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Dude, You Broke the Future [video]

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Re: Dude, You Broke the Future [video]

#51

Post by tqdm »

Fnoord wrote: post #31
ahartmetz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's fair to call all attempts so far "not reall communism". But you don't have to conclude "real communism would work". You can also conclude "real communism seems unimplementable". It is, after all, a social order that was created purely on paper and from theoretical arguments, which is ridiculous. That activity gives you something to try, but certainly not a fixed solution that you just need to implement a…

Its a typical low blow, akin to throwing all right-wing under the guise of Franco, the Weimar republic, or some other right-wing system. Communism has been implemented on small scale. One notable example in Spain [1], problem is that any large political system eventually turns out to be either authoritarian or ineffective or sabotaged (I leave the guess by whom as an exercise to the reader). Its also been applied in…

Capitalism is actually currently ending the world hunger because trickle-down effects actually exist. Living standards are rising globally incredibly quickly. Middle-class kids in Jordan are playing Diabolo 3 on their computers despite the region having almost no natural resources, almost no water and despite it being troubled by Syrian refugees. Yes, capitalism needs regulation, but it is a lie to say that the entire approach is doomed to be a race to the bottom.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future [video]

#52

Post by dogma1138 »

pjc50 wrote: post #47
narrator wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I’m pretty sure anyone who ever studied Marxist theory even at high school levels knows what that means.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future [video]

#53

Post by api »

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…

I agree, but I'd add the failure of Christian eschatology to materialize at the millennium. Whether openly stated or not this was a huge chunk of the right's vision of the future. There were a lot of people who thought 9/11 and Iraq was the beginning of the end times, which are followed by the return of Christ and the literal kingdom of God on Earth. Now they have their own race war doom, China will eat the world doom, etc. They're waking up to the failure of their own myths as well.

Both the secular left and the religious right are having their "the flying saucer didn't come" moment. The angst comes from the secondary implication that the future is not set and magic will not happen and that we are actually going to have to deal with our problems.

This also explains the rise of neo-Nazi and similar ideologies among not only disaffected former conservatives but also among some leftists and libertarians. (Yes, a good number of the latter have gone alt-right... more than the remaining leftists and libertarians would like to admit.) Those ideologies have at their core the idea of resisting cultural and civilizational decline. I personally think their scapegoats, theories, and solutions are all BS but they're getting somewhere because they are talking about the problem.

This will continue and will get worse until people get their heads out of the 20th century and start articulating new visions of the future. Star Trek and the Left Behind series are not going to happen.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future [video]

#54

Post by codewithcheese »

tqdm wrote: post #44
icc97 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That implies that "vulnerability/fallibility, social reputation/integration, slowness/interpretability, empathy" are not useful for decision making. Until we see intelligence comparable to human I don't think we can make that assumption.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future [video]

#55

Post by arethuza »

rimliu wrote: post #10
LeonM wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a reference to WW2

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

I do think there is an argument that the German and French banks who originally financed the ill-advised spending by previous Greek governments should have done a bit of due diligence as to what they money was going to be used for and whether there was a realistic chance of being paid back.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future [video]

#56

Post by bandrami »

dogma1138 wrote: post #52
pjc50 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I’m pretty sure anyone who ever studied Marxist theory even at high school levels knows what that means.

IDK. I'm amazed at how many people I've met who claim to be Marxist but haven't ever read Hegel.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future [video]

#57

Post by golergka »

gaius wrote: post #21
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…

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?

Real communism was tried and worked – in communities under 100-200 people (like kibutzim). This feeling of community, where people truly care about one another, is detrimental for communism to work – and turns out, millions of people can be shaped into something similar only under a terror and propaganda machine.

Free people will never care about millions of their "comrades" the same way the can care about their 100-200 closest social connections.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future [video]

#58

Post by LV-426 »

bsaul wrote: post #45
LV-426 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 » dictactorshi…

> Capitalism [...] doesn’t aim at making the world a just or better place

I didn't say it did. I pointed out that if you're going to insist that mass murder under a few decades of communist regimes = real communism, then mass murder (and genocide and slavery) under centuries of capitalist regimes = real capitalism.

> Communism [...] invents all kinds of counter measure ( one of them being the revolution, and « temporary » dictactorship).

Communism did not invent revolution or dictatorship.

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future [video]

#59

Post by legulere »

gaius wrote: post #21
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…

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?

It is an old argument because communism can mean different things. What you mean with communism I would rather call more precisely real socialism [1] Now those real socialist states had as their goal, or at least said so to achieve communism: "the establishment of the communist society, which is a socioeconomic order structured upon the common ownership of the means of production and the absence of social classes, money and the state" [2]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_socialism [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism

You could also ask: How many millions more have to die before we overcome capitalism?

Re: Dude, You Broke the Future [video]

#60

Post by codewithcheese »

lowglow wrote: post #26

(My comment will get buried because I'm flagged but whatever) I had drinks with a bunch of Hugo award winners and candidates a couple of years back (2015?) and we started talking about near-future stuff. Mainly that I was looking for more of it. (Diamond Age fans out there?) A funny thing came up: It's getting harder and harder to predict near-future stuff for some authors. I don't understand why. Is it that technolo…

Daniel Suarez fiction works are very on point with near future while also being fun.
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