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Dude, You Broke the Future [video]

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Re: Dude, You Broke the Future [video]

#41

Post by rainingmonkey »

freeflight wrote: post #19
rimliu wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is reference to Greece and its perceotion that Germany is somehow responsible for their irrespondible spending.

That's a tad bit oversimplified, not just in terms of what actually happened in Greece, mostly private banks being bailed out [0] but also how that whole situation came about. There's been a big elephant in the room nobody really wants to talk about for quite a while now: EU's most successful economies running up massive export surpluses, which really hurt the weaker southern economies [1]. In that regard, it's in ve…

Greeks in fact work the longest hours of any EU state. source: https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future [video]

#42

Post by BjoernKW »

fao_ wrote: post #16
narrator wrote: post #11

Except for the Singularity trashing, this talk feels like a rehash of reading your average Reddit political thread. I really wanted more than that. I think the political left viewed dialectical materialism as their futurism and now that that's gone with the fall of communism there's just doom. Global warming doom. Hyper-capitalism doom. Race war doom. Overpopulation doom. Evil AI overlord doom. They can't see the fut…

> and now that that's gone with the fall of communism there's just doom. The thing is, communism didn't really exist to fall in the first place, and the most advanced countries (Sweden, Norway, etc.) are all putting in place a mixed socialist/capitalist system. Also, dialectical materialism didn't necessarily fail just because a set of predictions were made with it didn't come true, it just means that we didn't have…

> The thing is, communism didn't really exist to fall in the first place

Not a true Scotsman, eh? The same argument can be applied to the current capitalist system, too. Some libertarians in fact do so when saying that the problems we see with capitalism don't actually arise from free markets but from precisely the state intervention in those markets that's supposedly meant to alleviate these problems.

> and the most advanced countries (Sweden, Norway, etc.) are all putting in place a mixed socialist/capitalist system.

It's called social democracy or social market economy. It's still largely a free market capitalist system because the means of production for the most part are privately owned.

> Not to mention the fact that much of communist writing with regards to capitalist failure is extremely "on point", even today.

Like many people being lifted out of poverty in the last decades? Like the average person having a much easier life than the average person just a hundred years ago?

That's not to say there are no problems in a free market system at all but it's not all doom and gloom. Quite to the contrary, free markets overall have been tremendously beneficial to the development of mankind.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future [video]

#43

Post by narrator »

pjc50 wrote: post #36
narrator wrote: post #11

Except for the Singularity trashing, this talk feels like a rehash of reading your average Reddit political thread. I really wanted more than that. I think the political left viewed dialectical materialism as their futurism and now that that's gone with the fall of communism there's just doom. Global warming doom. Hyper-capitalism doom. Race war doom. Overpopulation doom. Evil AI overlord doom. They can't see the fut…

> Their government and their society has a positive view of the future that they are implementing. Their government certainly has a view. The population has to accept that view, because it's not a free country and the scope for dissent from that view is limited. If you're someone who actually prefers to live in a traditional building rather than the new apartment complex? Tough, the bulldozers are at the door. Unimpr…

>Otherwise you get a tiny aristocracy with eternal life and pet AIs to run their security system that keeps the 99% out.

This seems to be the new formulation of dialectical materialism, which is similar to the old one, except the capitalist exploiters win in the end.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future [video]

#44

Post by tqdm »

icc97 wrote: post #27
narrator wrote: post #11

Except for the Singularity trashing, this talk feels like a rehash of reading your average Reddit political thread. I really wanted more than that. I think the political left viewed dialectical materialism as their futurism and now that that's gone with the fall of communism there's just doom. Global warming doom. Hyper-capitalism doom. Race war doom. Overpopulation doom. Evil AI overlord doom. They can't see the fut…

His discussion of corporations being actual, literal AIs in the mould of the Chinese Room [0] I found fascinating. He jokes in the Q&A that he wants an app that finds the 3% of the sociopaths out there. I like the connection to the Book / film The Corporation [1], that labels all corporations as psychopaths. So you don't need an app to find them. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room [1]: http://thecorporat…

The only similarity between cooperations and AGI is that they are superhuman optimization processes that yield considerable risk and that are tricky to control. The difference is that in case of cooperations there still is a human element: vulnerability/fallibility, social reputation/integration, slowness/interpretability, empathy. The policies for mitigating the respective risks are very different.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future [video]

#45

Post by bsaul »

LV-426 wrote: post #35
gaius wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

communism didn't really exist to fall in the first place Come on, we can do better here than the tired old “not real communism” argument. it just means that we didn't have the right data, or perhaps we need a new analysis Ah yes, always followed by “it will be different next time”. How many millions more have to die?

