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The World After Capital (2018)
- toomuchtodo 5y agoPrevious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16788996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16788996
- fouc 5y agoInteresting, a lot more skepticism about post-scarcity than I expected from the HN crowd.
- dvt 5y agoGave this a brief skim, and it's paradoxically both highfalutin and often times plain wrong at the same time. > Computers are universal machines. I use this term in a precise sense: anything that can be computed in the universe can in principle be computed by the kind of machine that we already have, given enough memory and time Yeah, this precise sense is precisely wrong. There are plenty of things computers can't do (and will never be able to do), including (probably) be conscious (see Searle), but maybe even more difficult to swallow, generally compute entropy[1], or compute the spectral gap[2]. [1] https://www.math.iupui.edu/~mmisiure/open/JM1.pdf https://www.math.iupui.edu/~mmisiure/open/JM1.pdf [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.04135.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.04135.pdf
- davidivadavid 5y agoHis point is probably along the lines of "any machine emulating a Turing machine can compute all computable functions." Which of course doesn't mean that there aren't uncomputable functions.
- ctdonath 5y agoHe’s indulging the common confusion of theory with practice. Just because something is computable in theory doesn’t mean it’s computable in practice.
- civilized 5y agoHe didn't say there is nothing computers can't do. Read again.
- jkhdigital 5y agoI haven’t looked at the book, but I don’t interpret that quote to mean computers “can do anything” which seems to be your interpretation. Your second link, for example, seems to be about the undecidability of some problem. The author’s quote clearly refers to computable problems so this undecidable problem is not under discussion here. And I’m sure the author could be both highfalutin and plain wrong a lot, but you just picked a poor exemplar.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hungryforcodes 5y agoThe key word here is "computed". Computers definitely do that -- it's in the name.
- rendall 5y ago> (see Searle) I don't know why people cite Searle. The "Chinese Room Metaphor" is the only real reason people cite him, and it has such clear and obvious flaws that I suspect the only reason it got any attention at all is that it's fun to poke holes in.
- civilized 5y ago> We need to figure out how to live in The World After Capital in which the only scarcity is our attention. This is fundamentally confused. If there were no scarcity of any kind other than attention, it wouldn't matter what we paid attention to. In reality, there are many things that remain scarce, and this is precisely why directing our attention and effort matters. Same as it's always been, really. The mindset that the modern world is all about competing for scarce attention is what you get when you've been breathing the indoor air in the adtech or other promotional industry for too long. Some people don't have food, others don't have access to education, and most don't have access to the best of the things they need or want.
- beerandt 5y agoThe other fundamental flaw is that post-scarcity is impossible, in that scarcity itself is paradoxically in huge demand. And human nature will create scarcity out of thin air where none naturally exists. NFTs, original art, first editions, exclusive neighborhoods, trendy fashion. Even judgmental aspects of society and things like activism & wokeness are basically examples of post-scarcity markets: social acceptance and personal status becomes a market of artificial scarcity in supporting the trendy causes, of which there's no limits on supply, since it's basically the abstract support of an idea. Once everyone's on board with the old-new cause, a new-new cause becomes unique and trendy, and early "possession" of the new cause is the new status symbol, as long as the artificial scarcity holds. These cycles endlessly repeat precisely because there's no scarcity in trendy ideas, just a lag time. But there are always people who want to judge and be judged based on the trendy possessions, even if those possessions are intangible ideas and values/virtues.
- wmf 5y agoPost-scarcity is generally understood with regard to material necessities, not everything. A future where coolness is the only scarcity would be a massive success.
- beerandt 5y agoI'm not so sure- look at how important social connections, status symbols, and power become in places that are already universally wealthy. Value starts to be put in things that by definition require scarcity: exclusive neighborhoods, fancy restaurants with hard to get reservations, concierge doctors, private vacation spots, vip type shopping where the store is only open for you, private club memberships, social-political connections Even most nimby-ism is a form of this. Plus anywhere people are willing to pay higher prices specifically because of who can't afford them. From fancy grocery stores to 1st class airplane seats to golf courses to "VIP status" of clubs to fast-passes/extended-hours at theme parks. It's a lot more than "coolness".
