India does the same. They try to be friendly (or at least on business terms) with as many countries as they can and stay out of global conflicts as much as possible. They were buying oil from Russia well after the Russia-Ukraine war started. It also worked well for India as they were able to get rock bottom prices.
From a purely economic standpoint, this would make sense. Not sure what to feel about the ethics of it though - at least part of the Russian war bill was footed by the money India paid for Russian oil. One can argue the Ukraine's problems are not India's problems. One could also argue it would be nice to not fund shitty wars, even a little, even indirectly.
Geopolitics is a complex subject I suppose, for a layman like me.
Russian natgas is laundered through third parties, whereas India is laundering Russian oil. Not saying I support any of these sanctions or tariffs, but India is making bank selling Russian oil to Europe right now, so there is going to be some political blowback. Malaysia also.
> Geopolitics is a complex subject I suppose, for a layman like me.
It helps to be familiar with realism in international relations theory starting with Machiavelli and Hobbes, and postwar realism which developed over the Cold War. The ethics have been debated for centuries and the mainstream interpretation is that leaders have a fiduciary obligation to the population they are responsible for, which fundamentally changes ethical considerations.
It’s a completely different moral question when you’re responsible for a billion people, many of whom may suffer or die due to the cost of fuel. It is in principle a violation against their own people for Indian leaders to prioritize Ukraine’s people over their own.
Russian crude made up 35-40% of India's oil imports in 2024. I'm sure it is not much different at present. Although a bill just passed through congress that will allow Trump to put up to a 100% Tariff on Indian imports.
It's 2026 now, and their oil production has dropped 28% due in the last month, they stopped exports (at least temporarily) and were buying oil from Turkiye and Kazakhstan, military police are stationed at fuel stations and people are fleeing crimea due to no fuel and other conditions.
With the strait of Hormuz closed, Russia now accounts for more than 50% of India's oil imports. If the tariffs work, the strategic petroleum reserves of the rich countries will deplete even faster, and when the reserves are gone, those rich countries will pay more for non-Russian oil than India can, so India is going to eventually have to buy the Russian oil and take the tariff hit.
I dunno, as a user I’d rather have the basics right first (longer battery life, no forced obsolescence, good UI etc) before having innovation. We already have enough good features, except many of them are frustrating to use. Might be a good idea to improve them first before adding more new stuff…
Taking Netflix as example - it has been going downhill steadily, they have a habit of canceling good shows after one or two seasons etc. It is no wonder users get annoyed when they have to pay more over time, and get less for their money. Increasing prices is never going to be popular even when it is justified, but users are more likely to tolerate if the price increase comes with better features or at minimum, no drop in features/quality.
Another egregious thing these subscriptions do is all kinds of dark patterns. Making it super easy to subscribe but super hard to cancel, not informing before charging (how hard can it be to send an email "upcoming charge next week"), showing ads in supposedly "ad-free" services etc. All this just add to the frustration which leads users to cancel.
It is likely, never. When all of this happen, a not-so-insignificant percentage of population would still say "it is god's will" or "it is just nature" or "it is just cyclical" etc, will never acknowledge humans caused a big part of it. There is a well funded, well coordinated effort by media, politicians, pundits, businessmen etc that will make sure of it
The most dangerous part of this addiction is that it doesn't feel like addiction. Suppose we spend 4 hours in an afternoon consuming random content - starting somewhere on a Google search, landing on Wikipedia, end up reading dozens of articles on various topics in that 4 hours. Unlike alcohol or drugs, this is knowledge addiction - afterall, we learned about a bunch of things in those 4 hours, didn't we? We didn't spend any money (well, other than the laptop, electricity and internet bills), we didn't harass anyone (like alcoholics sometimes do) etc. Heck, we didn't even "waste" time like we think we do, when we play video games. So it feels somewhat better.
But, all that we learned in those 4 hours - is it really that useful? Some of it might be, lets say an hour of it. What about the other three? That could have been spent on something healthier - having fun with friends, play sports, or even just sleeping!
I understand the irony of typing this, but I too am in the same boat - consuming things voraciously, most of which is just useless knowledge, at the cost of relationships, health etc.
