Comment by ceejayoz
9 hours ago
> 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.
Baxter's Flood, then Ark. Neal Stephenson's Seveneves, too. Down And Out in the Magic Kingdom is tonally similar, if you like Doctorow, although that explores a different manifestation of disconnection from others. All great for a romp
Vernor Vinge's Peace War and especially Marooned in Realtime both touch on this point of view.
Accelerando remains my favourite.
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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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> Rich white man's paradise
The majority of new billionaires are either Chinese or Indian [0] so at some point you’ll need to update your race-based hatred (if you feel passionately about it) to remain accurate
[0] https://www.hurun.net/en-us/info/detail?num=FTJ5PSSPOWOF
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.
The robots would have to be intelligent enough to be fully self sufficient, at which point they don’t care about people.
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https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Servitor
Yeah. Billionaire techbros and neofascists love to mis-read Tolkien, but this is a much better picture of the future they want to bring. Down to the mystical doom cult of Peter Thiel and the techno-feudalism on Mars that Musk wants.
Of course they’d imagine themselves as the High Lords on Terra, not amongst the untold billions who died eaten by bugs or enslaved by evil space elves.
Robots
And who is going to fix the robots when they break down?
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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.
That makes litteraly no sense. All the biggest companies are driven by middle-class purchases. Rich-only companies are boutique and are order-of-magnitude smaller than mass market companies.
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Why do you think they're all so into AI and robots?
The wars of the future will not be fought on a battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today, remember always, your duty is clear: to build and maintain those robots. Thank you.
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.