- alexpetralia 5y agoI haven't read this yet, but I want to credit Albert for his excellent posts on the basics of computer science. I found them incredibly educational! https://continuations.com/post/149364248835/tech-tuesday-index https://continuations.com/post/149364248835/tech-tuesday-ind... (He has a similar series on uncertainty, which I found great as well. There is no index so you have to work backwards from the start: https://continuations.com/tagged/uncertainty+wednesday/page/11 https://continuations.com/tagged/uncertainty+wednesday/page/...)
- hirundo 5y ago> We need to figure out how to live in The World After Capital in which the only scarcity is our attention. There's a sense in which this statement embodies the fulcrum of the liberal/conservative divide. The liberal outlook is that scarcity is a largely solved problem, a historical artifact if only we had the political will to distribute resources intelligently. The conservative outlook is that scarcity is real, immediate, inherent in the structure of the world, and at best separated from us by a few days of disaster or revolution. If you believe the former, you can start preparing for a world after capital, because capital has little point without scarcity. If you believe the later, the former program sounds like a formula for the manufacture of scarcity.
- jkhdigital 5y agoOr, as Sowell would describe it, the unconstrained vs. constrained visions: https://www.nku.edu/~gartigw/teaching_files/Weaver%20ch%2012%20Handout%20-%20Constrained%20versus%20Unconstrained%20Visions.pdf https://www.nku.edu/~gartigw/teaching_files/Weaver%20ch%2012...
- mkr-hn 5y agoThere's another perspective that takes parts of both: we're a lot less likely to have a few days of disaster and revolution, and get through it faster and better if it happens, if the maximum number of people have what they need to survive. Think of how many people die because they can't afford to evacuate ahead of a hurricane (if there's enough warning to begin with), or suffer greater loss because they can't afford a home built to a sufficient standard. Guillotines look a lot less friendly under a less precarious lens.
- chillwaves 5y agoSo who are these people that take the "both" perspective because that does not represent the conservative ideology at all -- which is based upon "personal responsibility" aka you get what you deserve. There is no call from conservatives for government intervention to make the poor less vulnerable.
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- Animats 5y ago1. (2018) 2. Previous: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16788996 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16788996 3. This is a self-published thing by a blogger. It's doesn't even seem to be available as a book. The author argues that there is a sufficiency of capital. He's a VC in San Francisco. From that perspective, there is more than enough capital, in that there's more money available than there are profitable investments to fund. This is an aspect of the webcrap/appcrap ecosystem - even the marginal niches have been filled. The other side is the lack of a capability to do some obvious things and make money doing them. Such as building affordable houses. That's not about attention. This guy may be in a bubble.
- lumost 5y agoThere are always fields with too much money. Moneyed interests decide they will spend N Billions on area X, N is decoupled from any technical assessment of X’s ability to absorb N. In such a case the productive assets will become exceptionally valuable, but an on the ground observer might notice that the money isn’t going to come back.
- ixtli 5y agoI haven’t read the whole thing but the premise and how its summarized by you is something Marx predicted and observed thoroughly hundreds of years ago.
- rendall 5y agoDemonstrate.
- ixtli 5y agoWhat? Capital vol 1 and 2 establish how the industrial revolutions lead to post scarcity. That’s what most of his work was about.
- rendall 5y ago> What? I'm certain nowhere in Marx is the term "post scarcity". If that's what he really meant, then it should be easy to demonstrate that with a paragraph or so. Otherwise one could take any good outcome and insist that Marx already predicted it.
- emersonrsantos 5y agoWe can only abolish capital (energy) when we have unlimited energy so we can disregard entropy for a while
- chaostheory 5y agoHe doesn't go into any details as to why he is disregarding resource scarcity in the modern era. He's very wrong when it comes to scarcity.
- wyager 5y ago“Post-scarcity” is imaginary as long as the first and second laws of thermodynamics continue to hold.
- remram 5y agoPost-scarcity does not mean everyone gets an infinite supply of things.
- wyager 5y agoThe only coherent opposite of “scarce” is “infinite”.
- remram 5y agoThat's one opinion. The common one is that the opposite of "infinite" is "none" and the opposite of "scarce" is "abundant". This is also the dictionary's opinion, I don't know whether dictionaries are "coherent" to you though.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Mizza 5y agoBraindead bourgeois horseshit from a venture capitalist without any social or philosophical foundation. It's not even a book, just a bunch of half-formed drivel. Fundamentally, the problem is that he believes that capital is _real_, that it is a tangible "thing" which humanity has now produced enough of, and not a _measurement_ of how authority flows. The fact that people in Flint don't still don't have access to clean water is a perfect example of this, which he brings up, though bizarrely to support his moronic idea that there is enough capital already, so then maybe we can keep our social structures the same but feel good about it by giving some small pittance to the trampled masses at the bottom.
