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If you've ever spent time working "among the people" - like, in a factory, or running a cash register, or cleaning toilets - you'd know that most people aren't
by brandonmenc 11y ago
If you've ever spent time working "among the people" - like, in a factory, or running a cash register, or cleaning toilets - you'd know that most people aren't smart enough to "build wealth for themselves."
In fact, most of them (and likely also you) are alive only because modern society is full of rubber bumpers and safety nets. I don't mean things like Social Security - I mean things like grocery stores and municipal water.
This isn't a bad thing, and it doesn't mean those people aren't good, or not worthy of basic human care and comfort. After the robots take their jobs, we need to give them a guaranteed basic income or they'll be dying in the streets.
There's nothing arrogant about acknowledging that - I think it's arrogant to assume that every person is smart enough (like you) to take care of themselves in a shockingly changed economy.
- hmahncke 11y agoPretty sure everyone on HN is only alive because modern society is full of rubber bumpers and safety nets like grocery stores and municipal water.
- disgruntledphd2 11y agoThe water and sanitation, particularly.
- brandonmenc 11y agoExactly. But that stuff isn't free - you still need money to exchange for groceries because you've spent generations specializing in factory work and forgot how to hunt. A lot of people are going to need hand outs so they can maintain access to these "rubber bumpers" that they're unable to provide for themselves.
- James001 11y agoMy, don't you sound like an arrogant twat
- brandonmenc 11y agoI don't know, here I am on HN admitting that (many years ago) I did janitorial work third shift. Am I still arrogant?
- api 11y agoThat's pretty blunt, but you are pointing out something real: all traits including intelligence are normally distributed, and the average IQ is 100. Nobody wants to talk about this for the same reason that the abused wife and children who live under a borderline-psychotic alcoholic father don't talk about it: it's "reality," and we don't feel like there's anything we can do about it, and talking about it threatens our coping mechanisms. The human ability to not see is prodigious, probably an adaptation that has arisen precisely to help us cope with our condition. I once heard an anecdote from a psychologist about a woman who was raped by her father in the bed with her mother, and the mother claims to have seen nothing. In our case the abusive father is "nature," a soulless chthonic process that did not think about the ethics of imbuing the agents in a Darwinian system with self-awareness, empathy, and consciousness. As far as we can see it just happened as a result of runaway evolution for central nervous system capability. So nature builds random assortments of genes and throws them at the wall. Never mind that these "agents" experience their existence. If you happen to be born with no legs, then... well... you are born with no legs. If you happen to be born with a less efficient brain that makes the world a bewildering haze of incomprehensibly complex systems that all seem arrayed against you, then... too bad. You're just a trial permutation in an algorithm. Watch the film Dark City. That is the human condition, only it's not being done to us by creepy aliens but by an unconscious natural process. I happen to think we might be able to do something about this this century, and that Silicon Valley might have some part in that. But the irony is that the sort of folks who write screeds like this Medium piece would be the first to shriek and condemn any attempt to interfere with holy Nature and its blessed bell curve distribution of genetic traits. Even talking about it is threatening our coping mechanisms. Society is getting more complex, but our genes are not changing that fast (if at all). Eventually a huge number of people are going to fall off a cliff where the economic value of their labor in a free market is <=0. That's actually completely disastrous for the entire economy, since it will cause the velocity of money to collapse and lead to political and social instability. Guaranteed minimum income is one way of dealing with this problem. Personally I think CRISPR is another. It's time to open our eyes and start doing something about our condition.
- thaw13579 11y agoMaybe it's not "threatening a coping mechanism" but remembering how eugenics played out last century?
- thaw13579 11y agoI don't think arrogant means what you think it means
- brandonmenc 11y agoI mean that the author has an arrogant attitude about humanity as a whole, believing that all members are capable of doing more than soon-to-be automated tasks.