Comment by bluefirebrand
10 days ago
And we're not talking a 51-49 disproportion, we're talking about a 99.9999 percent of the benefit will go to the richest people
10 days ago
And we're not talking a 51-49 disproportion, we're talking about a 99.9999 percent of the benefit will go to the richest people
Cite?
The entirety of human history.
There are many places on earth where people live no different from what we lived like 10,000s of years ago. You can just go there, you know, you can just do things. You are an adult.
How so?
Thought experiment - Startrek replicators are real.
This basically means almost everything can be built without human involvement. The guy who owns the replicators is the richest.
The wealth gap is so massive you get revolts (because we're educated, not serfs, right?) So then government needs to step in. Either tax->ubi?, socialize it, or make it a state asset?
Regardless, that's the goal of AGI/robotics/etc.
If you can make many replicators, money stops making much sense. You probably end up with energy (if these devices take a lot of energy to operate) as the new currency.
My gut says that _somehow_ the middle class will get screwed as always, but I struggle to articulate the way that abundant cheap goods lead to that outcome.
Maybe because the very few that control the replicators will be able to cut people they don’t like out of partaking from them? That’d make some sense.
If replicators were replicatable, that control evaporates quickly. Remember how nervous we all were about LLM censorship, then suddenly a $2000 MacBook Pro could run pretty great open source models that seem a few months behind SOTA?
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But these aren’t replicators owned by a monopolist. There are a number of highly funded, highly competitive vendors at every level of the stack.
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The world of Star Trek was fully post scarcity. Rich/poor were not things that existed.
They had to get through this before things got better: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bell_Riots
> The wealth gap is so massive you get revolts
This never happens. It's not the relative wealth gap that creates revolts it's the poverty/bad conditions in absolute terms.
If the lower class conditions improve, even just a little bit, there is no revolt.
Ultimately labour goes and works on something else instead. And the availability of free labour makes that possible. New industries and markets develop as a result. But a huge number of people will be left behind. But people will focus on things that were a lower priority before.
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Thought experiments in science work because there are falsifiable scientific theories that make definite predictions about the world than can be tested.
What you wrote is not that.
Yeah, but which tech has not had a homegrown variant that ultimately democratized it? Makes me think of the "feed" vs the "seed" in "The Diamond Age".
Continuing current trends presumably.