Comment by beardyw
14 days ago
I think this is far too nuanced. I am terrified by what the civilization we have known will become. People living in less advanced economies will do OK, but the rest of us not so much. We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people will get more wealthy, but very many will struggle without work or prospects.
A society where a large percent have no income is unsustainable in the short term, and ultimately liable to turn to violence. I can see it ending badly. Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?
> Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?
Absolutely no one.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/719111/survival-of-t...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwJQEAI_KE0
I definitely recommend to watch this video with Reinhold Niebuhr.
Sure some things deteriorate, but many things improve. Talking about a net decline (or net gain) is very difficult.
Every age has its own set of problems that need to be solved.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93EJJVAinRc
Part of it is also that when we look back we think of people's suffering as sacrifices that needed to be made. Now that it's us being sacrificed it really shifts a lot of people's perspective. I think we need a better solution than letting a bunch of people get fucked so that some other set of people in the right place can have shinier toys in the future. Society needs to handle these transitions better, especially as technology raises the stakes with mass servailance and nuclear weapons.
It only took 70 years (1880s to 1950s) and two world wars for the world to digest the industrial revolution and reach the 'capitalism lifts everyone' modern Capitalist(ish) era. Just think of the new kinds of jobs AI will enable our grandchildren to have after we inbetween sacrifice. Space yacht polisher. Space yacht teak refinisher. Space yacht eye candy.
FWIW I'm fine with the "sacrifices need to be made" angle in general provided that this sacrifice is fairly spread among the populace.
The problem is that you can randomly end up in a group of people destined to be fucked, and there's no compensation.
There is one thing different though: Technology allows surveillance on a level and scale that did not ever exist before. I would expect that that in turn allows far greater levels of oppression than ever before. And with all payments going more and more digital, if the powers decide to cut you off you can't even buy anything any more. Or get a job. Or go anywhere without being seen and identified by various cameras.
Or, try organizing any kind of movement that those with power don't like. It does not even have to be violent! Here in Germany, as soon as the previous government with the Green Party was in power, a huge never-ending campaign started. Easy - after all, the vast majority of the important media is owned by very few, just like in the US. Funny enough, after inevitably that government failed, turned out the CDU failed many if not most of the promises made, and in other areas does exactly what they heavily criticized.
The point is, surveillance, "soft" punishments, and media control and reach are on a whole new level. Trump wanted TikTok for a reason, and Musk wanted X not for the money that company could make.
The more tech we have, and it's conveniently concentrated too, the worse it can get if you don't want to play that game.
On top pf that, debt and a system of law heavily skewed for those with money, just because of its complexity and to gain access, and no more competition for minds from a block of socialist countries, so no clear alternative apart from obviously stupid ideas most people won't want to vote for, and this "democratic" system can go very far towards being very controlling and restricting for many.
We can see for example in Iran, or few decades ago in China, or since it was founded in North Korea what happens when people protest - and how nothing changes. Now we have billionaires who would love to have similar powers, who don't want to be "held back" by laws and regulations.
Yes, that’s why they are on the race to building the very advanced robots. To prevent the violence towards them.
>To prevent the violence towards them.
"This morning at 8:00 am Pacific, there were 5 simultaneously assassination attempts on tech executives across the Bay Area. The victims, who are all tech executives known to us have suffered serious injuries . It is reported that Securibot 5000s were involved. Securibot inc declined to comment. This is a developing story"
That is exactly the motivation. The problem with being a billionaire is you still have to associate with poor people. But imagine a world where your wealth completely insulates you from the resentful poor.
That notion is based on the misconception that for there to be very rich people, other people would need to be poor — that would resent you.
Economic science has pretty much proven that when the average income in a society is higher and fewer are poor, the economy moves more money and the rich benefit more as well.
3 replies →
Watch, or read "altered carbon" for a taste of that future.
1 reply →
How does a billionaire have to associate with poor people? They can live in a complete bubble: house in the hills, driven by a chauffeur, private jets, private islands for holidays etc...?
53 replies →
There is no master plan, there's a hype cycle, environment and the market.
Humanoid robots became possible and so people are racing to be first to market assuming that might be a giant market (it's cheap labor potentially so of course it might be huge - the microcomputer was).
