6 ms·

It is extremely concerning to me how these tech executives are so enamored with Chinas working conditions and all-pervasive data collection as if it was the pin

It is extremely concerning to me how these tech executives are so enamored with Chinas working conditions and all-pervasive data collection as if it was the pinnacle of living in the 21st century. What happened to the dream of letting technology do the work for us, giving us vast leisure time and taking the burden of survival off? These executives seem so driven towards some ever-changing unobtainable goal that I don't think they will be ever satiated with people just... living.

21 8y ago
Their goal is to be billionaires first. Then they can have the leisure life. You won't become a billionaire by enjoying life on basic income.
- tyfon 8y ago
  No but most likely you will have a better overall life (imho).
  - Kurtz79 8y ago
    https://fourpillarfreedom.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherman/ https://fourpillarfreedom.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fishe...
    - vkou 8y ago
      There's a part two to the fairy tale of the Mexican Fisherman. > Sensing skepticism from the fisherman, the businessman moves onto the next boat and finds a more receptive fisherman. The two, sensing an obvious business opportunity, decide to go into business together. They raise a venture capital round and a year later, return to the pier outfitted with a dozen high tech fishing boats. > Immediately, the price of tuna at the pier drops threefold with increased supply, forcing the young Mexican fisherman to increase his hours at sea just to maintain his existing standard of living. > Shortly thereafter, all of the shallow water tuna have been caught and the young Mexican fisherman discovers his tiny boat is incapable of deep water fishing. Because of his limited savings, he does not have enough capital to invest in a deep water fishing boat and he is forced to sell his tiny fishing boat for pennies on the dollar as scrap because advances in technology have made it obsolete. > After discovering that there is limited demand for an employee whose only skills are watching ballgames, playing the guitar and taking siestas, the young Mexican fisherman finds his only option is to take a job working minimum wage on one of the businessman’s fishing vessels. > Several years later, the fisherman’s joints are shot through from the hard manual labor of operating on a commercial fishing vessel and an ill timed lift of a 150lb pallet of tuna finally causes his back to give way, causing permanent crippling. The fisherman discovers intensive lobbying from the businessman has weakened workplace protection rules and the fisherman is summarily let go with only a paltry settlement. > After years of expensive medical treatments and crippling bills, the fisherman is finally forced to sell his land, passed along to him from generation to generation, to a development conglomerate run by the businessman who is buying large tracts of the entire village. > Unbeknownst to the fisherman, the businessman has lobbied for the village to turn into a protected nature reserve, allowing for the rehabilitation of the environment and the restocking of fish in it’s pristine waters. The businessman painstakingly recreates the quaint, costal charm of the village he once visited, making it a paradise where the wealthy flock to when they want to retire into a life of easy indolence. > Finally, 15 – 20 years after the original conversation, the fisherman and his wife are found dead in a homeless shelter. Meanwhile, the businessman retires to the village having made two successive fortunes first in fisheries and then in real estate development. He spends his days sleeping late, playing with his grandchildren, watching high def ESPN ballgames on a 70″ TV, and taking siesta with his wife. He occasionally strolls down to the village in the evenings where he regales his fellow millionaires with the story of how he found an unexploited niche in the marketplace and then took full advantage of it to make the fortune that got him to the comfortable retirement he enjoys today. Much like the original story, this is of course a fairy tale - I doubt the businessman in question would put much effort towards the rehabilitation of the village's environment. Environmentalism rarely improves a business' bottom line - if it did, we'd see a lot more businesses lobbying for it.
  - gutnor 8y ago
    Yes, but not your children and their children. Being a billionaire is prosperity for several generation of your children. The real problem is that becoming a billionaire is statistically an abnormal outcome of that kind of life. Some people have jumped from a plane without parachute and survived. The fact that happened shouldn't be an argument to do the same.
    - tyfon 8y ago
      But will those billions bring my children a happy and stress free life? It might. Or they will fight over it, get pestered by the media, have people beg for investments etc.
