121–130 of 267 posts
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Guess what. In Tallinn, Estonia public transport is free for city residents.
It's not free. You pay it with your taxes.
Personally, I think a future where AI can do most jobs is frightening. It will be run by a group of relatively few elites that are involved in power struggles for control of the AI and the rest of us that do stuff like pick fruit (assuming it's cheaper than having an AI do it) and serve as cannon fodder in the AI armies. I find people who believe that it will lead to some kind of Utopia horribly naive and they have n…
We went through a comparable transition from most people working in agriculture and farming to that being automated away and people doing stuff that hadn't been much worried about before. Given human nature hasn't changed I imagine it will be similar.
If you live in the USA and Europe, you are the recipient of generations of global technological dominance. It's hard to understand the possibility of being on the other side of that.
IF the answer is government, please just stop. A central ruling class? This has always ended badly. If the answer is private enterprise, ask why accept the role you have chosen and instead work to accumulate the goods you can provide as services. Then you have freedom - from rents, from control, and the removal of spontaneity.
"""
A just machine to make big decisions
Programmed by fellas with compassion and vision
We'll be clean when their work is done
We'll be eternally free, yes, and eternally young
"""
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My going rule of thumb is that any "good" fictive dystopia always starts off as being someone else's utopia, only it becomes compulsory. This in turn leads to any deficiencies or problems in the utopia needing to be papered over, ignored, and so forth because it is compulsory. This causes yet more distortions and away we go. It's like all of those breathless journo articles about insect protein: they sound fine until…
I like the Brave New World approach to distopia. It's kind of hard to argue with the world as presented because the people in it are happy/content, it seems sustainable, safe, etc. Yet, as a present-day reader with a present-day moral lens, it seems horrific and unjust.
Personally, I think a future where AI can do most jobs is frightening. It will be run by a group of relatively few elites that are involved in power struggles for control of the AI and the rest of us that do stuff like pick fruit (assuming it's cheaper than having an AI do it) and serve as cannon fodder in the AI armies. I find people who believe that it will lead to some kind of Utopia horribly naive and they have n…
You have used technology right?
You know it is all mostly shit that breaks down, crashes, and gets replaced and thrown out on an 18 month cycle?
What I think lots of people get wrong is forgetting just how crappy consumer tech is, and industrial/military isn't far behind. We may get AI working well in 5-25 years, but I doubt deployments will be any less buggy.
Repairing & provisioning the billions of bots will be most of the "tech" jobs. Think like the IT dept at your company that hands out new laptops, times a million.
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This is critical. As long as we operate in a highly competitive climate, private ownership and rights associated with it become a necessity. Ownership not only legally guarantees your rights but denies others rights (your competition). Even with a well optimized sharing economy inside a highly competitive environment, you'll look for ways to break the optimization process favorable to yourself. If everything schedule…
I feel that "post scarcity" requires some definition. In the west very few people go hungry and the vast majority of people have a mobile phone - something that was an expensive status item just a couple of decades ago. It feels like if we made everything "post scarcity" by today's standard, we would have a load more things that people would be striving to acquire. On the other hand maybe post scarcity is what some b…
"I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me." -- This gave me a feeling that I am unable to put into words.
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We went through a comparable transition from most people working in agriculture and farming to that being automated away and people doing stuff that hadn't been much worried about before. Given human nature hasn't changed I imagine it will be similar.
And then again during the industrial revolution and consequent automation, where the work previously done by 10 people is now done by 1. It's cyclical, and while I will concede that people lose their jobs because of automation, zooming out to the overall jobs market (and figures, which probably don't tell the whole story) things haven't really changed much. On an individual level though, people lose their jobs and li…
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Meritocracy set out from birth, no? Are not all people in that book test tube children with specific selected genomes? I fail to see how creating a class of genetic garbage men, relegated to working with trash for their entire lives is "meritocratic," since advocates of the meritocracy concept generally rely on the system's alleged mobility.
Reminder that "meritocracy" came to prominence in a satirical essay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy Unfortunately a bunch of folks read that and thought it was a great idea.