Comment by akudha
9 hours ago
Setting ethical and moral questions aside for a second:
Never pay a human again
Every time I see stuff like this (along with other more serious shenanigans like wage theft, union busting etc) I only ask myself the same question again and again - what is the end game here? If much of the population is too poor to buy anything, too sick to consume much etc - who is left to buy anything at all? If all their power comes from their wealth and if that wealth is threatened because consumers are too poor to buy, then what happens? Someone has to buy for the system to work, no?
> If much of the population is too poor to buy anything, too sick to consume much etc - who is left to buy anything at all?
No one. That's the idea.
A low-population paradise. Venice without its pesky people to mess with Bezos's wedding. Bora Bora without the peasants.
There's been plenty of good sci-fi written about this, but surely they know that any any display of power is meaningless without someone to have power over? The wedding in Venice only means anything because people live in Venice and you're still able to "take over". Any "paradise" built like this will never be paradise, it'll be just chasing the next extreme until there's nowhere left to go
> There's been plenty of good sci-fi written about this
Can you recommend me some? I feel like my brain still can't fully internalize the world these people are pushing for.
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I would have called BS on that before but I think now I would just call BS on the part where it was people like Bezos or whatever. It seems there is a neverending number of people who would do the same. Look at the stories about the sunflower fields that had to close down before the pandemic, or the current overrunning of cities and villages in Italy (like Lake Como). Or competing for views on social media (not just attempting to get them). Fighting for status is as old as.... well maybe humanity. What is fairly new is money and real property... and virtual property.
There probably is nowhere left to go. Maybe one of those little islands in the South Pacific but you can't live there and they are all mapped too.
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We’re already heading into a certain demographics crisis. It’s not only about the pyramidal system that retirement is but also about who will be your nurse when you’re old, make your car, be your doctor, etc if there aren’t enough people anymore? Every developed country is well below replacement rate with no real plans from the powers that be to address it because it’s so far in the future that it’s the next best guy problem (30 years horizon)
Eh, you see too many of these guys complaining about declining populations for this to be a thing.
I don't think you need Machiavellianism to explain their actions. These people have everything they could need, but death comes for all of us and they aren't getting any younger.
Purely speculating, but if you had everything in the world (except time) wouldn't you put everything you have into building a future with a 10% chance of living as long as you wanted? What would you sacrifice for that?
Lots of those people complaining about population decline aren't really talking about the absolute number. They're dog-whistling about demographic replacement - the idea that minorities are reproducing too fast and whites are reproducing too slow.
> Eh, you see too many of these guys complaining about declining populations for this to be a thing.
Overpopulation is the best way to get to low population - eventually.
> if you had everything - wouldn't you put everything you have for a 10% chance of living [forever]?
No, I wouldn't, that sounds awfully silly.
> What would you sacrifice for that?
Nothing. I don't sacrifice stuff for BS even if it's 100% sure.
And who is going to maintain this low-population paradise of elites, if there is no one left but the elites ?
Servants. Yes, robots eventually, but servants are the classical answer. The terrible truth is that palace economies are stable -- we see them in "resource-cursed" countries around the world and through time. When a single easily-owned fountain of wealth dominates the economy, a small group of people consolidate ownership and everyone else polarizes around them, forming into concentric rings of gatekeepers and masses struggling to access the only thing that matters. It's terrible but it's stable, and if you're inside the palace it doesn't feel like much of a curse at all.
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https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Servitor
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Robots
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You might be interested in William Gibson's Jackpot triloy - The Peripheral and Agency.
There will always be a certain percentage of the population whose greatest aspiration is to be "house slaves" as opposed to "field slaves". They're the ones that today would be described as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires". [1]
1. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/328134-john-steinbeck-once-...
Slaves. They will call 'em by another acceptable word though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot
how's Bezos going to fund his wedding if there's no population of proles buying from Amazon, nor anyone putting their retirement into a fund that buys Amazon stock? does he just plan to use force rather than money at this point?
Yea, at some point, these guys won't really need the vast majority of us to buy from them. They'll be buying from and selling to other wealthy people.
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Why do you think they're all so into AI and robots?
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The plan is that he (along with a small number of other people) will already own everything. The only reason he currently wants proles to buy things from Amazon is that he has not yet achieved what he considers sufficient ownership of the world.
They need to? The have all the money right now already.
That is in the past.
