61–70 of 86 posts
Even on HN, that distinction needs to be made…maybe especially on HN. That sort of conflation will eventually lead to inane arguments that waste everybody’s time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They quite literally hoard the profit produced by the people that work for them. If they didn't, they wouldn't be billionaires. Pretending that because the wealth isn't in the form of a pool filled with gold coins that somehow makes it different is just misunderstanding wealth. As far as feeding people, he could single handidly fund SNAP for a year and still have 100 billion plus.
>They quite literally hoard the profit produced by the people that work for the Do you realize jeff bezos was a billionaire long before amazon recorded a profit? So quite literally no, this is not true.
The dream of a single family home (in SF) is dying
If AI automates most jobs and UBI becomes the primary source of income for most people, doesn't that imply the means of production eventually have to transfer to government control? Is there a different mechanism that makes this work without that transfer?
If AI somehow does materially, permanently change the amount of human employment required, I don't think anyone is going to like the outcomes. I am to the left politically, but I do not think UBI can work in practice for the majority of population due to human nature and the resulting lack of purpose. People do seem to have an innate need for purpose, and most people need one imposed on them by circumstances, it woul…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Until Congress passes a law nationalizing their company, and forces them to sell their company to a holding company owned by the government.
The government won't be able to force Robot Inc. to do anything. Robot Inc. has control of the robots, and the government has control over words on paper.
My favorite Tech Bro "AI is gonna make money worthless" cognitive dissonance is how Musk keeps saying exactly this. He has been quoted that people won't need to save anymore due to abundance, while also extracting a potential $1T pay package for himself... https://fortune.com/2026/01/12/elon-musk-retirement-savings-...
He needs the money for Mars bro Just a few hundred billion more We’re so close to interplanetary civilisation bro Just hundreds of billions more, just one last time
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The government won't be able to force Robot Inc. to do anything. Robot Inc. has control of the robots, and the government has control over words on paper.
Are robots immune to explosives, armor piercing rounds and EMP blasts in this scenario? Does the human military with all it's firepower cease to exist? Robot Inc is going to replace the US Armed Forces?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it is a moot question because UBI and automation will destroy society as we know it through uncontrolled, malthusian growth. I don't think we will last long enough to see what long-term culture that results in. With infinite welfare, the dominant culture will be the one that is able to reproduce as much as possible, perhaps through cloning? We are already seeing IVF, surrogate mothers and other sorts of cloni…
People aren’t rats. Overall fertility is strongly regulated by education level, labor opportunities, cultural norms, etc. If “infinite welfare” unavoidably led to a reproductive feedback loop, the richest, safest societies would already be there, which we don’t see. Your comment seems to rest on the unstated assumption that hierarchy between humans is an essential stabilizing force, and that abundance without it is u…
When you just have one guy cloning himself with government subsidy, there are totally different dynamics at play.
The system of UBI changes the incentives to create this behavior. I am not even saying it is rat-like; In my previous comment I discussed the differences between our world and the rat utopia. In the rat utopia, reproduction is still limited by the interplay of sexes and you eventually get failure of the system through a breakdown of reproduction. It would be more accurate to describe the most successful strategy under UBI as "tumor-like", where the failure mode is based on a strain in resources.
The richest, safest societies don't have infinite welfare because they have cemented a culture which rejects welfare, and reproduction is currently limited by either culture (women's expectations of their partners) OR resources (look at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-chinese-billionaire... or what elon is doing). What happens when reproduction is limited by neither? We already see the effects of this in say, Africa where you have a massive population explosion caused by aid.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People aren’t rats. Overall fertility is strongly regulated by education level, labor opportunities, cultural norms, etc. If “infinite welfare” unavoidably led to a reproductive feedback loop, the richest, safest societies would already be there, which we don’t see. Your comment seems to rest on the unstated assumption that hierarchy between humans is an essential stabilizing force, and that abundance without it is u…
Exactly. Here's Orwell speaking on the whole thing: > "An argument that Socialists ought to be prepared to meet, since it is brought up constantly both by Christian apologists and by neo-pessimists such as James Burnham, is the alleged immutability of ‘human nature’. Socialists are accused—I think without justification—of assuming that Man is perfectible, and it is then pointed out that human history is in fact one l…
How would this be bred out without artificially controlling reproduction? What is the action here? The idea that individual pressure for resources would trickle down inter-generationally is lamarckian!
Under a regime of UBI and Reproductive "Freedom", the most successful genes will simply be the ones that choose to reproduce the most, because there are no longer any social or resource limitations on reproduction. You get a totally opposite effect, where the reproductively greediest are the most successful at reproduction. It is a tragedy of the commons.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Velocity would be much higher if the same amount of money was in the hands of millions more people. Corruption of politics would be much harder, too.
They aren’t hoarding money, you don’t understand that? What “money” velocity would be higher? Some of these companies have very little profit compared to wealth.
Being illiquid doesn't mean they can't use that wealth.