It's all about balance. Learning about various stuff from well written articles and Wikipedia for one hour is good. Doing the same thing for the whole weekend isn't.
Even reading books all the time to the detriment of other activities isn't good.
What's good is doing a bit of everything. Reading a book an hour before sleep, doing a hour of exercise two to three times a week. Reading a few blog articles, wikipedia, long and well researched magazine articles. Making time for in person social interactions. Playing games, video games, board games, card games from time to time. Engaging in a few online discussions every week. Etc
It's all about balance or at least that's the way I see it.
Doing a bit of everything is what’s good? Why? Because that sounds like aimless distraction. If you had a goal in mind, doing a bit of everything isn’t even an option
I've recently spent a night or two with near insomnia going down a performance / security rabbit hole in open source .NET libraries.
It feels useful, it feels important. But it's not, it's just addictive behaviour, because "you found a way to make <library> 5% faster / 5% fewer allocations" is a dopamine hit that feeds back into wanting to prod some more.
It feels like I'm learning an absolute ton about high performance .NET and the kinds of crazy things that maintainers need to consider when taking in untrusted input.
But it's the equivalent of empty calories. The maintainers don't really want to know, and I'm not really learning anything actually useful. It's not actually enlightening work, it's just keeping myself busy while helping feed maintainers a maintenance headache.
The security angle is also horrifying in a different way, it puts me off wanting to put anything near the internet. I used to think the concept of "net crash" and an internet abandoned to "rogue AIs" in cyberpunk was entertaining fiction.
While I don't think the network itself will host those rogue AIs, I do worry that there'll simply be a critical mass of bad actors armed with AI that will render the net effectively inoperable.
> The most dangerous part of this addiction is that it doesn't feel like addiction.
I've started framing addiction as something that we feel compelled to do even when we know it has a detrimental effect on more important aspects of our life. In that respect, yes, it does feel like an addiction.
> Unlike alcohol or drugs, this is knowledge addiction - afterall, we learned about a bunch of things in those 4 hours, didn't we?
Did we learn anything? If we aren't using that knowledge, even in casual conversation, chances are that retention is very low. I'm not even talking about useful learning here, since it is pleasurable to learn something for its own sake. I'm talking about the stickiness.
Another way to think of it is: are we even interested in learning? I have downloaded the entire Wikipedia to my computer, along with Project Gutenberg, as well as various technical documentation. (Kiwix is wonderful.) On top of that I have enough books (digital and physical) to last a lifetime. I have a multitude of resources that I can tap into without touching the Internet, and accessing it is all very low resistance (e.g. I don't have to get off my ass to go to the library). So why do I even have home Internet access? Communicating with people certainly doesn't require a high speed connection.
For the purposes of apocalyptic fiction, I wonder what the overlap is between people who have an offline copy of Wikipedia and people who have only casual security or no password. I can imagine a survivor hunting around for it for a very long time.
Well, it depends. If it's not at the cost of relationship, sports and other important things, is it really an addiction? It can often be just a hobby like everything else.
Piggybacking onto your post to sort of expand this. I feel like there are a few views of what those 4 hours can encompass on the internet. My view is that reels/shorts << rage gaming <<< background noise-tier youtube << social/healthy gaming <= information binging. My problem is most reddit or twitter-esque sites make it easy to fall on the side of rage consumption, without constant self enforcement.
Now I don't think that most knowledge is really that useful in general, maybe 1% of 4 hour binges have any real consequences. But occasionally it really does turn out to be very useful. I spent maybe 4-5 hours reading and watching videos about window air conditioners, having known basically nothing but the terrible shaky units from my childhood. After that period of research time, I bought two new replacements, saved $80 with National Grid rebates, and reduced my summer monthly kwh consumption by 200-250. It also led me to information about heat pump systems which I will consider in a future house purchase, and additionally more information which led me to avoid purchasing cheap peltier dehumidifiers for one with a compressor.
