5 ms·

I believe all this, and it's terrifying. If AI emerges in the private sector (and therefore under the control of rich people) we might as well give up on the en

by psi75 4y ago

I believe all this, and it's terrifying. If AI emerges in the private sector (and therefore under the control of rich people) we might as well give up on the entire human experiment, because the AI will be put toward malevolent ends and we, as a species, shall fail. The good news is that we probably won't see AGI for at least 50 years. There's a decent chance of capitalism being over by then.

spacephysics 4y ago
The capitalism that’s lifted more people out of poverty than any other system in human history. Hopefully it’s not over.
- Reki 4y ago
  Just because paperclips are useful doesnt mean we should keep making more of them forever.
  - GauntletWizard 4y ago
    The nice thing about capitalism is that it has controls on it, like "Who wants to buy the products", and "Does everyone think that corporation's leader is an asshole and will buy from competitors" that a command economy doesn't.
    - psi75 4y ago
      It really doesn't. The vast majority of economic activity in our system is driven by coercion and need, not want and certainly not freedom. People don't show up to jobs where they take orders from idiots for an exact lower bound of 40 hours per week (but, in practice, often more) because they're freely choosing to do so.
- FpUser 4y ago
  It did and the best time has passed. Right now we have rich getting richer poor getting poorer and middle class evaporating. The way it works it may no longer serve the purpose. Not like there is any viable alternative. We have finite resources and ever growing population. Unless these factors are mitigated somehow (dirt cheap infinite energy for example) we do not have much to look forward to.
- psi75 4y ago
  "Capitalism" is a funny way of spelling "China". To be clear, I'm not saying the CCP is a force for good. I don't really think it is; I'm not a fan of them at all. They do a lot of fucked-up shit. But it is a statistical fact that this lifting out of poverty has been going on since 1980 comes entirely from one country's influence on the data, and that's China. The rest of the world is net neutral, with some losers and some winners. Capitalism only improves human life when heavily restrained, and what we've learned since about 1980 is that even mild, neutered, "nice guy" capitalism will, in time, erode the restraints put upon it... and then you get the catastrophe of the American 21st century... which is probably going hit Europe just as hard in 10-15 years because, ultimately, dangerous and greedy assholes aren't limited to one nation but exist everywhere.
bogdanoff_2 4y ago
>There's a decent chance of capitalism being over by then. Why do you say that? What are you envisioning?
- psi75 4y ago
  Corporate capitalism is going to crash the world in the next 25 years. That we're on an unsustainable course is obvious. Capitalism is basically the sick man of the 21st century, like the Ottoman Empire circa 1915; at this point, everyone's just hoping to avoid the Armenian fate. What's less clear is what will replace it. We could end up with an improvement--post-scarcity technological socialism (en route to automated luxury communism)--but we could also end up with something a lot worse than the current system. There's no law of nature saying that the next world order has to be better than the current, outdated and moribund, one.
civilized 4y ago
This is the dominant history of the next century in certain circles. It's become cliché by repetition and doesn't seem to require any justification. People just vibe with it. Capitalism's doomsday has been predicted as relentlessly over the last couple centuries as the religious version, but neither seems any closer. By my reckoning, anyway.
- psi75 4y ago
  It's not clear who was the first to have said it, but there's a quote that is 100 percent on the mark: It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. We've been brainwashed into believing in the supremacy of private wealth--that we somehow have no choice but to accept the self-asserted superiority of the small number of people born in access to capital. We don't. We could end it in an afternoon if we got our shit together.
  - civilized 4y ago
    I genuinely like the sentiment. But in my lived experience and study of history, the people who want to knock off the alphas mostly just want to be the alphas themselves. All communist revolutions I'm aware of embody this principle extremely well. The closest people have gotten to a large-scale egalitarian society is Scandinavian social democracy.
- VictorPath 4y ago
  > Capitalism's doomsday has been predicted as relentlessly over the last couple centuries as the religious version, but neither seems any closer. From the 7th/8th century until the 15th century, the feudal mode of production predominates in Europe. It still exists in some form today - the United Kingdom (note the name) is technically ruled by a queen, as is Spain, Holland etc. Someone in the 9th century saying feudalism would end would not have seen much of the prediction come true 500 years later in the 14th century. But then the crack-up started. 10,000 years ago slave empires arose in Sumeria, Egypt and other places. Slave latifundias in Italy lasted past the sack of Rome. Someone predicting the end of slavery in ancient Sumeria would look like a faulty predicted. Peter Mills was born a slave in the USA and did not die until 1972. So people here could have met him and discussed this with him. Migratory hunter-gatherer bands painted in caves and carved Venus figurines tens of thousands of years ago. If you told the painter in the Chauvet cave 35,000 years ago that this mode of production would end, he might say that this would be false worldwide for another 25,000 years and that in 2022 AD, deep in the Amazon migratory hunter gatherer bands still roamed. You seem to have a mental capacity on par with by-weekly sprint deliverables, and are looking at your watch for the end of capitalism, the commodity, bourgeois republics, Sand Hill Road VCs approaching LPs to raise new funds, corporate media, the aristocracy of heirs that send their children to Phillips Exeter, accelerating carbon into the atmosphere, dividends, rents, interest and other rentier instruments etc. I'm afraid history does not happen on this time table so you can continue to feel self-satisfied that whereas hunter gathering fell after tens of thousands of years, slavery for thousands, feudalism for centuries - that capitalism enthroned will be the mode of production henceforth and forever. History shows this is not the case. I look today at the inflation, what may be two quarters of GDP contraction, the stock market dive and firms cutting hiring and no one knowing what the year will hold amidst European and world energy potential energy crises, and think it does not look as bad yet as the subprime crisis of 2008 or dot com crash of 2000, and how Marx said such financial crises tend to worsen over time due to contradictions he pointed out, and the economic system goes on trial with each economic crisis. I see masses going out to rally for the socialist Bernie Sanders, and other masses listening to Tucker Carlson and rallying for Trump, neither of whom seem to be fond of "free trade" deals, the international migration of labor, foreign military interventions for capital etc. In 2020 the massive crowds were for the socialist and for the other candidate lambasting free trade deals. Unlike 2016, the establishment was ready and got their candidate elected, someone no one seems to particularly care for. Young people seem to have a change of mind as well. The picture I see is quite different, but so is the timetable.