There is no end game. Short term profits are by definition not a long-term view. The family's future will be secured if I invest in plastics and robot payment mechanisms now. I won't live forever, so I won't get to rest under the shade of the trees I plant for my family. With money and influence, they will be best set up to conquer whatever comes in the future.
The people who advocate this expect to be part of a very small group of humans who own literally everything, so they don’t share your concern.
> Someone has to buy for the system to work, no?
Well yeah, but not human consumers. Businesses can buy from other businesses and that can be the only surviving part of the economy. Even further, maybe those businesses are fully autonomous. There's no reason this wouldn't work, as far as I can tell.
The economy would be much more focused. It would be mostly energy, materials, and tech.
Exactly, it seems many if not most people are trapped in an 1800s ideal of how an economy works. "You do work, you get money, you spend money, you do work" In fact the entire "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." statement is in full force here.
It's impossible for most people to envision an economy without them even though there are economic systems that will work without them.
If a small group of people fully automated all production and controlled it, they wouldn't need anyone to buy anything anymore; they could live off of it indefinitely and produce whatever they needed to in order to protect themselves from the masses. I don't see any obvious reason why this outcome would be prevented by a purely capitalist economic system (assuming that this sort of automation ends up being possible), which in my mind is an argument in favor of some sort of upper bound for wealth consolidation.
I think the end game is to only do interesting things and automate all the mundane parts of life.
We used to have to wash clothes by hand and it took all day. Now we have a washing machine and it takes 2 hours.
People used to spend time washing clothes and now we have more members of the household working.
I think the future from scifi that I remember (eg, Star Trek) is that humans are just being creative. Usually some sort of post scarcity where there’s no more need for money.
If everything is automated away, you won't see a Star Trek style post scarcity utopia because everyone on UBI will have lost basically all of their political power. They aren't employable so they can't threaten to withhold their labor in order to get any sort of leverage. The most they could do is withhold consumption to some extent. If you have a dependent population being managed by the same state that's already allowed wealth to accumulate to its current levels, what incentive does the state have to do any more than the bare minimum?
You actually believe this is what these people want to create?
Why then are they directly attacking many forms of creativity (writing, photography, art, filmmaking, even programming)?
Why do they resist all forms of social programs if these technologies are supposed to create untold wealth (ala Star Trek)?
That's not what the tech bros are saying the end goal is.
> what is the end game here?
They don't have one, outside of trying to hoard as much wealth and power as possible if it all falls apart. I firmly believe that greed is an addiction just like any other.
Why does the raging alcoholic drink themselves to death? Can they not see that they're careening towards the end? The powerful worship one concept at the expense of all others, and that is the endless accumulation of more.
From AZ's perspective that's someone else's problem (i.e., governments step in with UBI or whatever)
No one has to buy anything for the system to work. You buy because you beneficially contributed to the system or the system gifted you some credit. Otherwise, you buying is actually "inflating" consumption for others (ie: the rich). There are billions of people in the world buying nothing and yet the "system" still work. They just want you to be lined up to them next. (or line them up next to you).
there is nothing magically good about economic activity, it has merely been necessary thus far.
once it's no longer necessary and once they can have robot security they will decouple from the rest of society.
they would also require military grade deterrence. eventually they will either steal, buy or make nukes.
https://www.wkms.org/energy/2025-07-25/billionaire-peter-thi...
> A California-based company with ties to billionaire investor and Trump ally Peter Thiel announced plans Friday to build America’s first U.S.-owned, privately developed facility to enrich uranium in far western Kentucky.
The end game is that we're all dead, and they live off their robot slave army in a world of abundance, no poors, and no governments to tell them no. I wish that were hyperbole, but it's what they want more than anything if you really pay close attention to what thy're doing, which as you say doesn't make sense given an end game where you and I are part of the system. When then say "everyone in the future will be rich" they don't mean that poor people will be made rich; they mean poor people will all be dead, or don't count as people, thus trivially leaving only rich people.
I still can't wrap my head around it.
So we're all dead, robots take care of the infrastructure and healthcare, and there's maybe 50-100 billionaires left on the planet. Then what? They drive their sports car, do bungee jumping, sip cocktails and watch ai made movies. They don't have children? The human race dies with them? Or they have children, somehow avoid the trap of inbreeding and their children in turn have children and in no time there's again a billion of "us".