I guess my point is, it can definitely be worse. You can at least point to an Ortega hypothesis-like effect of learning a bunch of random stuff. But I agree that even just going on a walk and doing literally nothing feels way, way better than spending that time online. The balance is so heavily tilted towards internet addiction that I expect that having multiple "real" offline hobbies will increasingly be seen as green flags. In my experience, "bookworm" has not been a pejorative in a long time. stackbutterflow's comment about balance seems like the most sensible way to approach timespend in this sense, though. /rant
It's not learning unless you put it into practice. 4 hours of woodworking videos is nothing for you unless you get to work.
I've been watching framing videos for weeks feeling like I'm being less unproductive than if I were playing video games. But at a certain point it's just as bad. Not a single nail driven.
That’s a good point. Internet addiction didn’t have a name, or a stigma, in the way alcohol or other drugs did so in a sense I had no idea that the slide I was on was harmful. It also felt a lot like what I did a lot of at university - library research.
Setting ethical and moral questions aside for a second:
Never pay a human again
Every time I see stuff like this (along with other more serious shenanigans like wage theft, union busting etc) I only ask myself the same question again and again - what is the end game here? If much of the population is too poor to buy anything, too sick to consume much etc - who is left to buy anything at all? If all their power comes from their wealth and if that wealth is threatened because consumers are too poor to buy, then what happens? Someone has to buy for the system to work, no?
There's been plenty of good sci-fi written about this, but surely they know that any any display of power is meaningless without someone to have power over? The wedding in Venice only means anything because people live in Venice and you're still able to "take over". Any "paradise" built like this will never be paradise, it'll be just chasing the next extreme until there's nowhere left to go
You don't have to look at sci-fi, go look at the history of the Republic of Venice. It was ruled by a tiny group of ultra-wealthy people while the vast majority of the population owned nothing and had zero influence.
Absolutely not, sci-fi is just often a good vehicle for these kind of ideas (plus it gives me an excuse to talk about warhammer), but your right, theres plenty of real world examples to look at too.
Others have listed some great examples, but to be honest I was actually thinking of something somewhat more contemporary, specifically the eldar (or dark eldar perhaps) in Warhammer 40,000.
The long story short is that the Eldar once had paradise, and spent their time seeking greater and greater excess and pleasure, which eventually gave birth to an immensely powerful demon of excess. For the current-setting followers of this demon, their lives are spent in a desperate hunger for excess that can never be satiated, every greater excess they experience quickly becoming too dull to bare. As for the Eldar, their paradise is gone and their race is doomed, all they can do now is fight off the inevitable.
Obviously I don't think the rich have much to fear in terms of giving birth to a demon, but you get the point
Baxter's Flood, then Ark. Neal Stephenson's Seveneves, too. Down And Out in the Magic Kingdom is tonally similar, if you like Doctorow, although that explores a different manifestation of disconnection from others. All great for a romp
I would have called BS on that before but I think now I would just call BS on the part where it was people like Bezos or whatever. It seems there is a neverending number of people who would do the same. Look at the stories about the sunflower fields that had to close down before the pandemic, or the current overrunning of cities and villages in Italy (like Lake Como). Or competing for views on social media (not just attempting to get them). Fighting for status is as old as.... well maybe humanity. What is fairly new is money and real property... and virtual property.
There probably is nowhere left to go. Maybe one of those little islands in the South Pacific but you can't live there and they are all mapped too.
The majority of new billionaires are either Chinese or Indian [0] so at some point you’ll need to update your race-based hatred (if you feel passionately about it) to remain accurate
We’re already heading into a certain demographics crisis. It’s not only about the pyramidal system that retirement is but also about who will be your nurse when you’re old, make your car, be your doctor, etc if there aren’t enough people anymore? Every developed country is well below replacement rate with no real plans from the powers that be to address it because it’s so far in the future that it’s the next best guy problem (30 years horizon)
Countries are not doing anything about low replacement rates because its currently in the interest of the elite to keep them low so that they can sell the need to import lower paid foreigners instead.
When you are far removed from everything, your logic doesn't always make sense.
The problem with local workforce is that you have less threats hanging over their heads. Ones you can threaten with deportation, separation from their children, or just shoot in the streets, are just more controllable.
Imported labour has less rights and will be more open to grovelling.
They would never see water that can be ignited because of the contamination so don't know the scale of their actions. Or
2. They think they have enough power to make the other countries worse, pressure on the EU, bombing the middle east, that making life worse for locals is offset.
