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The Real Danger to Civilization Isn't AI. It's Runaway Capitalism

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Re: The Real Danger to Civilization Isn't AI. It's Runaway Capitalism

#71

Post by civilian »

VonGuard wrote: post #38
civilian wrote: post #13

Runaway capitalism, oh shit. So that does that mean: - Global poverty will continue to decrease - We'll get a variety of options to choose from whenever we want to buy something - We'll get to choose how to spend our own money - We'll get quick and diligent service - If we don't like something, we can choose to stop buying it or working for them? The horror!!!!!

We'll also get highly optimized algorithms that sell us things we don't need through the use of psychology and the exploitation of human nature. We'll also get rampant misspending of scientific research funds, which will go to boner pills and hair replacement techniques, rather than curing malaria or exploring space. We'll also have the end-game for all capitalist nations be leadership that is completely bought and p…

And what would your solution be? Because I imagine it would be government control on what we're allowed to spend money on. You are a totalitarian, and while it might be a "good" thing in some situations, that kind of power is quickly and easily corrupted. How long do you think you can last before regulatory capture happens? How long can you last before you're persecuting people for thoughtcrimes?

I'll take the "people can spend money on what they want" dystopia before I take yours. Because the capitalism dystopia to presented can be fixed by people changing their minds and changing their spending habits. Your dystopia can't change without deaths.

Re: The Real Danger to Civilization Isn't AI. It's Runaway Capitalism

#72

Post by lotyrin »

hal9000xp wrote: post #29

Capitalism is danger for civilization? Writes who? A buzzfeed. A very, very leftist media site. How we end up in situation when huge portion (if not majority) of hacker community turned out to be die hard socialists ? (nowadays they call themselves social-democrats) I remember when I lived in Uzbekistan and I didn't have access to internet, I got floppy disk with saved copies of Eric Raymond articles. Once I've read…

Liberterianism !== Anarcho-Capitalism. And Socialism !== Centralized Authoritarian Communism.

There's not just the one polar spectrum of political ideology that's demonstrated by modern politicians and its far extremes.

You can hold both Libertarian and Socialist value axioms at the same time, they aren't mutually exclusive.

Re: The Real Danger to Civilization Isn't AI. It's Runaway Capitalism

#73

Post by pdonis »

tstactplsignore wrote: post #67
hal9000xp wrote: post #29

Capitalism is danger for civilization? Writes who? A buzzfeed. A very, very leftist media site. How we end up in situation when huge portion (if not majority) of hacker community turned out to be die hard socialists ? (nowadays they call themselves social-democrats) I remember when I lived in Uzbekistan and I didn't have access to internet, I got floppy disk with saved copies of Eric Raymond articles. Once I've read…

Your worldview is common, but doesn't really understand where left-wing, pro-democratic socialists are coming from. Like you, we are driven by a deep mistrust of power. We hate absolute authority, like decentralization, and are especially interested in out of the box thinking. Right now, the box we find ourselves in is a capitalist society where capitalist ideology is completely pervasive. The most powerful and dange…

> Like you, we are driven by a deep mistrust of power. We hate absolute authority, like decentralization, and are especially interested in out of the box thinking.

> The best hopes for decentralization lie in genuinely decentralized solutions that give power back to workers, like worker cooperatives, democratic labor unions, and political protest.

All of these "solutions" have been tried. They all failed at your stated goal; instead they ended up leading to enough centralized power to kill tens of millions of people.

The only way to decentralize is to empower individual people. As soon as you form a group, any group, based on any interaction except mutual affection or trade, you are centralizing, whether you realize it or not. That's the hard lesson the 20th century taught us; unfortunately many people have not learned it.

