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Comment by magic_hamster

3 hours ago

Good luck with that. Capitalism doesn't work that way. AI will make money for some companies, but as always, it will be on our expense, not for our benefit. We will get some convenient features, we will grow dependent, and eventually subscriptions will be squeezed as far as we are able to pay, advertising will take over, we will have less choice and worse service.

By then we might not even have computers anymore, or we might have "transparent" computers, i.e. have everything on the cloud and just tell our AI agents what to do.

Sorry Pope Leo, things are not going to suddenly turn into a wonderful utopia, but maybe buy some stocks so you can at least make a buck from what's coming.

Capitalism tends to benefit most people, like capitalist enterprise makes food, clothing, cars and the like and most get some benefit. I'm not convinced by the on our expense bit on the whole. It can have glitches sometimes of course.

  • Arguably, all the industries that you mentioned (clothing, food, automotive) have the same symptoms, doing everything possible to increase growth even (and often) at the expense of shipping worse products. At least, this has been my experience with clothing, electronics, appliances, and honestly almost everything. It's very hard today to find good long lasting products. A couple of decades ago you could expect your purchase to last a while, today - hardly.

What point are you trying to make here, because your post is all over the place and never really goes anywhere.

The pope is not claiming utopia is possible. He is reminding the world of its moral duties within this scope. "Capitalism" is not a system that we helpless atoms merely get pushed around in. How good the world is depends on each one of us choosing to do our moral duty toward the common good. There is no "system" that will, without effort on the part of its citizens, straighten the crooked timber of humanity and relieve human beings of their moral responsibilities.

  • My point is AI is not going to be built to "benefit humanity" because that's not the incentive in our economy. AI might give us some benefits, but like all tech products currently, it will be designed to benefit corporations and shareholders. It is what it is.

  • Nah, I think that's a bit of a cop-out. Capitalism heavily incentivizes competition at the detriment of everything else. You can talk about moral duties all you want, but in a hyper-competitive environment, if you don't do the thing, the other guy will. Societies don't necessarily have to be structured in such ways.