- yters 8y ago
  Once they have a billion dollars, what will they do that is substantially different than someone on basic income? I have a hard time imagining things I want to do that require a billion dollars.
  - asianthrowaway 8y ago
    Gold plated lamborghinis
  - SpicyLemonZest 8y ago
    It’s not that that there are particular things you can only buy for a billion dollars, but that a billion dollars frees you from having to think about doing them. When a millionaire wants to take a vacation, they plan it out just like you or I do, even if they’re going to a cooler place or staying at a fancier hotel. When a billionaire wants to take a vacation, they just take it.
    - yters 8y ago
      Seems like a lot of effort to take a vacation...
- alexandercrohde 8y ago
  I think though wanting to be a billionaire is, for lack of a better word, a psychosis. There's nothing that you could possibly want that costs that much. A drive for that much money to me indicates a form of emotional damage where one no longer has a rational relationship with a numeric self-assessment.
  - Tade0 8y ago
    There's nothing that you could possibly want that costs that much. What about your own space station to name one thing from the top of my head? Then again 1 billion wouldn't be nearly enough.
  - cee_el123 8y ago
    The underlying problem with all of this is that money is a poorly designed mechanism for (1) exchange of services (almost all goods are the result of services) between people (2) apportioning of natural resources which really belong to no one in particular
    - kamarg 8y ago
      I'm curious what you see as a better mechanism for exchanging services.
      - FiveSquared 8y ago
        Killing everyone! /s
  - almost_usual 8y ago
    You might enjoy the book 'How Much Is Enough?' by Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky
  - slededit 8y ago
    You think of money as a way to buy things. Others think of it for what it really is - a way to gain influence and control.
- browsercoin 8y ago
  what's the point tho? you are not taking that money into your afterlife.
  - MockObject 8y ago
    It would be interesting if we are indeed judged in the afterlife by our net worth at the time of death, perhaps with our dollars being converted into a heavenly currency for continued commerce. Seems a bit more likely than sitting around playing harps and petting lambs for an eternity.
    - Leary 8y ago
      "heavenly currency for continued commerce" Crypto?
    - phd514 8y ago
      From a Christian perspective, the Parable of the Talents (or Minas from Luke's gospel) describes future reward based not on net worth but on one's faithfulness with the resources entrusted to one. No harp-playing or lamb-petting necessary. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+25%3A14-30&version=ESV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+25%3A14... https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke+19%3A11-27&version=ESV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke+19%3A11-27...
  - samontar 8y ago
    Maybe just because it’s hard.
  - j7ake 8y ago
    No but you live on through your influence and your children, which can be modulated with money.
    - browsercoin 8y ago
      you won't be alive to see it sadly. it would be as if it never existed in the first place.
cee_el123 8y ago
I think this is correct as long as survival is a personal goal. However IMO civilization overall needs all the scientific and technological advancement possible, and then some more - if it is to survive beyond the next 50-60 years. ( 50-60 yrs : a guesstimate of how long the earth will remain habitable )
- gmanley 8y ago
  Are you really suggesting that at the current rate earth will only remain habitable for 50-60 more years? Even the most dire predictions, that I have seen, don't have a timeline like that. Unless we have a full out nuclear war or a giant meteor hits, I don't see how that could be the case. Habitable being that humans can no longer live on it at all.
  - borkt 8y ago
    Maybe OP is referencing soil health? Not saying I agree but I've seen similar numbers there.
    - gmanley 8y ago
      Interesting. We not being able to grow food is a show stopper. I'll have to look into that more.
  - cee_el123 8y ago
    I guess 50 yrs is too dire. However IMO the direst predictions you refer to are probably assuming a continuation of the current levels of resource consumption/ecosystem destruction. But IMO it's far more likely that resource consumption in all its forms will keep increasing at a breakneck pace with every technological advance - thus accelerating the march to uninhabitability.
borplk 8y ago
It's just capitalists pushing their agenda and propaganda in pursuit of "more".
s_kilk 8y ago
Full automation was the dream of the proletariat. The capitalists dream of full emiseration.
- dang 8y ago