Re: The Real Danger to Civilization Isn't AI. It's Runaway Capitalism

#74

Post by CodeMage »

hal9000xp wrote: post #29

Capitalism is danger for civilization? Writes who? A buzzfeed. A very, very leftist media site. How we end up in situation when huge portion (if not majority) of hacker community turned out to be die hard socialists ? (nowadays they call themselves social-democrats) I remember when I lived in Uzbekistan and I didn't have access to internet, I got floppy disk with saved copies of Eric Raymond articles. Once I've read…

> Now, what I've see is disappointing, I don't like this and it shouldn't be like this at least on Hacker News. We have more than enough people in the world who wants more government, more authority, more religion.

I agree, HN discussions should be more than just saying "I don't like this and it shouldn't be like that", don't you think?

> I imagined "a hacker", an individualist person, who likes to find non-standard solutions to problems, who thinks out of box, who don't blindly follow authority, who likes decentralisation as opposed to centralisation. "A hacker" is a person who almost by definition right-libertarian.

That's a huge jump you made there, from someone "who doesn't blindly follow authority" to a "right-libertarian". Your whole "argument" hinges on your perception and interpretation of what "hacker" means.

Re: The Real Danger to Civilization Isn't AI. It's Runaway Capitalism

#75

Post by TeMPOraL »

hal9000xp wrote: post #29

Capitalism is danger for civilization? Writes who? A buzzfeed. A very, very leftist media site. How we end up in situation when huge portion (if not majority) of hacker community turned out to be die hard socialists ? (nowadays they call themselves social-democrats) I remember when I lived in Uzbekistan and I didn't have access to internet, I got floppy disk with saved copies of Eric Raymond articles. Once I've read…

> How we end up in situation when huge portion (if not majority) of hacker community turned out to be die hard socialists? (nowadays they call themselves social-democrats)

They've grown up. They've come to understand that the biggest problems humanity faces all come down to them not being able to coordinate shit. They've learned that governments, bad as they are, are the natural and one of the few working mechanisms to coordinate at scale. And in particular, they've realized the folly of libertarians who ignore the fact that free markets have stupidly obvious and dangerous failure modes that come from insufficient or invalid coordination.

They've also been observant. They've noticed how private industry took over and utterly corrupted computing. They've noticed that it's private companies who create apparatus of the totalitarian dystopia they feared. They've seen how the market abused people, and they themselves have been disappointed by the market, which left them behind and continued to create shitty computing toys for the masses instead of useful tools to build the future with.

They comprehended topology, discovering that decentralization can be more robust, but is usually also less efficient - and sometimes a situation calls for more efficiency.

But hey, there's plenty of decentralization-loving, government-hating anarchist "hackers" out there. They're busy trying to cook us all on this planet by worsening climate change with cryptocurrencies.

Re: The Real Danger to Civilization Isn't AI. It's Runaway Capitalism

#76

Post by dragonwriter »

sbov wrote: post #51
throwaway1660 wrote: post #3

Just thought I'd drop by with this helpful link about Venezuela: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/17/world/america... There's a first time for everything. New kinds of disasters happen. However, we can identify a number of past and present civilizational collapses, going back to the 18th century, that appear to correlate strongly with what we might call "runaway socialism." It seems difficult to identify a…

> "capitalists" think of "capitalism" as just a thing that happens when property is respected and contract law works "Just a thing" is a conveniently abridged version considering capitalists can only own anything physical in the first place because their government took it from someone else under threat of (or actual) physical violence. The only way anyone can own anything they had no hand in creating is by planting…

> "Just a thing" is a conveniently abridged version considering capitalists can only own anything physical in the first place because their government took it from someone else under threat of (or actual) physical violence

But it's not really wrong, it just ignores that the same is just as true of other economic systems, what differs is simply the model of property rights.

To address the (unfortunately dead, because while wrong it's a point of view which is common enough that its worth correcting, and not present in an inappropriate way) grandparent post:

> Given that "capitalism" is a word used by socialists to describe the absence of socialism

No, it's not. It's true that capitalism was coined and defined by socialist critics, but it doesn't refer to the mere absence of socialism. (Marx distinguished capitalism as much from the feudalism that preceded it as from the socialism he saw following it.)