We're talking about a level of control over the remaining humans, them and their friends, that require absolute totalitarianism. Of course billionaire A won't accept to live their life according to billionaire B so it'll be a mess in no time.
This thing makes no sense to me when they can already enjoy everything the world has to offer and on top of that they're for all practical purposes above the law.
> Then what? They drive their sports car, do bungee jumping, sip cocktails and watch ai made movies.
It's helpful to think of the world as if it were a gigantic vacation resort for about 1000 people, and the remaining 8billion of us are just the staff keeping it luxurious for them. They would be 100% fine if the resort didn't need or have any staff.
When you have everything, you want something new and different. The whole Epstein scandal is literally about this, you want to kill babies, r*pe the kids, do sacrifice rituals, etc because nothing gives you sensory satisfaction anymore. In the view of the commenters above, humanity will just be the final playtoy, let's have a little nuclear bomb in that town and film it in 4k, etc.
> This thing makes no sense to me when they can already enjoy everything the world has to offer and on top of that they're for all practical purposes above the law.
It doesn't have to make sense because these are not well-reasoned theories of the future. Thiel, Yarvis and Musk, from what you hear and read on their interviews, come off as drug-addled losers who hate other human beings and anything that doesn't have to do with their hyper-optimized partial view of the world.
I'm not even sure they care about living. They only care about the growth of capitalism. At some point it seems very likely capitalism won't need humans to continue growing, and all humans may be killed off.
There's people that actively cheer this on, Theil and other billionaires may be among them.
You are assuming they are acting out of greed, but maybe they are just doing what they've spent their whole lives doing - accelerating the growth of capitalism.
You have to put yourself in the mindset of a virus, then it makes perfect sense. The point is to consume and exhaust without thinking (introspection), not to sustain and thrive.
btw none of this will be possible because it's a dumb plan and would never work, but it's their utopia.
> they can already enjoy everything
What I love Elon Musk for is teaching me that even if you have everything in the world, you can still be an empty miserable shell of a human, unhappy, unliked, and satisfied with nothing. His example makes me far less driven to acquire more and rather just be happy with what I have. But we should be aware these people could own everything on Earth, the Moon, and Mars and it wouldn't be enough to satisfy them. They're fundamentally empty and insatiable people, it's such a shame so many aspire to be like them or join their ranks.
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>I still can't wrap my head around it.
Mmhm
> So we're all dead, robots take care of the infrastructure and healthcare
Yep, and then there's a few hundred or few thousand kings and queens of the world that can do whatever they want! And no more dirty fucking lowlife scum to worry about (poors).
It becomes sort of like the dystopian future imagined in William Gibson's "The Peripheral" - most of the human race has died off, but technology has advanced so that the elites can self-sustain anyhow. Big cities are haunted with holograms running scripts of people going about their day to make them feel lived in.
> what is the end game here?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_Player_One_(film)
A tale as old as time, power and control, over the means of production and (what those seeking this power and control consider lesser) humans.
If you think they're doing this for "the betterment of humanity," I would ask you strongly re-examine the evidence. "Watch what people do, not what they say."
"The wealth of the top-400 Americans surpassed 20% of GDP at the start of Trump's second term."
https://www.ft.com/content/2472ef5a-798d-4e7b-b4be-020855cf3... | https://archive.today/8X9dw
Comparing GDP to net worths isn’t very meaningful
Its a measure and visualization of undemocratic power and control through wealth and resources.
These guys have already all but built Elysium--just not in space.
They live their lives completely insulated and apart from the masses. They go to different events, they have other people shop for them and transport them around. They don't really interact with us at all. When was the last time you even saw a billionaire in person, let alone talked to one? They have private security to keep us away from them. They only interact with each other.
Several times a year in the USA during the last 15 years with several 'You don't need to knows'...
About 2008 in Hamburg, Germany. Some woman jogging with her St. Bernard dog along the empty beach of the Elbe river at around 4:30AM at earliest dawn(blaue Stunde), while I was tending the last glow of a camp-fire, alone, and she complained about the smoke. I complained back. We complained back and forth for about 30 minutes until she jogged away, exasperated :->
Hilarious!
About 2003 in Gevelsberg, Germany. Some inventor, amongst them tools for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDC_(electrical_connector) (LSA+). Fixed his computers and network.
Interesting. Big house, but living alone, with the exception of some really nice horses. Otherwise no extraordinary luxuries. No kitsch.