That describes aristocracy. Those have been economically and politically compromised, or were assassinated in the 1930s.
Modern elites do not belong to any particular country; this is the entire selling point of globalism. They have no stake in any country's success.
We may pride ourselves on distinctions but when you put a white guy, an African and an Indian through the grinder, the same pink slurry comes out the other end. We're all just mince to them. We aren't even ruled from within our own borders anymore.
I don't think humanity will run into any capacity problems because of that, due to how grotesquely overpopulated it currently is. As far as I see it, every country in the world should be well below replacement rate, for the long run. Setting aside some problematic side effects stemming from our current social system setups. A small fraction of the current world population would probably enable everyone to have a much higher quality of life, if organised properly. We probably don't need to worry about who builds our cars when there are close to 10 billion of us. Where we'll get our food from, on the other hand -- I think that's where the real crisis lies.
Eh, you see too many of these guys complaining about declining populations for this to be a thing.
I don't think you need Machiavellianism to explain their actions. These people have everything they could need, but death comes for all of us and they aren't getting any younger.
Purely speculating, but if you had everything in the world (except time) wouldn't you put everything you have into building a future with a 10% chance of living as long as you wanted? What would you sacrifice for that?
Lots of those people complaining about population decline aren't really talking about the absolute number. They're dog-whistling about demographic replacement - the idea that minorities are reproducing too fast and whites are reproducing too slow.
But why wouldn't the rest of society kick them out before that point? Like at some point, there's going to be a lot of political pressure to fix things, especially if the majority of the population is going hungry or struggling to find work.
Feels like at some point, some 'rogue' political figure will win election by saying the elites need to be overthrown, and the latter's influence will burn to the ground. If even a percentage of the world's countries are still democracies by that point, then any sort of 'leave the population to suffer while we live in luxury' plan will fail.
Why do you think countries are creating more and more ways to quickly squash dissent. If people can't organize because their messages are being monitored and public protests will get you immediately imprisoned then the resistance will come too late.
Also, what protects their wealth is the justice system and the enforcement mechanisms, which are run by ordinary people.
There is no invisible force that will prevent the “peasants” from attacking the wealthy if the police also loses belief in the system and just starts looking the other way. Or just suddenly becomes _less competent_.
How many years remain where the population actually still has any way to kick them out? Once military robots are sufficiently advanced, we've lost. We'll be fully at their mercy. Optimistically speaking, that's maybe 5-10 years out?
But that assumes the population can't vote for someone else who will kick them out. As far as I know, there are no plans to stop third parties from being created, independents from running for political roles, or people voting for whoever they want to vote for.
If a large percentage of the population is going hungry or can't find jobs, then they'll vote for people that (at least say) they'll change that. If any of those people actually do that, then billionaires are toast, their assets could be seized and the laws could be rewritten so things like a universal basic income are implemented.
It doesn't matter how many resources someone has, they're not overthrowing the government, replacing democracy with a dictatorship or doing anything of the sort, especially not worldwide.
Today, the working class already have a miniscule influence compared to the rich and powerful. What makes you think the people could vote them out once they have an automatic army...? Why would they care about any kind of vote?
Seriously, imagine SV had produced 1 million autonomous robots, and a US government like today's was in power. How long do you think a strike would last? Many of these people are already openly talking about how we should adopt the 996 system, and how most people shouldn't be allowed to vote. I don't see any reason why we should expect anything but the worst.
First, the assumption seems to be that the US is the only country on Earth, or that every other country will follow their lead. There are plenty of places (especially in Europe) which are a lot more... left leaning in their political philosophies. As crazy as the US government may be, I doubt they'll literally attack Europe or Canada or wherever else even if under the thrall of Musk or Thiel.
2. Even in the US, the vote still has a pretty big effect on the government and how it's run. The person in the White House right now only got in because a percentage of people in certain swing states voted for him/the Republican Party, and it could have easily gone the other way. The whole 'billionaires get to do anything, law and order is a farce, ignore the constitution for the sake of it' system in play right now was only possible because Trump won the election.
