221–224 of 224 posts
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Where else would you apply this reasoning? If I lose my phone it doesn't stop being a phone...
Yes, but it's probably useless for anyone else (because of locking). And if you break your phone, it stops being a (useful) phone.
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Not even. Humanity would consist of a small elite who owns everything, a small, continually shrinking middle class that consists of the remaining few workers who are actually needed for some reason (eventually, this tiny middle class would shrink to just the members of boards of directors, or something -- someone has to supervise the machines even if it's just rubber stamping them) and a vast underclass experiencing…
Kensington in Philadelphia right: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensington,_Philadelphia the Crime section But you didn't mention the Soldier class. Some security people are needed, with an ok decent life, to keep the masses in check, and put up surveillance cameras and collect everyone's photos and biometrics A bit like in Uganda, "Uganda's surveillance state is built on national ID cards" https://news.ycombinator…
> Now, OTOH, if at that point, robot/AI weapons are sufficient so you only need 10 people to run the entire US Army.... then it's game over.
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Not even. Humanity would consist of a small elite who owns everything, a small, continually shrinking middle class that consists of the remaining few workers who are actually needed for some reason (eventually, this tiny middle class would shrink to just the members of boards of directors, or something -- someone has to supervise the machines even if it's just rubber stamping them) and a vast underclass experiencing…
Utterly absurd premise that doesn't even make sense as a dystopian thought experiment. 1. Supply drives demand. If nobody produces anything with which to buy the factory output, then the factories will not be valuable. 2. If most people are somehow living "outside" the economy, then they would form their own economy. Those are but two trivial rebuttals, and by no means anywhere near exhaustive.
If with enough automation that's not necessary then it doesn't matter. Why operate a sneaker factory to get the money to buy caviar from the caviar factory when you can just operate the caviar factory directly?
Put another way, china thanks to it's new middle class is a great market for a business to sell to. That's because they have something of value to trade back.
But the Congo, full of people or not, isn't. They don't have anything any capitalist could want that would equal the value of finished middle class goods. All they have to offer is cheap raw materials or perhaps labor to extract. If people are made useless, we will all be from the Congo except the legacy capital owners, who can trade with each other for everything they might want.
Regarding #2, they would form their own garbage shit economy whose size and per capital size are like specks of dust compared to the main one, with obvious consequences for power dynamics when the two economies interact. Think of the underground economy in a prison, a homeless encampment, or a warzone, or subsistence farming peasanta deep, deep in thr Congo. Or the "economy" formed by insects trading pollen services for nectar with plants. That's how small and weak the economy of the leftover people with no access to the global industrial machine would be by comparison.