I hope you still feel you arent losing when your job is gone and thus your income and woops there goes your home because you cant afford your rent/mortgage anymore.
Sure but price to income has never been lower if you're willing to move and work remotely (or retire on investment income) somewhere cheaper.
If you want to live in the best real estate in the world and expect to continue doing so when you have no job, that's not going to happen. If you're willing to adapt and spread out you can live better and freer than ever in a hypothetical world where AI has taken most jobs.
Eventually that king will demand more and more. Humans are just fundamentally incapable of wielding that much wealth and thus power. And the pattern repeats again and again and again: billionaires actively lobby to destroy the livelihoods of huge swaths of people, destroy the environment, kill jobs or complete companies, do whatever they feel is necessary just so they can get even more money.
> I wish wealth wasn't treated so abstractly as if it's some kind of universal measure of evil.
Wealth equals influence. So yes, it kinda is a measure of evil. It goes so far as Musk turning of Starlink at a critical moment to help the Russians for example. Or buying access to POTUS. Or donating money to groups to help undermine labor rights.
Basically, the type of person that can get this rich is in 99% of all cases also the type of person that doesnt give two shits about other people.
> Basically, the type of person that can get this rich is in 99% of all cases also the type of person that doesnt give two shits about other people.
This is mostly because we’re ruled by elites that hate us. Noblesse oblige is a thing and wealth disparity is not necessarily a bad thing. What’s bad is our current elites using wealth to enrich themselves instead of planting trees (so to speak) for America.
There are humans out there who are much better than the rest of us at doing things. I’d like the subset of those that care for their people to have money and power.
The missing piece from this conversation is our current elites have made all the elements that produce good rulers taboo. The term “blood and soil” is a big no no, but it’s also the kind of cultural bond that’s needed to produce good rulers. What more noble cause is there than sacrificing for your land and people? Its been a rallying cry for all of human history.
The oligarchs that run society know exactly what kind of ideas will remove them from power and make sure these ideas are effectively banned.
I don't see why influence is evil per se. Gates did a lot with his fortune that seems unambiguously good. Musk also seems to have done at least some good in terms of sustainability tech. Doesn't mean there isn't lots of bad as well, but I don't see that wealth itself is a measure of evil.
If it's true that all these .001 percent of the population are indeed self-serving sociopaths, I'll eat my hat. But I just assume things are more complex than wealth = evil.
I could say with certainty that wealth magnifies the qualities and intention of whoever controls it. And we might argue nobody should have so much power. But I don't see why tremendous wealth could not also be good or neutral, and so with the accumulation of wealth.
Its not. We already see this on social media: creating pictures and clips has become basically effortless and the result isnt utopia, its a massive steaming pile of worthless shit.
They were not opposing automation. They were opposing loss of jobs, wages, dignity in work and all that. And they turned out to be completely right. AI is just the next attack from capitalism in a long line of attacks aimed at workers. And this time its coming for every single worker, given that the explicit purpose is to create AI that can replace every single person.
You think anything they did could've put the automation genie back in the bottle?
Barring massive violence against anyone even thinking about automating something, is there anything the could've done realistically?
We're at the same point with AI now, a bit worse really. People are using AI for _everything_ since it's practically free to shove it at any problem and get "meh" results.
Then they do the math whether "meh" basically for free is better than "decent to good" for a liveable wage.
With knitting machines there was an actual monetary and time cost to getting them running so the adoption was slower.
AI adoption is moving at crazy speeds with no regard for anything. Some of the uses will stick and people will lose jobs, some will be scaled back because "meh" quality isn't sustainable practice.
Boycotting products and companies that use AI in a stupid "meh" way will work eventually, but for some fields it's here to stay because it's just better. Programming is one of them, there's no going back to "stupid" Intellisense or plain tab complete when even a local AI model powered system can pre-fill whole functions with 80-100% accuracy in seconds.
The Luddites weren't against automation, they were retaliating against the capital class. Their demands were to have dignified work, not for automation to go away. They attacked the machines because it was the tool the capital class used to deny them their livelihood.
Not at all. This technology could be deployed in many ways. We have written about benefiting ways it could be deployed to help society for 80 years. It is Capitalism that has decided to deploy it in the worst ways thought up.
University rankings have pretty much nothing to do with how well they teach students, only their research output. And good researchers aren’t automatically good teachers ( and vice versa).
The marketplace is a terrible mechanism for truth-finding except for all the others. What's your proposed alternative that doesn't just relocate the problem to whoever gets to be the arbiter?
Let's clarify, maybe the best ideas would win out in the "level marketplace", where the consumer actually is well informed on the products, the product's true costs have to be priced, and there was no ad-agencies.
Instead, we have misinformation (PR), lobbying, bad regulation made by big companies to trench their products, and corruption.
So, maybe, like communism, in a perfect environment, the market would produces what's best for the consumers/population, but as always, there are minority power-seeking subgroups that will have no moral barriers to manipulate the environment to push their product/company.
There are still small pockets with actual humans to be found. The small web exists. Some forums keep on going, im still shitposting on Something Awful after twenty years and it’s still quite active. Bluesky has its faults but it also has for example an active community of scholars you can follow and interact with.