> First, the assumption seems to be that the US is the only country on Earth, or that every other country will follow their lead.
How so? The elite class acts & collaborates on a global scale, as we've seen demonstrated time and time again, especially over the last decade. But even if there is no collaboration, all that's needed is for the US to develop an advantage in this field. Once heads of other countries get the choice between either possibly being targeted militarily or taking a leadership role managing a vassal state, how many of them would stick up for their country instead of selling their people out? They're already doing so without any real personal risk, purely for profit.
> 2. Even in the US, the vote still has a pretty big effect on the government and how it's run.
Maybe I'm thinking about this from a completely different perspective, but how would this scenario play out in your mind? Say it's 2030, the US government is centrist instead of far-right, and autonomous production of military robots is rapidly scaling, slowly rivaling even the military.
Then the SV elite decides to take over, with backing from at least half the government. Any governmental resistance can decide between playing along or likely being hunted down by said autonomous robots, and the military can't take over control since this takeover was prepared on the hardware side.
What does your vote do?
You may think this scenario is unlikely, but IMO given the current direction of the world it sounds far more realistic than stuff like Project 2025 did, yet here we are.
Unfortunately, even if a unified resistance formed by all gun-owning Americans were to march against them, it would buy the labor class a few months at most. Once enough capacity has been established (either production or troops) our only possible recourse would be to hijack/destroy their control, and that's unlikely to be possible if e.g. communication & compute originate from satellites.
Servants. Yes, robots eventually, but servants are the classical answer. The terrible truth is that palace economies are stable -- we see them in "resource-cursed" countries around the world and through time. When a single easily-owned fountain of wealth dominates the economy, a small group of people consolidate ownership and everyone else polarizes around them, forming into concentric rings of gatekeepers and masses struggling to access the only thing that matters. It's terrible but it's stable, and if you're inside the palace it doesn't feel like much of a curse at all.
'Care' is a human concept. Robots, even extremely advanced ones, will not necessarily come bundled with aspirations. Giving a robot the capacity to care and want change, if it's even possible, would be extremely dangerous. It's completely realistic to imagine a world where robots just do what they're told because it's what they're made to do, because they lack any incentive to do anything else.
Yeah. Billionaire techbros and neofascists love to mis-read Tolkien, but this is a much better picture of the future they want to bring. Down to the mystical doom cult of Peter Thiel and the techno-feudalism on Mars that Musk wants.
Of course they’d imagine themselves as the High Lords on Terra, not amongst the untold billions who died eaten by bugs or enslaved by evil space elves.
Personally, not being a billionaire, in a WH40k-type setting, I like to imagine myself as an ork. The dakka would make a lot of cool noises before I die.
There will always be a certain percentage of the population whose greatest aspiration is to be "house slaves" as opposed to "field slaves". They're the ones that today would be described as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires". [1]
how's Bezos going to fund his wedding if there's no population of proles buying from Amazon, nor anyone putting their retirement into a fund that buys Amazon stock? does he just plan to use force rather than money at this point?
That makes litteraly no sense. All the biggest companies are driven by middle-class purchases. Rich-only companies are boutique and are order-of-magnitude smaller than mass market companies.
This is actually changing. Many consumer and retail companies are already shifting their focus from the mass middle class toward high-income and affluent segments. Businesses find higher profit margins and more resilient demand in premium goods. And in enterprise, companies just pay other rich companies who pay them. (sometimes just directly).
The wars of the future will not be fought on a battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today, remember always, your duty is clear: to build and maintain those robots. Thank you.
The plan is that he (along with a small number of other people) will already own everything. The only reason he currently wants proles to buy things from Amazon is that he has not yet achieved what he considers sufficient ownership of the world.
> how's Bezos going to fund his wedding if there's no population of proles buying from Amazon
there will be new economy around satisfying super rich and few layers of their servants. You can think about shifting production and distribution to more luxury cars/clothes/jets etc for them.
Bezos and Andreesen won't live alone on planet, there still be population, just much smaller.
There is no end game. Short term profits are by definition not a long-term view. The family's future will be secured if I invest in plastics and robot payment mechanisms now. I won't live forever, so I won't get to rest under the shade of the trees I plant for my family. With money and influence, they will be best set up to conquer whatever comes in the future.
