You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass • Hacker News Board

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#191

Post by derangedHorse » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 12:32 PM UTC

Llamamoe wrote: post #177

anal_reactor wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer is obvious: abandon civilisation, join the Amish. Big Tech cannot ruin your life if you simply don't participate in the capitalistic market. I mean sure, it's difficult to live completely off-grid, but in modern world, it's a long way before you starve to death. What I'm saying is, I have a cozy bullshit job that gives me the perspective of someday not being in the working class anymore. But if that wasn't…

> Big Tech cannot ruin your life if you simply don't participate in the capitalistic market. I mean sure, it's difficult to live completely off-grid, but in modern world, it's a long way before you starve to death. You still have to pay taxes, and doing this means giving up on a lot of your existing human connection, joining a community in no small part comprised of crackpots, tanking your quality of life, and losing…

> joining a community in no small part comprised of crackpots

You don't think there's anyone who has similar values and reasons for joining as the OP?

> tanking your quality of life

That sounds very subjective based on what one values.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#192

Post by mlrtime » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 12:33 PM UTC

pizlonator wrote: post #56

Let's say that somehow we end up in a world where capital is the only thing separating one set of humans from the other, and that separation is large, and the overwhelming majority of humans are in the underclass. Such situations usually correct themselves violently.

Do you live in France? Because this is not universally true.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#193

Post by mlrtime » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 12:37 PM UTC

camgunz wrote: post #157

Llamamoe wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you raise the bar for being allowed to speak about a very real concern that high, nobody will be left to spread and debate the idea in the first place.

geohot's not a regular joe, he's founded multiple companies and is a leader in our community. This is like a general being like "why are you letting the enemy win?" while he sits comfortably in his study managing his cigar collection.

I personally wish he would spend more time jailbreaking the PS5 than writing blogs posts about how SWEs at big tech should quit their jobs.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#194

Post by mlrtime » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 12:39 PM UTC

fnoef wrote: post #7

d1sxeyes wrote: post #3

Hard to take seriously from a guy who has Facebook, Google, and Twitter on his CV.

I noticed an interesting pattern. People who “made it” usually by working high paying jobs for the neofeudal lords, suddenly gain moral compass and tell the rest of us to not work for said neofeudal lords, because “money is not important”, and apparently you can buy a place to live or food to feed your family simply by having principles.

Probably not a popular opinion but this is why capitalism works. We all work to compete for what is best for US and our Family, not what someone tells us to work on because they think they know whats better, they don't.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#195

Post by derangedHorse » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 12:40 PM UTC

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #67

roenxi wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it isn't like people can't do still everything they could do yesterday. There are just more and better options. Economically AI is no particular threat to the median human and even knowledge workers are still going to have fine lives. Maybe not as knowledge workers. The real risk here is the military implications of pairing AI and robots. If the army doesn't need lots of people then there is a real problem. But r…

Right, you can still do everything you could yesterday. You can still hand-weave cloth and sell it if you want to, just like your ancestors could do three hundred years ago; you'll simply have to do it three thousand times faster than your ancestors did to exchange that labor for a loaf of bread, because even though bread is cheaper than it used to be, your customer's next best alternative is an automatic loom, and t…

> you'll simply have to do it three thousand times faster than your ancestors did to exchange that labor for a loaf of bread

Who's to say that a loaf of bread will be that much more valuable? You acknowledge that bread is cheaper than it used to be, but baselessly assert that an automatic loom will accentuate the value differential rather than lessen or maintain it with the innovations in bread making.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#196

Post by mlrtime » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 12:43 PM UTC

DiscourseFan wrote: post #61

All this talk of neofeudalism and yet not a single bushel of corn has been taken by my lord! Capital leads to class difference, often immense class difference, which is not a claim against our society as primarily capitalistic but in favor of it. If you took away all the food grown in America and the clothes woven in Bangladesh and the laptops manufactured in China, there would be no Amazon, no Google, no Microsoft,…

TLDR: Abandon capitalism, create a union.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#197

Post by mlrtime » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 12:44 PM UTC

redox99 wrote: post #151

raverbashing wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every bubble in history has popped But if you disagree I have an NFT to sell you

Is internet a bubble? Has it stopped?

Were you working in 1999?

Bubbles don't stop forever, they pop and move back to equilibrium.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#198

Post by derangedHorse » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 12:48 PM UTC

WithinReason wrote: post #132

mmaunder wrote: post #19

The premise is economically incoherent because labor is not a single task category that technology can delete. It is the input that continuously reconstitutes itself around whatever remains scarce, valuable and socially demanded as productivity rises. This is the lump of labor fallacy- the belief that there’s a fixed amount of economically valuable work that technology and capital can eliminate through automation or…

Let's say a truck driver's job gets fully automated by self-driving trucks. How will his labor reconstiture itself into something new? #learntocode? How about SW developers? What if the most capable model you need to use to stay competitive costs $10k a month so you're locked out?

> How will his labor reconstiture itself into something new?

That's for the job market to decide. It'll be whatever people still find valuable to do.

> What if the most capable model you need to use to stay competitive costs $10k a month so you're locked out?

What if a capable computer needed to stay competitive costs $10k? Or if all SW jobs turned remote and electricity costs for computers cost $10k? I think the problem with this line of thinking is there was no logical path to this happening that was presented. You're raising a problem of an unrealized conclusion without a solid premise.

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#199

Post by ben_w » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 12:49 PM UTC

duskdozer wrote: post #111

teiferer wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Big tech is making everyone's life miserable: I understand that sentiment, but it's very one-sided. I enjoy having the worlds knowledge at my fingertips. I enjoy being able to video-call my family from anywhere in the world at any time. I enjoy never being lost cause I always have a map showing where I am. I enjoy having group chats with all my different social groups, big and small. I enjoy being able to easily wo…

You could do all those things 10 if not 15 years ago, with maybe the exception of the last one - mainly driven by the onset of the COVID pandemic forcing people to think differently about things for a brief time - in a much less hostile climate. And big tech isn't even required for let alone the best implementation of all those things, it's merely situated itself as the default.

Even with the last one, "I enjoy being able to easily work from home", the reason "cottage industry" has that name is one of the pre-industrial-era modes of production: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putting-out_system#Cottage_ind...

Re: You have three minutes to escape the perpetual underclass

#200

Post by ben_w » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 12:57 PM UTC

jofzar wrote: post #22

kaliqt wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It posits that the tools at their disposal will be far more powerful and wide reaching than just Gmail or even modern social networks. The good ol' AGI and then ASI singularity everyone likes to talk about. To be fair, it is possible.

I don't believe "true" agi/asi will happen, but I totally believe if a company theoretically invented they would immediately shut all API's and then go for software market dominance in every category.

While I've said in another comment on this thread that comparative advantage is flawed, I still think the opening moves, the very initial phase, would be as per comparative advantage, not everything all at once.

Until supply grows to saturate demand in whatever market, comparative advantage points to the fastest way to make more money, that money then gets used to construct more servers and data centres, which gets used to saturate supply for the next most profitable market, etc. until there's none left.

I wouldn't say "never" for AI that can economically substitute all human labour. I think that meaning of AGI/ASI is slightly easier than the "AI which learns from as few examples as humans do" meaning, which I also think is possible eventually but don't know how far away it is.