[dead]
Gaza is kept as a testing ground for domestic spying and domestic military technology intended to be used on other groups. Otherwise they'd have destroyed it by now. Stuff like Palantir is always tested in Gaza first.
The bombs dropped on Gaza are equivalent to six Hiroshimas - I think we can safely say that Gaza has been destroyed.
https://www.bradford.ac.uk/news/archive/2025/gaza-bombing-eq...
1 reply →
> Otherwise they'd have destroyed it by now.
About that…
Isn’t Gaza a mess in ruins already? I’d count that as destroyed aleeady
1 reply →
Sort of. The thing building and being protected is capital, not humans. As Nick Land wrote:
"Robotic security. [...] The armed mass as a model for the revolutionary citizenry declines into senselessness, replaced by drones. Asabiyyah ceases entirely to matter, however much it remains a focus for romantic attachment. Industrialization closes the loop, and protects itself." [0]
The important part here is that "[i]ndustrialization [...] protects itself". This is not about protecting humans ultimately. Humans are not autonomous, but ultimately functions of (autonomous) capital. Mark Fisher put it like this (summarizing Land's philosophy):
"Capital will not be ultimately unmasked as exploited labour power; rather, humans are the meat puppet of Capital, their identities and self-understandings are simulations that can and will be ultimately be sloughed off." [1]
Land's philosophy is quite useful for providing a non-anthropocentric perspective on various processes.
[0] Nick Land (2016). The NRx Moment in Xenosystems Blog. Retrieved from github.com/cyborg-nomade/reignition
[1] Mark Fisher (2012). Terminator vs Avatar in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, Urbanomic, p. 342.
This reads like absolute gibberish to me. The capitalistic system does not function without the motivations of the people running it. Ultimately every decision and action is in service of some human, and his or his group's interest.
6 replies →
It's no coincidence that populism is rising. That's the non-violent way out - electing leaders that are willing to change the dynamics a lot.
Populism can be a non-violent way out, not is the non-violent way out.
As we saw 100 years ago, violent authoritarians will gladly use technology to make themselves look like the populists choice all the while planning to neglect the very thing they promised when they were getting elected.
> violent authoritarians will gladly use technology to make themselves look like the populists choice all the while planning to neglect the very thing they promised when they were getting elected.
And you don't even have to go back 100 years for an example. About a year will do it.
Populism is how you get elected, not what you do once elected. Disregarding current politics, Adolf Hitler was a populist and that didn't go very well, did it? As I see it now, populism means focusing on truthiness instead of truth, charisma instead of competency, and running the country into the ground because those things you don't have are actually important.
Agreed, my two sentences should probably be a bit more disconnected to each other. Not a proponent of populism myself, but that is the way I see things moving
History shows that populism often leads to fascism, we should tread carefully.
People in power won't act out of foresight or ethics. They'll act when the cost of not acting exceeds the cost of doing something messy and imperfect
They'll act when it profits them.
What's stopping them from good actions is not the fear of "doing something messy and imperfect". It's the lack of financial and power-grabbing motivation.
Even that’s giving them too much credit. They’ll burn it all down preserve their fragile egos.
I wonder, will the rich start hiring elaborate casts of servants including butlers, footmen, lady's maids, and so on, since they'll be the only ones with the income?
As far as I can tell, the rich have never stopped employing elaborate casts of servants; these servants just go by different titles now: private chef, personal assistant, nanny, fashion consultant, etc.
The fact that it's a voluntary arrangement instead of forced makes a significant difference.
3 replies →
They already do. In fact, we are all working in service of their power trips.
They already do and always have. They never stopped hiring butlers (who are pretty well paid BTW), chefs, chauffeurs, maids, gardeners, nannies.....
The terminology may have changed a bit, but they still employ people to do stuff for them
One big difference is while professional class affluent people will hire cleaners or gardeners or nannies for a certain number or hours they cannot (at least in rich countries) hire them as full time live in employees.