They don't have one, outside of trying to hoard as much wealth and power as possible if it all falls apart. I firmly believe that greed is an addiction just like any other.
Why does the raging alcoholic drink themselves to death? Can they not see that they're careening towards the end? The powerful worship one concept at the expense of all others, and that is the endless accumulation of more.
Well yeah, but not human consumers. Businesses can buy from other businesses and that can be the only surviving part of the economy. Even further, maybe those businesses are fully autonomous. There's no reason this wouldn't work, as far as I can tell.
The economy would be much more focused. It would be mostly energy, materials, and tech.
Exactly, it seems many if not most people are trapped in an 1800s ideal of how an economy works. "You do work, you get money, you spend money, you do work" In fact the entire "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." statement is in full force here.
It's impossible for most people to envision an economy without them even though there are economic systems that will work without them.
Yes, that's the inefficient part of the economy that can and will be eliminated as far as the elite are concerned. The only reason that hasn't been achieved yet is because so far you still need manual labor to support the wishes of the elite.
The end game is that we're all dead, and they live off their robot slave army in a world of abundance, no poors, and no governments to tell them no. I wish that were hyperbole, but it's what they want more than anything if you really pay close attention to what thy're doing, which as you say doesn't make sense given an end game where you and I are part of the system. When then say "everyone in the future will be rich" they don't mean that poor people will be made rich; they mean poor people will all be dead, or don't count as people, thus trivially leaving only rich people.
So we're all dead, robots take care of the infrastructure and healthcare, and there's maybe 50-100 billionaires left on the planet. Then what? They drive their sports car, do bungee jumping, sip cocktails and watch ai made movies. They don't have children? The human race dies with them? Or they have children, somehow avoid the trap of inbreeding and their children in turn have children and in no time there's again a billion of "us".
We're talking about a level of control over the remaining humans, them and their friends, that require absolute totalitarianism. Of course billionaire A won't accept to live their life according to billionaire B so it'll be a mess in no time.
This thing makes no sense to me when they can already enjoy everything the world has to offer and on top of that they're for all practical purposes above the law.
> This thing makes no sense to me when they can already enjoy everything the world has to offer and on top of that they're for all practical purposes above the law.
It doesn't have to make sense because these are not well-reasoned theories of the future. Thiel, Yarvis and Musk, from what you hear and read on their interviews, come off as drug-addled losers who hate other human beings and anything that doesn't have to do with their hyper-optimized partial view of the world.
> Then what? They drive their sports car, do bungee jumping, sip cocktails and watch ai made movies.
It's helpful to think of the world as if it were a gigantic vacation resort for about 1000 people, and the remaining 8billion of us are just the staff keeping it luxurious for them. They would be 100% fine if the resort didn't need or have any staff.
You have to put yourself in the mindset of a virus, then it makes perfect sense. The point is to consume and exhaust without thinking (introspection), not to sustain and thrive.
btw none of this will be possible because it's a dumb plan and would never work, but it's their utopia.
> they can already enjoy everything
What I love Elon Musk for is teaching me that even if you have everything in the world, you can still be an empty miserable shell of a human, unhappy, unliked, and satisfied with nothing. His example makes me far less driven to acquire more and rather just be happy with what I have. But we should be aware these people could own everything on Earth, the Moon, and Mars and it wouldn't be enough to satisfy them. They're fundamentally empty and insatiable people, it's such a shame so many aspire to be like them or join their ranks.
>btw none of this will be possible because it's a dumb plan and would never work
Ensure you realize that "not working" and them "not trying" are two totally different things. Because they absolutely will try just as many dictators have tried in the past with horrific outcomes, even though the end point was it not working out.
When you have everything, you want something new and different. The whole Epstein scandal is literally about this, you want to kill babies, r*pe the kids, do sacrifice rituals, etc because nothing gives you sensory satisfaction anymore. In the view of the commenters above, humanity will just be the final playtoy, let's have a little nuclear bomb in that town and film it in 4k, etc.
I'm not even sure they care about living. They only care about the growth of capitalism. At some point it seems very likely capitalism won't need humans to continue growing, and all humans may be killed off.