  Please keep ideological flamewar miles away from this site. It's predictable, therefore tedious, and usually nasty. HN exists for other things: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - throwaway0255 8y ago
    The behavior and displays in these ideological flamewars have gotten so much worse over the last year, and the pace of that change seems to be accelerating. There seems to be a demographic shift happening on HN, away from rational and genuinely interested technologists and business people, and toward college kids who haven't done anything and don't know anything, trying to sound smart and then throwing a temper tantrum whenever anything political comes up. How a community in aggregate behaves when certain topics are brought up is more than just an isolated event, it's a litmus test for what kind of community it is and the kind of people it is attracting. I think I'm done participating entirely.
    - dang 8y ago
      I don't think that's accurate. The community isn't that different from how it used to be; it's largely the same people after all. For example, the GP's account is 6 years old. What's changed is that society is becoming increasingly polarized. HN isn't immune from macro trends.
PavlovsCat 8y ago
Emphasis mine: > We don't know a perfected totalitarian power structure, because it would require the control of the whole planet. But we know enough about the the still preliminary experiments of total organization to realize that the very well possible perfection of this apparatus would get rid of human agency in the sense as we know it. To act would turn out to be superfluous for people living together, when all people have become an example of their species, when all doing has become an acceleration of the movement mechanism of history or nature following a set pattern, and all deeds have become the execution of death sentences which history and nature have given anyway. -- Hannah Arendt To me that's basically what the driving force of totalitarianism is in a nutshell, people who can't stand themselves and want to get rid of (the agency and the ability to judge of) free humans, and ultimately themselves, consciously or not. Insofar a person is cut off from themselves and depends solely on external validation, colossal projects that are "objectively impressive" are just perfect. Working hours, money earned, daily active users, anything of that kind of metric is great because it never asks you who you are. The more metrics, the better. That it never ends and never quite satisfies is actually a desired quality where the main goal to not achieve something, but to run away from oneself. > The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any. -- Hannah Arendt If you want to get somewhere with others that isn't far off, a nice walk with calm conversations where everybody gets to speak might be a good way to do it. But if you don't care or can barely see where you're going because it's mostly drowned out by fear and insecurity, driving in circles endlessly in loud race cars, while communicating mostly with equally driven drivers over the radio, is so much better.
hourislate 8y ago
Tech executives mostly care about their own rewards and the shareholder/Wall ST. Employees become less and less important in the grand scheme of things. Especially when there are millions of people competing for every position, a way to distinguish yourself in these environments is through either a higher education or being more driven (willing to work/die for your company). I'm sure the burn out rate is high.
ryanmercer 8y ago
>What happened to the dream of letting technology do the work for us, giving us vast leisure time and taking the burden of survival off? See: - https://basicincome.ycr.org/ https://basicincome.ycr.org/ - https://openai.com/ https://openai.com/
ionforce 8y ago
Why is it concerning to you? It's typical for human nature. Out of sight out of mind. If it doesn't directly affect the executive or their bottom dollar, then it doesn't matter. As long as they aren't getting spied on, everything is fine from their perspective. Nothing will change.
- l33tbro 8y ago
  I read the subtext as OP being concerned that the same degree of dystopian data collection and race-to-the-bottom work culture eventually may occur in their own backyard. That's also a pretty common human fear. It's also tricky territory, however, as it's actually an economic imperialist perspective. Ie, pining for a Western quality-of-life reminiscent of the 195X-2008 period all but guarantees that, somewhere else on the planet, swathes of your fellow man will be systematically fucked over to facilitate your bubble.
badcede 8y ago
> It is extremely concerning to me how these tech executives are so enamored with Chinas working conditions That's handy! You could read the article linked above, which presents the opposite picture. “I’m not worried so much about my portfolio companies not working as hard as the Chinese companies,” said Mr. Chan, now a partner at Felicis Ventures. “I’ll worry when they’re less creative and less efficient.”