by psi75 4y ago

spacephysics 4y ago

The capitalism that’s lifted more people out of poverty than any other system in human history. Hopefully it’s not over.

Reki 4y ago
Just because paperclips are useful doesnt mean we should keep making more of them forever.
- GauntletWizard 4y ago
  The nice thing about capitalism is that it has controls on it, like "Who wants to buy the products", and "Does everyone think that corporation's leader is an asshole and will buy from competitors" that a command economy doesn't.
  - psi75 4y ago
    It really doesn't. The vast majority of economic activity in our system is driven by coercion and need, not want and certainly not freedom. People don't show up to jobs where they take orders from idiots for an exact lower bound of 40 hours per week (but, in practice, often more) because they're freely choosing to do so.
FpUser 4y ago
It did and the best time has passed. Right now we have rich getting richer poor getting poorer and middle class evaporating. The way it works it may no longer serve the purpose. Not like there is any viable alternative. We have finite resources and ever growing population. Unless these factors are mitigated somehow (dirt cheap infinite energy for example) we do not have much to look forward to.
psi75 4y ago
"Capitalism" is a funny way of spelling "China". To be clear, I'm not saying the CCP is a force for good. I don't really think it is; I'm not a fan of them at all. They do a lot of fucked-up shit. But it is a statistical fact that this lifting out of poverty has been going on since 1980 comes entirely from one country's influence on the data, and that's China. The rest of the world is net neutral, with some losers and some winners. Capitalism only improves human life when heavily restrained, and what we've learned since about 1980 is that even mild, neutered, "nice guy" capitalism will, in time, erode the restraints put upon it... and then you get the catastrophe of the American 21st century... which is probably going hit Europe just as hard in 10-15 years because, ultimately, dangerous and greedy assholes aren't limited to one nation but exist everywhere.