> ("capitalists" think of "capitalism" as just a thing that happens when property is respected and contract law works),

The only difference between that and, say, the Marxist view is that Marx recognizes that the capitalist system of property rights is a specific view of property rights distinct from other historical and conceivable views of property, while capitalists are prone (as you just did) to confuse their model of property with the general concept of property. Feudalism (and for that matter socialism) is just as much a thing that happens when a particular system of property rights is established, enforced, and respected, and contracts consistent with that model of property are given weight.

Re: The Real Danger to Civilization Isn't AI. It's Runaway Capitalism

#77

Post by Clubber »

chrisco255 wrote: post #47
jonny_eh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are an infinite number of alternatives between communism and unregulated corporate capitalism.

Please show me a country where unregulated capitalism exists.

Cartel Mexico?

Re: The Real Danger to Civilization Isn't AI. It's Runaway Capitalism

#78

Post by nkrisc »

yedava wrote: post #56
hal9000xp wrote: post #29

Capitalism is danger for civilization? Writes who? A buzzfeed. A very, very leftist media site. How we end up in situation when huge portion (if not majority) of hacker community turned out to be die hard socialists ? (nowadays they call themselves social-democrats) I remember when I lived in Uzbekistan and I didn't have access to internet, I got floppy disk with saved copies of Eric Raymond articles. Once I've read…

Wealth inequality leads to a form of centralization of power. One could even say that libertarian inspired deregulation of the past few decades has accelerated this centralization of power. So it shouldn't be surprising if people are looking for other political systems to decentralize power.

I only know a few die-hard libertarians personally, but the few I've talked seemed to be primarily motivated by the opportunity to ruthlessly and amorally exploit their fellow citizens. Maybe they're fringe, but they were the "living in a walled compound protected by their private militia" type libertarians.

Re: The Real Danger to Civilization Isn't AI. It's Runaway Capitalism

#79

Post by pdonis »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #65
hal9000xp wrote: post #29

Capitalism is danger for civilization? Writes who? A buzzfeed. A very, very leftist media site. How we end up in situation when huge portion (if not majority) of hacker community turned out to be die hard socialists ? (nowadays they call themselves social-democrats) I remember when I lived in Uzbekistan and I didn't have access to internet, I got floppy disk with saved copies of Eric Raymond articles. Once I've read…

> I imagined "a hacker", an individualist person You _cannot_ build a society on individualism. We have shared needs that only scale with our shared contribution. We also have _plenty_. We have the resources to ensure the health and well-being of every human being on the planet. We need capitalism to innovate and respond with agility to market forces (when THERE'S ACTUALLY A FREE AND TRANSPARENT MARKET), but we need…

> You _cannot_ build a society on individualism. We have shared needs that only scale with our shared contribution.

And the only way to scale that shared contribution without leading to all the problems with centralization that you refer to is to do it based on interactions between individuals--i.e., individualism. So you _have_ to build a society on individualism: nothing else works.

> We have the resources to ensure the health and well-being of every human being on the planet.

Who is this "we"? There is no single "we" that has all the resources. Nor should there be; that would be centralized power.

Re: The Real Danger to Civilization Isn't AI. It's Runaway Capitalism

#80

Post by kenforthewin »

hal9000xp wrote: post #29

Capitalism is danger for civilization? Writes who? A buzzfeed. A very, very leftist media site. How we end up in situation when huge portion (if not majority) of hacker community turned out to be die hard socialists ? (nowadays they call themselves social-democrats) I remember when I lived in Uzbekistan and I didn't have access to internet, I got floppy disk with saved copies of Eric Raymond articles. Once I've read…

If you don't believe that unchecked capitalism can be a danger to civilization, you've completely disconnected from reality. Also worth noting: your Paul Graham-inspired libertarianism is funny to all of us who are still connected.
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