21 8y ago

Their goal is to be billionaires first. Then they can have the leisure life. You won't become a billionaire by enjoying life on basic income.

tyfon 8y ago
No but most likely you will have a better overall life (imho).
- Kurtz79 8y ago
  https://fourpillarfreedom.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherman/ https://fourpillarfreedom.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fishe...
  - vkou 8y ago
    There's a part two to the fairy tale of the Mexican Fisherman. > Sensing skepticism from the fisherman, the businessman moves onto the next boat and finds a more receptive fisherman. The two, sensing an obvious business opportunity, decide to go into business together. They raise a venture capital round and a year later, return to the pier outfitted with a dozen high tech fishing boats. > Immediately, the price of tuna at the pier drops threefold with increased supply, forcing the young Mexican fisherman to increase his hours at sea just to maintain his existing standard of living. > Shortly thereafter, all of the shallow water tuna have been caught and the young Mexican fisherman discovers his tiny boat is incapable of deep water fishing. Because of his limited savings, he does not have enough capital to invest in a deep water fishing boat and he is forced to sell his tiny fishing boat for pennies on the dollar as scrap because advances in technology have made it obsolete. > After discovering that there is limited demand for an employee whose only skills are watching ballgames, playing the guitar and taking siestas, the young Mexican fisherman finds his only option is to take a job working minimum wage on one of the businessman’s fishing vessels. > Several years later, the fisherman’s joints are shot through from the hard manual labor of operating on a commercial fishing vessel and an ill timed lift of a 150lb pallet of tuna finally causes his back to give way, causing permanent crippling. The fisherman discovers intensive lobbying from the businessman has weakened workplace protection rules and the fisherman is summarily let go with only a paltry settlement. > After years of expensive medical treatments and crippling bills, the fisherman is finally forced to sell his land, passed along to him from generation to generation, to a development conglomerate run by the businessman who is buying large tracts of the entire village. > Unbeknownst to the fisherman, the businessman has lobbied for the village to turn into a protected nature reserve, allowing for the rehabilitation of the environment and the restocking of fish in it’s pristine waters. The businessman painstakingly recreates the quaint, costal charm of the village he once visited, making it a paradise where the wealthy flock to when they want to retire into a life of easy indolence. > Finally, 15 – 20 years after the original conversation, the fisherman and his wife are found dead in a homeless shelter. Meanwhile, the businessman retires to the village having made two successive fortunes first in fisheries and then in real estate development. He spends his days sleeping late, playing with his grandchildren, watching high def ESPN ballgames on a 70″ TV, and taking siesta with his wife. He occasionally strolls down to the village in the evenings where he regales his fellow millionaires with the story of how he found an unexploited niche in the marketplace and then took full advantage of it to make the fortune that got him to the comfortable retirement he enjoys today. Much like the original story, this is of course a fairy tale - I doubt the businessman in question would put much effort towards the rehabilitation of the village's environment. Environmentalism rarely improves a business' bottom line - if it did, we'd see a lot more businesses lobbying for it.
- gutnor 8y ago
  Yes, but not your children and their children. Being a billionaire is prosperity for several generation of your children. The real problem is that becoming a billionaire is statistically an abnormal outcome of that kind of life. Some people have jumped from a plane without parachute and survived. The fact that happened shouldn't be an argument to do the same.
  - tyfon 8y ago
    But will those billions bring my children a happy and stress free life? It might. Or they will fight over it, get pestered by the media, have people beg for investments etc.
yters 8y ago
Once they have a billion dollars, what will they do that is substantially different than someone on basic income? I have a hard time imagining things I want to do that require a billion dollars.
- asianthrowaway 8y ago
  Gold plated lamborghinis
- SpicyLemonZest 8y ago
  It’s not that that there are particular things you can only buy for a billion dollars, but that a billion dollars frees you from having to think about doing them. When a millionaire wants to take a vacation, they plan it out just like you or I do, even if they’re going to a cooler place or staying at a fancier hotel. When a billionaire wants to take a vacation, they just take it.
  - yters 8y ago
    Seems like a lot of effort to take a vacation...
alexandercrohde 8y ago
I think though wanting to be a billionaire is, for lack of a better word, a psychosis. There's nothing that you could possibly want that costs that much. A drive for that much money to me indicates a form of emotional damage where one no longer has a rational relationship with a numeric self-assessment.
- Tade0 8y ago
  There's nothing that you could possibly want that costs that much. What about your own space station to name one thing from the top of my head? Then again 1 billion wouldn't be nearly enough.
- cee_el123 8y ago
  The underlying problem with all of this is that money is a poorly designed mechanism for (1) exchange of services (almost all goods are the result of services) between people (2) apportioning of natural resources which really belong to no one in particular
  - kamarg 8y ago
    I'm curious what you see as a better mechanism for exchanging services.
    - FiveSquared 8y ago
      Killing everyone! /s
- almost_usual 8y ago
  You might enjoy the book 'How Much Is Enough?' by Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky
- slededit 8y ago
  You think of money as a way to buy things. Others think of it for what it really is - a way to gain influence and control.
browsercoin 8y ago
what's the point tho? you are not taking that money into your afterlife.
- MockObject 8y ago
  It would be interesting if we are indeed judged in the afterlife by our net worth at the time of death, perhaps with our dollars being converted into a heavenly currency for continued commerce. Seems a bit more likely than sitting around playing harps and petting lambs for an eternity.
  - Leary 8y ago
    "heavenly currency for continued commerce" Crypto?
  - phd514 8y ago
    From a Christian perspective, the Parable of the Talents (or Minas from Luke's gospel) describes future reward based not on net worth but on one's faithfulness with the resources entrusted to one. No harp-playing or lamb-petting necessary. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+25%3A14-30&version=ESV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+25%3A14... https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke+19%3A11-27&version=ESV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke+19%3A11-27...
- samontar 8y ago
  Maybe just because it’s hard.
- j7ake 8y ago
  No but you live on through your influence and your children, which can be modulated with money.
  - browsercoin 8y ago
    you won't be alive to see it sadly. it would be as if it never existed in the first place.