bogdanoff_2 4y ago

>There's a decent chance of capitalism being over by then. Why do you say that? What are you envisioning?

psi75 4y ago
Corporate capitalism is going to crash the world in the next 25 years. That we're on an unsustainable course is obvious. Capitalism is basically the sick man of the 21st century, like the Ottoman Empire circa 1915; at this point, everyone's just hoping to avoid the Armenian fate. What's less clear is what will replace it. We could end up with an improvement--post-scarcity technological socialism (en route to automated luxury communism)--but we could also end up with something a lot worse than the current system. There's no law of nature saying that the next world order has to be better than the current, outdated and moribund, one.

civilized 4y ago

This is the dominant history of the next century in certain circles. It's become cliché by repetition and doesn't seem to require any justification. People just vibe with it. Capitalism's doomsday has been predicted as relentlessly over the last couple centuries as the religious version, but neither seems any closer. By my reckoning, anyway.

psi75 4y ago
It's not clear who was the first to have said it, but there's a quote that is 100 percent on the mark: It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. We've been brainwashed into believing in the supremacy of private wealth--that we somehow have no choice but to accept the self-asserted superiority of the small number of people born in access to capital. We don't. We could end it in an afternoon if we got our shit together.
- civilized 4y ago
  I genuinely like the sentiment. But in my lived experience and study of history, the people who want to knock off the alphas mostly just want to be the alphas themselves. All communist revolutions I'm aware of embody this principle extremely well. The closest people have gotten to a large-scale egalitarian society is Scandinavian social democracy.
VictorPath 4y ago
> Capitalism's doomsday has been predicted as relentlessly over the last couple centuries as the religious version, but neither seems any closer. From the 7th/8th century until the 15th century, the feudal mode of production predominates in Europe. It still exists in some form today - the United Kingdom (note the name) is technically ruled by a queen, as is Spain, Holland etc. Someone in the 9th century saying feudalism would end would not have seen much of the prediction come true 500 years later in the 14th century. But then the crack-up started. 10,000 years ago slave empires arose in Sumeria, Egypt and other places. Slave latifundias in Italy lasted past the sack of Rome. Someone predicting the end of slavery in ancient Sumeria would look like a faulty predicted. Peter Mills was born a slave in the USA and did not die until 1972. So people here could have met him and discussed this with him. Migratory hunter-gatherer bands painted in caves and carved Venus figurines tens of thousands of years ago. If you told the painter in the Chauvet cave 35,000 years ago that this mode of production would end, he might say that this would be false worldwide for another 25,000 years and that in 2022 AD, deep in the Amazon migratory hunter gatherer bands still roamed. You seem to have a mental capacity on par with by-weekly sprint deliverables, and are looking at your watch for the end of capitalism, the commodity, bourgeois republics, Sand Hill Road VCs approaching LPs to raise new funds, corporate media, the aristocracy of heirs that send their children to Phillips Exeter, accelerating carbon into the atmosphere, dividends, rents, interest and other rentier instruments etc. I'm afraid history does not happen on this time table so you can continue to feel self-satisfied that whereas hunter gathering fell after tens of thousands of years, slavery for thousands, feudalism for centuries - that capitalism enthroned will be the mode of production henceforth and forever. History shows this is not the case. I look today at the inflation, what may be two quarters of GDP contraction, the stock market dive and firms cutting hiring and no one knowing what the year will hold amidst European and world energy potential energy crises, and think it does not look as bad yet as the subprime crisis of 2008 or dot com crash of 2000, and how Marx said such financial crises tend to worsen over time due to contradictions he pointed out, and the economic system goes on trial with each economic crisis. I see masses going out to rally for the socialist Bernie Sanders, and other masses listening to Tucker Carlson and rallying for Trump, neither of whom seem to be fond of "free trade" deals, the international migration of labor, foreign military interventions for capital etc. In 2020 the massive crowds were for the socialist and for the other candidate lambasting free trade deals. Unlike 2016, the establishment was ready and got their candidate elected, someone no one seems to particularly care for. Young people seem to have a change of mind as well. The picture I see is quite different, but so is the timetable.