There are some things that are increasing. For example employing full time tutors to teach their kids - as rich people used to often do (say a 100 years ago). So they get one to one attention while other people kids are in classes with many kids, and the poor have their kids in classes with a large number of kids. Interesting the government here in the UK is increasingly hostile to ordinary people educating their kids outside school which is the nearest we can get to what the rich do (again, hiring tutors by the hour, and self-supply within the household).
They also hire people to manage their wealth. I do not know enough about the history to be sure, but this seems to be also to be a return to historical norms after an egalitarian anomaly. A lot of wealth is looked after by full time employees of "family offices" - and the impression I get from people in investment management and high end property is that this has increased a lot in the last few decades. Incidentally, one of the questions around Epstein is why so many rich people let him take over some of the work that you would expect their family offices to handle.
A lot of it is probably more part-time but, yes, people who are some definition of rich spend more money on people to do more work for them (cleaning, landscaping, accounting, etc.) Doesn't mean they don't do any of those things--and outsourcing some can be more effort than it's worth--but they don't necessarily cut their own lawn or do car repairs.
6 replies →
>increasingly hostile to ordinary people educating their kids outside school
There is a whole lot more nuance here than you're giving the topic.
There is one side that wants to give their kids a good education, they have the resources and the motivation to ensure they come out ahead.
They are not the problem, the problem is the other side of this coin.
Where I grew up there were a lot of homeschooled kids that belonged to religious organizations. These groups had very little motivation to ensure they were intelligent, but instead nice dumb little worker bees that would stay with said organization and have little ability to work with the outside world at large. They were also at a much higher risk of being sexually abused/sexually trafficked as they were given little to no education about sex or risky adults.
I still remember being a kid myself and having to educate these other kids my age because they were missing large chunks of important information about the world.
1 reply →
Who do you think is building the machines for the rich? All of these tech companies are nothing without the employees that build the tech.
This is what the service economy in the imperial core already is.
>We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people will get more wealthy, but very many will struggle without work or prospects.
Brink? This has been the reality for decades now.
>A society where a large percent have no income is unsustainable in the short term, and ultimately liable to turn to violence. I can see it ending badly. Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?
Nobody. They will try to channel it.
I think all signals are pretty inevitably pointing to three potential outcomes (in order of likelihood): WW3, soviet style collapse of the west or a soviet style collapse of the sino-russian bloc.
If the promise of AI is real I think it makes WW3 a much more likely outcome - a "freed up" disaffected workforce pining for meaning and a revolutionized AI-drone first battlefield both tip the scales in favor of world war.
"People living in less advanced economies will do OK, but the rest of us not so much" how is this possible? are the less advanced economies protected from outside influences? are they also protected from immigration?
Not OP, but assuming I am following the argument correctly, I think parent is referring to something else. Advanced economies have participants, who function well in that environment and are shaped by it to a large degree. As a result, if one was to ask them to get food in an environment, where it is not as easily accessible as it is today, they might stumble. On the other hand, in the old country, a lot of people I knew had a tendency to have a little garden, hunt every so often, forage for mushrooms and so on. In other words, more individuals may be able to survive in less developed economies precisely, because they are less developed and less reliant on convenience today brings.
ah makes a lot of sense! thanks!
> We stand on the brink of a world where some wealthy people will get more wealthy
Not to the degree you might originally think. Most of the wealth being captured today is hypothetical wealth (i.e. promises) to be delivered in a hypothetical future. Except we know that future will never come as the masses, as you point out, have almost nothing, and increasing nothing, to offer to make good on those promises. In other words, it is just a piece of paper with IOU written on it, not real wealth.
What that hypothetical wealth does provide and what makes it so appealing, however, is social standing. People are willing to listen to the people who have the most hypothetical wealth. You soon hear of what they have to say. When the hobo on the street corner says something... Wait, there is a hobo on the street corner?
A small group of people having the ear of the people is human nature. In ancient times, communication challenges left that small group of people to be limited to a small community (e.g. a tribe, with the people listening to the tribe leader). Now that we can communicate across the world with ease, a few people rising up to capture the attention of the world is the natural outcome. That was, after all, the whole point — to move us away from "small tribes" towards a "global tribe".
Hypothetical wealth is the attention-grabbing attribute du jour, but if you remove it, it will just become something else like who is most physically attractive, who tells the funniest jokes, whatever. The handling of "Dunbar's number" doesn't go away.