cee_el123 8y ago

I think this is correct as long as survival is a personal goal. However IMO civilization overall needs all the scientific and technological advancement possible, and then some more - if it is to survive beyond the next 50-60 years. ( 50-60 yrs : a guesstimate of how long the earth will remain habitable )

gmanley 8y ago
Are you really suggesting that at the current rate earth will only remain habitable for 50-60 more years? Even the most dire predictions, that I have seen, don't have a timeline like that. Unless we have a full out nuclear war or a giant meteor hits, I don't see how that could be the case. Habitable being that humans can no longer live on it at all.
- borkt 8y ago
  Maybe OP is referencing soil health? Not saying I agree but I've seen similar numbers there.
  - gmanley 8y ago
    Interesting. We not being able to grow food is a show stopper. I'll have to look into that more.
- cee_el123 8y ago
  I guess 50 yrs is too dire. However IMO the direst predictions you refer to are probably assuming a continuation of the current levels of resource consumption/ecosystem destruction. But IMO it's far more likely that resource consumption in all its forms will keep increasing at a breakneck pace with every technological advance - thus accelerating the march to uninhabitability.

borplk 8y ago

It's just capitalists pushing their agenda and propaganda in pursuit of "more".

s_kilk 8y ago

Full automation was the dream of the proletariat. The capitalists dream of full emiseration.

