Comment by flowerlad
7 hours ago
> billions will suffer from the results
Not everyone agrees with that. Bill Gates, Elon Musk and others think that 20 years from now the world will be "post scarcity", and everything will be abundant. If food production, distribution and preparation are all automated using robots, food will be abundant and cheap, and nobody will starve. The same with housing manufactured by robots.
Gates thinks the transition to that world--which will be the next 20 years--will be painful but the outcome after 20 years will be a world of plenty.
If no one has jobs because robots are doing all the work, we need some sort of collaborative economy, or UBI etc. Musk has proved to be strongly against any sort of progress in that direction.
> Gates thinks the transition to that world--which will be the next 20 years--will be painful but the outcome after 20 years will be a world of plenty.
probably aligns with his life expectancy or something
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50056837
How could we ever reach a post-scarcity society when people like Elon Musk have infinite greed?
The world is already post scarcity and the only scarcity is artificially implemented onto people to keep the old power structures in place. Mainly through two measures: real estate feudalism and income tax.
But this will also pass and people will wonder how they could be under the spell of such idiocy. Much like the Soviet Union collapsed and people just woke up. Much like how the monasteries and churches stranglehold on the economy was just wiped away to the extent that few remember it.
Thats Star trek utopia shit. Absolutely impossible in 20 years, IMHO neither in 200.
Look at how fucking dumb common folks are ie with voting pedophile in repeatedly to most powerful power position globally, how amoral almost all elites are, people are predominantly selfish to the core even when situation is ok, much less otherwise. Next global war in some terrible form or some butlerian totalitarian slavery is way more likely than some hippie kumbaya paradise. I wish very much it could happen, but chance is exactly 0.
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we will all be slapping each other in some authoritarian strong-man pecking order.
I have no idea why Gates would be uniquely prescient here (maybe hanging out with famous pedophiles and secretly drugging your wife gives you special insight).
If we have learned anything from the last 200 years of technological advancement and capitalism it is that capital must be forced to share with labor. Bosses didn't say "oh everybody is more productive lets have some weekends off." No. They fought tooth and nail (including with guns) to stop that from happening.
Tuberculosis is the world's deadliest disease. It is also curable. The thing that causes TB today is unequal distribution of wealth and resources. If a TB drug cannot be distributed to the world to save millions of lives a year, why would we expect this new stuff to be?