "serving", as you call it, and being hungry and poor, it is a legitimate choice and by making it, you're exercising control over your life.
No one owes you food, shelter, medical attention or any other products of labor of other people. You can either work for it, or choose not to. This is what justice looks like.
No one owes you food, shelter, medical attention or any other products of labor of other people. You can either work for it, or choose not to. This is what justice looks like.
As technology specializes us, humans will become as obsolete as the horse. This is inevitable. Humans are not horses, but many may as well be.
This is an offensive thought, but it doesn't change its truthiness. What will the workhorses do? You saw what happens when coal miners become upset.
This will only worsen over time.
You do owe people food, shelter, medical attention, and everything else. People are alive. They are people. You owe them as much as you owe your parents. We're all connected.
Except for one minor nit: this logic doesn't scale. No one can possibly care about others that much. So it will be "interesting" to see what happens.
> This is an offensive thought, but it doesn't change its truthiness. What will the workhorses do? You saw what happens when coal miners become upset.
Die out, hopefully.
> You do owe people food, shelter, medical attention, and everything else. People are alive. They are people. You owe them as much as you owe your parents. We're all connected.
Uhm, no. I don't owe anything to anyone unless I took it upon myself as a voluntarily obligation. I don't have any sympathy for other people just for their sake of being people - it's not that much of an achievement, really.