Millions fewer than died under centuries of global slavery and imperialism, which I'm sure you're not going to now claim is "not real capitalism".

That’s a common misconception : Capitalism isn’t as ambitious as communism in that matter. It doesn’t aim at making the world a just or better place, just more economicaly efficient one. Communism is not only an economical system, but it also aims at solving the unfairness that it attributes to capitalism, and then invents all kinds of counter measure ( one of them being the revolution, and « temporary » dictactorship).

For a capitalist, this vision is like blaming the engine for the direction the car is taking.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future [video]

#46

Post by lispm »

narrator wrote: post #11

Except for the Singularity trashing, this talk feels like a rehash of reading your average Reddit political thread. I really wanted more than that. I think the political left viewed dialectical materialism as their futurism and now that that's gone with the fall of communism there's just doom. Global warming doom. Hyper-capitalism doom. Race war doom. Overpopulation doom. Evil AI overlord doom. They can't see the fut…

> Their government and their society has a positive view of the future

I don't think a computerized authoritarian dictatorship is a 'positive view'.

> It's almost all doom pretty much across the board these days.

The Chinese dissidents are in Berlin and enjoy more freedom.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future [video]

#47

Post by pjc50 »

narrator wrote: post #43
pjc50 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their government and their society has a positive view of the future that they are implementing. Their government certainly has a view. The population has to accept that view, because it's not a free country and the scope for dissent from that view is limited. If you're someone who actually prefers to live in a traditional building rather than the new apartment complex? Tough, the bulldozers are at the door. Unimpr…

>Otherwise you get a tiny aristocracy with eternal life and pet AIs to run their security system that keeps the 99% out. This seems to be the new formulation of dialectical materialism, which is similar to the old one, except the capitalist exploiters win in the end.

> dialectical materialism

You keep using that phrase, but I don't think very many other people still do or have any idea what it means. Everyone's moved on to Picketty now.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future [video]

#48

Post by wazoox »

fasteo wrote: post #8
cgio wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask southern europeans.

Southern European here. Could you elaborate ?

That's a reference to the austerity absurdly imposed upon Greece, Portugal and Spain (and soon Italy and France) though it has demonstrably worsened the situation (not for Germany, though, so you may say that it worked well enough for them).

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future [video]

#49

Post by fallingfrog »

BjoernKW wrote: post #42
fao_ wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and now that that's gone with the fall of communism there's just doom. The thing is, communism didn't really exist to fall in the first place, and the most advanced countries (Sweden, Norway, etc.) are all putting in place a mixed socialist/capitalist system. Also, dialectical materialism didn't necessarily fail just because a set of predictions were made with it didn't come true, it just means that we didn't have…

> The thing is, communism didn't really exist to fall in the first place Not a true Scotsman, eh? The same argument can be applied to the current capitalist system, too. Some libertarians in fact do so when saying that the problems we see with capitalism don't actually arise from free markets but from precisely the state intervention in those markets that's supposedly meant to alleviate these problems. > and the most…

There is no such thing as pure capitalism either, because private property cannot exist without all the elaborate state machinery that libertarians love to hate: a court system, contract law, a police force, an army, and the taxes to support it. All this stuff exists to create the illusion of such a thing as pure private property. Neither pure communism or pure capitalism are things that could exist in the real world.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future [video]

#50

Post by ferongr »

cgio wrote: post #5
jlebrech wrote: post #4

"this time germans are the good guys", history will tell.

Ask southern europeans.

Don't ask me, I'm thankful for all the bailouts, debt restructuring and the dragging the inefficient, bloated public sector of Greece into the 21st centrury.
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