August 1988, Neuss, Germany. 'You don't need to know'. Fucked daughter which I knew from boarding school, because she had a crush on me, and her parents wanted to fulfill her wishes.
So I've been invited home for a weekend. Besides riding Freya and being ridden by her with full consent of her parents, I had much joy riding their horses with her in lush greens.
Yeehaaa!
About 1983 in Bonn Bad-Godesberg, Germany. Some Tanya (former classmate) 'You don't need to know', living right next to https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Spinat (been paperboy, and played with the horses), with some Bettina (then classmate(very well off, but not extraordinarily rich) of Tanya) at the same time :-)
Doubleplusgood Fun!
About 1983 in Bonn Bad-Godesberg, some Anja, daugther of 'You don't need to know', really big into pencils, pens, all sorts of stuff for painting and drawing. After her mother overheard what I've been talking about to her, of some extraordinary thing I did, which she got confirmation of behind my back via telephone from the hospital in which I did that, then I had 'carte blanche', and the adoration of her daughter.
Sweet careless fun!
About 1980 to 1981 in Bonn Bad-Godesberg, playing with Max, son of 'You don't need to know' , big into fire extinguishers, living right over the street from me. When he's been there. They lived elsewhere, too. He was also in boarding school most of the times, unhappy about it. Very, very smart and friendly mother, though.
Interesting. Because humble.
About 1980 to 1981 in Bonn Bad-Godesberg, some René, son of 'You don't need to know', Big Pharma by themselves, and the German exclusive distribution rights for other stuff. Very unhappy child, they had it all, butlers, gardeners, security, really big house with laaarge garden, big indoor aviary with shiny hummingbirds. But something seemed to be always 'off', like tension because of domestic problems.
Interesting, because that made it obvious that money alone is not making you happy.
About 1980 in Pech, Germany, near Bonn Bad-Godesberg. One of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haribo heirs. Been watching the compound with the deers, but really hoping to see the private https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_CH-47_Chinook in Haribo livery starting or landing there on the private heliport. Someone came walking to the edge of the fence I casually leaned on, with a rifle or shotgun over his shoulder. Asked me what I wanted. I told him. He said bad luck, it's in Sankt Augustin for maintenance. We talked a little, and he said who he was. I asked him how it felt to be responsible for countless cavities all over the world?
Not good!
Luckily I've been really fast on my road bicycle, and just gave him the bird while speeding away while he cussed and cursed.
Intense!
Certainly, and it isn't enough, is it? It's never enough. Political spending, lobbying, etc. That's the point, the accumulated wealth and their actions are simply symptoms of the dysfunction.
"Just another billion bro." Like a food driven shark, I acknowledge the shark's existence, while wanting the strongest cage possible between us when in close proximity. Never envy, always recognizing the danger and need for self preservation from the paperclip maximizers.
> what is the end game here?
You are asking the wrong question.
There's no end game. They just really hate life and the living. They want you to suffer.
that sort of crappy movie with Matt Damon and Jodie Foster that is supposedly dystopian but far more utopian than the reality would be.
wonder if the overlords will allow meat or only gruel or bug bars like that Bong Ho movie to the survivors. heh but serious.
I think you're arguing against something that is made up by doomers. They truly believe (evidence by the comments below yours) that the billionaire class are all a of one mind and want to eradicate other humans, live in cloud cities, and have robots cater to their every need.
I don't even really know how to start refuting this. It seems to absurd to even start.
I think people think this because many billionaires outright say it. We can’t pretend they aren’t salivating at the idea of eradicating labor when they literally talk about how excited they are to eradicate labor.
Ok fine, I guess not all billionaires. But the other ones are reaaaal quiet.
We have an entire history of rich elites abusing their wealth and power at the expense of everyone else. It's lead to various conflicts and social upheavals. And we currently have tech elites selling the idea of full automation, machine godhood, and opposition being the antichrist. Also they like talking about replacing democracy with some sort of digital feudalism.
How it all plays out remains to be seen (predicting the future is hard), but calling people who point this out doomers is very dismissive and one sided.
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Look at how they fantasize about humanoid robots and you will understand.
Why the humanoid form, with all of its engineering inefficiencies and difficulties? Because it is a thing which can be dominated.
The whole purpose is domination. Ever seen Apocalypse now or read Heart of Darkness? They are little colonel Kurtzes. The will to dominate for these people goes to the depths of their soul.