- masijo 5y agoCan't believe I agree with a political opinion in HN for once.
- pydry 5y ago>capital is _real_, that it is a tangible "thing" which humanity has now produced enough of, and not a _measurement_ of how authority flows. This is a really good point. You could also look at it as a measure of "spare" wealth.
- cutler 5y agoThe author needs to spend some time in one of the many economic wastelands of the world. Many forms of material scarcity are just around the corner as the consequences of global warming start become apparent. Add to that stupid exercises such as Brexit and you now have additional, real economic scarcity due to an exodus of European skilled labour. Scarcity of attention doesn't come into it.
- swiley 5y agoMeh. Almost everywhere there is a surplus of labor, the market finally began to correct in the US and people are misinterpreting it as a shortage.
- cutler 5y agoFord paid his workers decent wages so that they could afford to buy his cars. Low pay leads to economic ruin in the long run - a fact the UK is now waking up to.
- Chris2048 5y ago> an exodus of European skilled labour Are skilled workers not able to get work visas? Ireland let it's tradesmen to fend for themselves, and they all pissed of to Oz. Didn't have anything to do with the EU.
- lanevorockz 5y agoQuick warning, we are nowhere near that. The world he is talking about still relies on a population of Tesla Bots.
- droptablemain 5y agoThe author has clearly never been to or is unfamiliar with the many developing nations currently being over-exploited by Wall Street and global finance capitalists. Or even post-industrial America, where they've come and gone with their big bag of plunder.
- pphysch 5y agoThis same book was written half a century ago by another member of the US libertarian elite: Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave (1980). Which itself was a bad ripoff of Zbigniew Brzezinski's Between Two Ages (1970).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- trhway 5y ago>When we were foragers, food was scarce. During the agrarian age, it was land. Following the industrial revolution, capital became scarce. as a result we have people who are hungry, don't have land nor capital. >With digital technologies scarcity is shifting once more. definitely. In addition to concentrating material wealth, real estate and capital, the elite is also getting digital power over the rest of us. That digital power, i.e. lack of it, is that new scarcity. You're watched, tracked, predicted, scored, etc. while you're completely powerless over it.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- CptFribble 5y agoI would argue the opposite, that the limiting factor of progress actually IS capital at the moment - but not capital in a total-floating-around-sense, but rather how much capital the average person has access to. Literally everyone is talking about the pandemic-induced economic crisis all the time now, about how businesses are going under, minimum wage workers are walking off and looking for better pay, people are losing their homes because they can't make rent/mortgage. The $15/hr argument is still ongoing, the student debt crisis is mentioned often, and most of all the housing affordability crisis, specifically the growing awareness in the media and homeowning public that minimum wage is not enough to pay for a median 1-bedroom rental in almost 100% of counties in the USA. All of these stories of the current moment have a common theme: the people in question don't have enough capital. So maybe the author of this article was living in a bubble back in 2018 - many of the things I mentioned were just as true 3 years ago as they are today, but since the mainstream of boomer homeowning voters was doing ok we never heard about the millions of Americans who were working two 8/hr jobs and barely making it. Hopefully the present reality has relieved the author of their delusions.
- shenbomo 5y agoThe author narrowly defines "capital" as the context of the argument: "... industrialization shifted scarcity from land to capital (which throughout The World After Capital refers to physical capital, such as machines and buildings, unless otherwise noted)." Seems a lot of comments here assumes the broader definition of "capital", just want to point out...
- bikamonki 5y agoMade it past the intro. His ideas are debatable; however, I'm gonna go a bit ad-hominem here: why do we tend to put rich and smart in the same box? Increasingly, I see guys who 'made it' (maybe sheer luck or timing) being cast as authorities on solving the world's problems. Is it because cash is king?
- defaultprimate 5y agoThere will never be a world without capital because human capital will always be present and critical.
- MaysonL 5y agohttps://brucesterling.tumblr.com/image/661056847548121088 https://brucesterling.tumblr.com/image/661056847548121088