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Because America values money above everything else. Ask anyone outside America, and that is immediately clear to them. Yet Americans are so imbued with the no

Because America values money above everything else. Ask anyone outside America, and that is immediately clear to them. Yet Americans are so imbued with the normalization of transactionality in all aspects of life that they can't really understand why it's not ok that the pursuit of happiness has become simply the pursuit of riches. Want another example? Look at how y'all consider poverty as basically a personal bad choice.

0_____0 1y ago
The AI boosters are sort of telling. Their bull case is that AGI/robotics could replace 100% of global GDP, which doesn't seem to register as a weird thing to want. Replace all labor on the planet and I'll be stinking rich!! That's an insane thing to want, regardless of whether it's even possible.
- ElevenLathe 1y ago
  IMO it's a reasonable thing to want /alongside a massive and historic global reform package that redistributes the massive windfall it represents/. Wanting to replace all human labor under our current political economy is just a thinly-veiled wish for mass suffering, chaos, and death.
  - camillomiller 1y ago
    The second part of your first sentence is like a full-on universe that they haven't even started to consider, which invalidates the first part completely.
9rx 1y ago
But actually, it's because people have a limit on how many other people they can keep track of. Robin Dunbar, of Dunbar's number fame, suggested the limits were around 500 people as acquaintances and around 1,500 people whom you could recognize. Beyond that, other people may as well not exist. When communication at a distance was hard and the world was more insular, the faces you'd recognize would be mostly of people in your community. Still, even within a community, you were going to take more interest in the local movers and shakers over the hobo on the street. Our modern, interconnected global village just scales that up. We still focus on the movers and shakers and ignore the hobos just the same. But now, instead of everyone in a community recognizing the same 600 locals, everyone in the world now recognizes the same 600 people. Which is also how they become so rich. Need to buy a widget? You're not going to seek out a hobo to see if he has any in his beat up old shopping cart, are you? (well most won't, anyway) You're going to go to straight to the guy you already know. When communities were insular that meant some small number of people in the community were richer than the rest, but there was a pretty hard limit on how rich they could become when there were only so many local buyers. The difference now is, again, a matter of scale. When the entire world wants to buy from the same person, that hard limit becomes multiplied by a very large multiplier.
sharts 1y ago
In America it seems the pursuit of happiness requires pursuit of riches. Just the fact that there is very little social safety net, people can go homeless due to medical bills, and the whole pull yourself up from your own bootstraps (because socialism and bailouts are only reserved for the wealthy and connected) —it seems obvious that valuing money becomes the main concern. Without the money you can’t really live let along thrive or be happy without constant anxiety.

0_____0 1y ago

The AI boosters are sort of telling. Their bull case is that AGI/robotics could replace 100% of global GDP, which doesn't seem to register as a weird thing to want. Replace all labor on the planet and I'll be stinking rich!! That's an insane thing to want, regardless of whether it's even possible.

ElevenLathe 1y ago
IMO it's a reasonable thing to want /alongside a massive and historic global reform package that redistributes the massive windfall it represents/. Wanting to replace all human labor under our current political economy is just a thinly-veiled wish for mass suffering, chaos, and death.
- camillomiller 1y ago
  The second part of your first sentence is like a full-on universe that they haven't even started to consider, which invalidates the first part completely.

9rx 1y ago

But actually, it's because people have a limit on how many other people they can keep track of. Robin Dunbar, of Dunbar's number fame, suggested the limits were around 500 people as acquaintances and around 1,500 people whom you could recognize. Beyond that, other people may as well not exist. When communication at a distance was hard and the world was more insular, the faces you'd recognize would be mostly of people in your community. Still, even within a community, you were going to take more interest in the local movers and shakers over the hobo on the street. Our modern, interconnected global village just scales that up. We still focus on the movers and shakers and ignore the hobos just the same. But now, instead of everyone in a community recognizing the same 600 locals, everyone in the world now recognizes the same 600 people. Which is also how they become so rich. Need to buy a widget? You're not going to seek out a hobo to see if he has any in his beat up old shopping cart, are you? (well most won't, anyway) You're going to go to straight to the guy you already know. When communities were insular that meant some small number of people in the community were richer than the rest, but there was a pretty hard limit on how rich they could become when there were only so many local buyers. The difference now is, again, a matter of scale. When the entire world wants to buy from the same person, that hard limit becomes multiplied by a very large multiplier.

sharts 1y ago

In America it seems the pursuit of happiness requires pursuit of riches. Just the fact that there is very little social safety net, people can go homeless due to medical bills, and the whole pull yourself up from your own bootstraps (because socialism and bailouts are only reserved for the wealthy and connected) —it seems obvious that valuing money becomes the main concern. Without the money you can’t really live let along thrive or be happy without constant anxiety.