dang 8y ago
Please keep ideological flamewar miles away from this site. It's predictable, therefore tedious, and usually nasty. HN exists for other things: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- throwaway0255 8y ago
  The behavior and displays in these ideological flamewars have gotten so much worse over the last year, and the pace of that change seems to be accelerating. There seems to be a demographic shift happening on HN, away from rational and genuinely interested technologists and business people, and toward college kids who haven't done anything and don't know anything, trying to sound smart and then throwing a temper tantrum whenever anything political comes up. How a community in aggregate behaves when certain topics are brought up is more than just an isolated event, it's a litmus test for what kind of community it is and the kind of people it is attracting. I think I'm done participating entirely.
  - dang 8y ago
    I don't think that's accurate. The community isn't that different from how it used to be; it's largely the same people after all. For example, the GP's account is 6 years old. What's changed is that society is becoming increasingly polarized. HN isn't immune from macro trends.

PavlovsCat 8y ago

Emphasis mine: > We don't know a perfected totalitarian power structure, because it would require the control of the whole planet. But we know enough about the the still preliminary experiments of total organization to realize that the very well possible perfection of this apparatus would get rid of human agency in the sense as we know it. To act would turn out to be superfluous for people living together, when all people have become an example of their species, when all doing has become an acceleration of the movement mechanism of history or nature following a set pattern, and all deeds have become the execution of death sentences which history and nature have given anyway. -- Hannah Arendt To me that's basically what the driving force of totalitarianism is in a nutshell, people who can't stand themselves and want to get rid of (the agency and the ability to judge of) free humans, and ultimately themselves, consciously or not. Insofar a person is cut off from themselves and depends solely on external validation, colossal projects that are "objectively impressive" are just perfect. Working hours, money earned, daily active users, anything of that kind of metric is great because it never asks you who you are. The more metrics, the better. That it never ends and never quite satisfies is actually a desired quality where the main goal to not achieve something, but to run away from oneself. > The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any. -- Hannah Arendt If you want to get somewhere with others that isn't far off, a nice walk with calm conversations where everybody gets to speak might be a good way to do it. But if you don't care or can barely see where you're going because it's mostly drowned out by fear and insecurity, driving in circles endlessly in loud race cars, while communicating mostly with equally driven drivers over the radio, is so much better.

hourislate 8y ago

Tech executives mostly care about their own rewards and the shareholder/Wall ST. Employees become less and less important in the grand scheme of things. Especially when there are millions of people competing for every position, a way to distinguish yourself in these environments is through either a higher education or being more driven (willing to work/die for your company). I'm sure the burn out rate is high.

ryanmercer 8y ago

>What happened to the dream of letting technology do the work for us, giving us vast leisure time and taking the burden of survival off? See: - https://basicincome.ycr.org/ https://basicincome.ycr.org/ - https://openai.com/ https://openai.com/

ionforce 8y ago

Why is it concerning to you? It's typical for human nature. Out of sight out of mind. If it doesn't directly affect the executive or their bottom dollar, then it doesn't matter. As long as they aren't getting spied on, everything is fine from their perspective. Nothing will change.

l33tbro 8y ago
I read the subtext as OP being concerned that the same degree of dystopian data collection and race-to-the-bottom work culture eventually may occur in their own backyard. That's also a pretty common human fear. It's also tricky territory, however, as it's actually an economic imperialist perspective. Ie, pining for a Western quality-of-life reminiscent of the 195X-2008 period all but guarantees that, somewhere else on the planet, swathes of your fellow man will be systematically fucked over to facilitate your bubble.

badcede 8y ago

> It is extremely concerning to me how these tech executives are so enamored with Chinas working conditions That's handy! You could read the article linked above, which presents the opposite picture. “I’m not worried so much about my portfolio companies not working as hard as the Chinese companies,” said Mr. Chan, now a partner at Felicis Ventures. “I’ll worry when they’re less creative and less efficient.”