> Trouble who in power is willing to stop it?
China has tried with its Great Wall (meaning the internet one, although perhaps you can find relevance in the physical one too), but is it successful? Maybe to some degree, but I expect many people in China still listen to what Elon Musk has to say, all while completely ignoring the millions of Chinese people immediately outside of their door. It isn't really something a power can do (ignoring that there even being a power contradicts the whole thing). The people themselves could in theory, but they would have to overcome their natural urges to do so.
Welcome to capitalism!
Besides being a bit of a shallow comment, what exactly do you imply here? That capitalism logically implies that the rich become richer? I don't think this is necessarily the case, it just needs a stronger government than what the US currently has in place. (e.g. progressive taxation and strong antitrust policy seem to work fairly well in Europe).
But with how compounding works, isn't this outcome inevitable in capitalism? If the strong government prevents it then the first step for the rich is to weaken or co-opt the government, and exactly this has been happening.
1 reply →
>That capitalism logically implies that the rich become richer? I don't think this is necessarily the case,
It doesn't need to imply anything. It's an ideology, those promoting it will say whatever BS attracts people to it. In practice, what is happening in capitalist countries since 1970s (when they abandoned all pretense) is that the rich get way richer and everybody else is fucked.
8 replies →
We have a lot of people, capitalism values them as approaching zero, anything that alters that valuation (without reducing population) is contrary to capitalism. Capitalism means the rich must get richer, they own the resources and means of production, they take the reward.
It comes to a point where they need an underclass to insulate them from the masses; look how cheaply Trump bought his paramilitary though, he only had to spend the money taken from those he's suppressing, didn't even have to reduce his own wealth one bit; the military and his new brown shirts will ensure the rich stay rich and that eventually there is massive starvation (possibly water/fuel poverty first).
Or USA recovers the constitution, recognises climate change and start to do something about it.
It seems like the whole of humanities future hinges on a handful of billionaires megalomania and that riding on the coattails of Trump's need to not face justice for his crimes.
3 replies →
> That capitalism logically implies that the rich become richer? I don't think this is necessarily the case,
It is necessarily the case. Capitalism is characterized by private ownership of capital, which among other things means that it's possible to accrue it without limit. So the loop whereby the rich accumulate capital, which then allows them to extract even more value produced by workers (i.e. people who actually do useful things with said capital), is an inherent part of capitalism.
You can make it more mellow by heavily taxing the capitalists and using that money to raise the standard of living for everyone else, which is basically what Western social democracy is. But it doesn't eliminate the loop, and thus rich continue getting richer. And more powerful, too, which they use to dial said taxation back eventually.
Isn't that what Americans call socialism?
> very many will struggle without work or prospects.
People always say this with zero evidence. What are some real examples of real people losing their job today because of LLMs. Apart from copywriters (i.e. the original human slop creators) having to rebrand as copyeditors because the first draft of their work now comes from a language model.
Translators, graphic designers, soundtrack composers, call center/support workers, journalists, all have reported devastating losses coinciding with LLM use. And there's no shortage of companies press releases about cutting down thousands of jobs and saying it's because they leverage AI.
Call center workers are bound to a fixed script, they're basically humans who play robot as their job. Replacing this with AI is a welcome development. As for jobs like translator, graphic designer and journalist, it's only the extremely low-end work that can possibly be replaced with LLMs. Not an issue if they move upmarket.
> And there's no shortage of companies press releases about cutting down thousands of jobs and saying it's because they leverage AI.
These press releases are largely fake. "We're leveraging AI now" sounds a lot better than "whoops, looks like we overhired, we have to scale back and layoff workers because there's no demand for what we're doing".
6 replies →
book keepers, graphic artists
I wouldn't let an LLM touch my business's books with a 10 foot pole.
2 replies →
It's regression to the mean in action. Everethyng eventually collapses into olygarhy and wevwill simply joing the unpriviliged rest in their misery. Likely with few wars civil or not here and there
It's not oligarchy, it's feudalism.
I wholeheartedly recommend you buying a new keyboard, by the way.