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This and other fairytales. The only solution here is to stop tying people's value to their productivity. That makes a lot of sense in the 1900s but it makes a
by idiotsecant 8mo ago
This and other fairytales.
The only solution here is to stop tying people's value to their productivity. That makes a lot of sense in the 1900s but it makes a lot less sense when the primary faucet of productivity is automation. If you insist on tying a person's fundamental right to a decent and secure life to their productivity and then take away their ability to be productive you're left with a permenant and growing underclass of undesirables and an increasingly slim pantheon of demigods at the top.
We have written like, an ocean of scifi about this very subject and somehow we still fail to properly consider this as a likely outcome.
- karol 8mo agoThey key is to do it by setting up the right structure or end up with it naturally, not by laws and control, because then you end up in a oppressive nanny state at the very best.
- hackyhacky 8mo agoThe key, as history teaches us, is guillotines.
- ap99 8mo agoYou couldn't set up a lemonade stand using that principle let alone an entire society.
- Sohcahtoa82 8mo ago> They key is to do it by setting up the right structure or end up with it naturally This is extremely hand-wavy. Can you be more concrete in what you think this looks like? The way I see it, we're only 5-10 years away from having general purpose robots and AI that can basically do anything. If the prices for that automation is low enough, there will be massive layoffs as workers are replaced. There's no way to "naturally" solve the problem of skyrocketing unemployment without government involvement.
- NetMageSCW 8mo agoTen years from now, we will still be ten years from general AI or robots.
- ap99 8mo agoSpeaking of fairytales, you're living in your own. Disconnecting value from productivity sounds good if you don't examine any of the consequences. Can you build a society from scratch using that principle? If you can't then why would it work on an already built society? Like if we're in an airplane flying, what you're saying is the equivalent getting rid of the wings because they're blocking your view. We're so high in the sky we'd have a lot of altitude to work with, right?
- IgorPartola 8mo agoImagine a society where one person produces all the value. Their job is to do highly technical maintenance on a single machine that is basically the Star Trek replicator: it produces all the food, clothing, housing, energy, etc. that is enough for every human in this society and the surplus is stored away in case the machine is down for maintenance, which happens occasionally. Maintaining the machine takes very specialized knowledge but adding more people to the process in no way makes it more productive. This person, let’s call them The Engineer, has several apprentices who can take over but again, no more than 5 because you just don’t need more. In this society there is literally nothing for anyone else to do. Do you think they deserve to be cut out of sharing the value generated by The Engineer and the machine, leaving them to starve? Do you think starving people tend to obey rules or are desperate people likely to smash the evil machine and kill The Engineer if The Engineer cuts them off? Or do you think in a society where work hours mean nothing for an average person a different economic system is required?
- thegrimmest 8mo agoFor something to be deserved, it must be earned. What do these people do to distinguish themselves from The Engineer’s pets? If they are wholly dependant on him for their subsistence, what distinguishes him from their god? To derive an alternate system you need alternate axioms. The axioms of our liberal society are moral equality and peaceful coexistence. Among such equals, no one person, group, or majority has the right to dictate to another. What axioms do you propose that would constrain The Engineer? How would you prevent enslaving him?
- carlosjobim 8mo agoIt's already completely disconnected, don't worry about it. Most people who own any real estate earn more in price appreciation per year than they earn in take-home salary from their real full-time jobs.
- s5300 8mo ago[dead]
- thegrimmest 8mo agoWho ever said you have the right to a decent a secure life? People don’t universally agree about this. Some of us posit that we will never escape a state of competition for fundamentally scarce resources. And that the organizing principle of a free society should be peaceful coexistence, not mandatory cooperation. You figure out your own economic security, I’ll manage mine.
- bloomingeek 8mo agoOh my, please rant on. I'd love to hear more about people not having the right to a decent and secure life. (After all, I've often thought that having my life tracked and used my a corporation or government would be a wonderful utopia!)
- idiotsecant 8mo agoThere are already enough resources that nobody should live in abject insecurity and poverty. Your position is fundamentally morally abhorrent to me. You're saying that your ability to take a little bit more for yourself is more important than a child not having polio, a mother feeding her child, a village having clean water. You are, in short, a tiny little microcosm of why humanity is doomed as a species.
- flavionm 8mo agoWe don't need to have every human care about every single other human to thrive as a species. If anything, if we did, we wouldn't be able to thrive at all. The issues you mentioned are, in the vast majority of cases, caused by the lack of peaceful coexistence to begin with, because as long as me and everyone else is coexisting peacefully, getting more for myself isn't taking anything away from those in the situations you mentioned. Resources might be scarce, but that doesn't mean they're zero sum.
- thegrimmest 8mo agoI’m not saying that at all. I’m saying that my right to choose which children I help is more legitimate than your right to dictate to me. That the voluntary nature of our cooperation is more important than equality of resource distribution.