Comment by vrganj
15 hours ago
The industrial revolution begot the labor movement, which is what caused greater freedom.
It could do that because of the dependence on labor for production, or in other words leverage over the ownership class.
If we accelerate technology to the point where we sever this dependency, all those freedoms will no longer have the leverage required to extract them. Our lives didn't become not worthless because of the steam machine. They became not worthless because of leverage over capital reproduction, and once that's gone they may well become worthless again.
Technology doesn't cause freedom, or at least not directly. Social relations and power dynamics do. Technology just drives those.
> Technology doesn't cause freedom, or at least not directly. Social relations and power dynamics do. Technology just drives those.
Technology drives and makes possible changes in social relations.
Indeed, that is what I'm saying. But whether things change for the better or the worse isn't up to technology, it is up to social dynamics.
I think you're both right in different ways. Some labour movements were not dependent on technological advancement. Some technological advancements materially and independently improved the lives of people. The contraceptive pill gave women much greater control over the timing of pregnancy. [Its diffusion substantially affected women's investment in professional careers and the timing of marriage.](https://www.nber.org/papers/w7527) Medical and reproductive technologies played an important role in increasing married women's ability to participate in paid work. Those are changes in actual individual choice brought about, in significant part, by technology.
However if we circle back to your original comment that social change (and I'm reading that as some form of communism) is required before technology delivers material abundance, then I feel compelled to remind you that the last 37 times humanity attempted this, it failed so spectacularly that 100+ million people died. I think it's clear that whatever the nuance of this discussion, communism (or whatever aphorism you prefer) is incompatible with scarce resources. I therefore argue that the abundance must come first.
So I think abundance completely changes the game and I think we can all agree on that.
I would argue that if we get abundance before fundamentally changing ownership structures, we will get a handful of people that control said abundance and with that, have basically infinite leverage over the rest of humanity.
Labor will no longer be required for their productive needs, so that handful of people that controls the abundance machines will no longer have any incentive to keep the rest of humanity satisfied, or even alive for that matter.
In other words, if we don't change social relations before we get to this state, we will end up in a world where the Musks, Bezos and Zucks of this world control all material production, with the rest of us reduced to being dependent on their charity.
Personally, that sounds like the worst dystopia imaginable.
I will give you that prior attempts at socialism weren't necessarily successful and a lot of people died, however, I also think that argument requires holding one eye shut.
People are dying from capitalism right now. There's a homeless guy in SoMa that is breathing his last breath as we speak. There's entire villages in Africa that can't afford clean water while Nestle sells it in plastic bottles that pollute our planet. The status quo is not without its own violence and I think that is a point that too often gets swept under the rug.
Either way though, I think even if I were to concede that capitalism historically had better outcomes (which I have not been fully sold on! it's positives have just been more articulated imo, but that's another debate.), we are in a critical moment right now.
If we really believe we're to transition into a post-scarcity world, we need to make sure the right social relations are in place before that happens and whatever we have right now is locked in forever.
All criticism of socialism's supposed productive ineffectiveness becomes irrelevant once the transition is done anyways.
> I would argue that if we get abundance before fundamentally changing ownership structures, we will get a handful of people that control said abundance and with that, have basically infinite leverage over the rest of humanity.
It's a valid concern. We use democracy right now to address inequality. Are you concerned that those in charge of the abundance machines will create their own nations with militaries to prevent other nations from taking said resources? To this I would respond: there is nothing stopping other nations from building their own abundance machines. As we've seen with AI, distillation cannot be stopped. The knowledge of how to build these machines cannot be censored. Here in Denmark I have high confidence that people will vote to build nationalised abundance machines for the good of all.
Perhaps this is more of a regional risk? There are some nations which culturally value individuality. I'm not sure the U.S. would build national abundance machines.
I think I broadly agree with your thesis, however. Abundance is going to force massive social change. If goods and services are effectively free, most jobs disappear. So too does their income and consumer demand, which destroys the entire premise of capitalism. You might be surprised to learn that Elon Musk believes capitalism will cease to function in the next 10-20 years because of this. So abundance will force us to move to a system which much more closely resembles communism. It's the transition I'm worried about.
When Middle American manufacturing jobs were offshored to China, Hilary Clinton famously laughed at them and told them to "learn to code." I fear many more people whose jobs are lost to AI will be met with similar derision. It is only when things get very bad that change will occur. The Star Trek timeline describes this collapse between 2020s-2053.
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