Marx, Keynes, and AI • Hacker News Board

Re: Marx, Keynes, and AI

#101

Post by kibwen » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 10:22 PM UTC

scotty79 wrote: post #99

kibwen wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you truly believe that being pets is something humans ought to aspire to, there's no point in continuing this conversation.

If you are the one that pities the fate of the pets of the civilization, aka the rich, probably there's no point.

You seem to think that the pertinent property of being a "pet" is living a life of comfort. The pertinent property of a pet is that they are owned, and they live and die at the whim of their master. Do you think that what makes slavery deplorable is merely the labor aspect?

Re: Marx, Keynes, and AI

#102

Post by kibwen » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 10:31 PM UTC

subw00f wrote: post #100

kibwen wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, people don't revolt, warlords revolt. Warlords in control of weapons which are decreasingly reliant on humans and increasingly reliant on remote and autonomous technologies. A drone swarm is not "the proletariat in uniform".

Your argument doesn't really make a lot of sense. Warlords, factions, rebels, or whatever you'd like to call them, they are people, and sometimes they succeed in toppling a form of government and implanting a different one. A drone swarm doesn't control itself. There are no fully autonomous weapons that can continuously implement higher-level strategies to achieve a certain goal. Of course a drone swarm is not part o…

> Of course a drone swarm is not part of the proletariat, the same way a rifle is not part of the proletariat. A drone swarm is a tool in the hands of humans that belong to or are in service of a certain social class.

Every rifle takes one person to wield it; one more person that might decide to turn that rifle against the ruling class. A drone swarm is worth ten, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand people with rifles, capable of being controlled by one person issuing high-level kill orders. The tyrants of the future won't need to risk arming "the proletariat".

Re: Marx, Keynes, and AI

#103

Post by subw00f » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 2:10 AM UTC

kibwen wrote: post #102

subw00f wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument doesn't really make a lot of sense. Warlords, factions, rebels, or whatever you'd like to call them, they are people, and sometimes they succeed in toppling a form of government and implanting a different one. A drone swarm doesn't control itself. There are no fully autonomous weapons that can continuously implement higher-level strategies to achieve a certain goal. Of course a drone swarm is not part o…

> Of course a drone swarm is not part of the proletariat, the same way a rifle is not part of the proletariat. A drone swarm is a tool in the hands of humans that belong to or are in service of a certain social class. Every rifle takes one person to wield it; one more person that might decide to turn that rifle against the ruling class. A drone swarm is worth ten, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand people with rifle…

What? How many people is a tank worth, or an helicopter, or a fighter jet. You keep insisting that a hypothetical thousand-drone swarm can’t be used against a tyrant in case of a civil war and that the tyrant himself will operate the weapons directly. They won’t. They will need workers and soldiers and a chain of command that is convertible to a cause.

Re: Marx, Keynes, and AI

#104

Post by scotty79 » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 5:21 AM UTC

kibwen wrote: post #101

scotty79 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are the one that pities the fate of the pets of the civilization, aka the rich, probably there's no point.

You seem to think that the pertinent property of being a "pet" is living a life of comfort. The pertinent property of a pet is that they are owned, and they live and die at the whim of their master. Do you think that what makes slavery deplorable is merely the labor aspect?

> The pertinent property of a pet is that they are owned, and they live and die at the whim of their master.

Tell me that this is not what the civilization we are part of does to everybody. We live and die at the whims of bureaucratic machines. People in Ukraine die just because machine of war decided that they ought to.

> Do you think that what makes slavery deplorable is merely the labor aspect?

Isn't that what differentiates slave from a prisoner? Of course there are other deplorable aspects like the health harming intensity of the labor, brutality serving the purpose of forcing the labor. But slave without the labor is at most a prisoner. Or you could say that slaves are prisoners with mandatory jobs.

Human relation to freedom and captivity is a nuanced one. Banishment was one of the worst possible punishments because it often meant death. People don't do well when they are free from infrastructure. And if you want to use the infrastructure you don't have full freedom because there are rules the societal machine requires you to obey.

AI doesn't change anything in this setup. It just makes the machines smarter. And hopefully more well off and having more space for the luxury of morality.

Pets are not slaves, nor prisoners. They often can go out and return and if they can't it's mostly for their protection because they are not adapted to the freedom of being unhoused.