There's people that actively cheer this on, Theil and other billionaires may be among them.
You are assuming they are acting out of greed, but maybe they are just doing what they've spent their whole lives doing - accelerating the growth of capitalism.
You are right and all these people replying to you are living in some kind of fantasy world.
I forget what it's called, but there's this fallacy of ordinary people, that states that we attribute superhuman abilities to people far enough from us on the social scale. In reality, rich people are far from movie villains, life is much more mundane.
It is scary for me to see how many well-educated people here on HN are so conspiracy-theory minded. In a quest to avoid these fantasized dictators, it is very well likely that we will vote for the one who promises to give us what we want, if only we give them enough power. In the end, the world's worst political systems were also the ones promising of liberating the poor and equalizing everyone.
> It is scary for me to see how many well-educated people here on HN are so conspiracy-theory minded.
The basis of so much of the era of computing I come from was basically based on a 70s Berkeley hacker mindset, which had a strong hippie crossover of that era that largely later became the basis for the Open Source movement.
I don't know how you mentally separate or understand the modern computing era without that era.
> So we're all dead, robots take care of the infrastructure and healthcare
Yep, and then there's a few hundred or few thousand kings and queens of the world that can do whatever they want! And no more dirty fucking lowlife scum to worry about (poors).
I think the end game is to only do interesting things and automate all the mundane parts of life.
We used to have to wash clothes by hand and it took all day. Now we have a washing machine and it takes 2 hours.
People used to spend time washing clothes and now we have more members of the household working.
I think the future from scifi that I remember (eg, Star Trek) is that humans are just being creative. Usually some sort of post scarcity where there’s no more need for money.
If everything is automated away, you won't see a Star Trek style post scarcity utopia because everyone on UBI will have lost basically all of their political power. They aren't employable so they can't threaten to withhold their labor in order to get any sort of leverage. The most they could do is withhold consumption to some extent. If you have a dependent population being managed by the same state that's already allowed wealth to accumulate to its current levels, what incentive does the state have to do any more than the bare minimum?
In universe the society of earth and the federation only happened because there was a devestating global thermonuclear war that left the survivors being highly selected for collectivist impulses and then on top of that the eugenics wars where there was another filter (even the common people).
No one has to buy anything for the system to work. You buy because you beneficially contributed to the system or the system gifted you some credit. Otherwise, you buying is actually "inflating" consumption for others (ie: the rich). There are billions of people in the world buying nothing and yet the "system" still work. They just want you to be lined up to them next. (or line them up next to you).
Nobody cares about that at the top. At some point they will have robots doing their bidding and the people at the bottom are economically squeezed to build and "train" their replacement.
Once that is done, there is no "need" for people to exist. This is how they think about people, disposable and replacable "resources" providing "value" over "time". This logic has shaped corporations for decades at this point. "Value" has been redefined and those who still cling to "common sense" are exploited.
We have been observing the cracks of this philosophy of anti human design for a while now and yet there are still people believing they are doing something that brings humanity forward or at least they believe they will have a spot in that future.
If you truly believe in a utopian outcome, you probably have never been on the receiving end of cold calculation, in terms of layoffs or work and/or starve to see how this can backfire, regardless of what you do and what common sense tells you.
Just challenge the micro agreements you had to make while growing up into becoming an adult to justify doing the things you do and the way you are forced to treat other people while doing business.
I see cold judgements on a daily basis, when someone is instrumentalized to do or say objectively immoral things, despite them just wanting to pay bills. It is ordinary men all the way down until reality arrives. Fear of certain consequences is the biggest lever that is being pulled every time, no matter what direction you look at.
Despite that I'm still optimistic and believe people will pull back and change direction.
It becomes sort of like the dystopian future imagined in William Gibson's "The Peripheral" - most of the human race has died off, but technology has advanced so that the elites can self-sustain anyhow. Big cities are haunted with holograms running scripts of people going about their day to make them feel lived in.
Well, this is not a problem at all - long before you ever need to ask "who will buy stuff" the world will burn.
That will fix the problem & whoever rises to power from the ashes will be hopefully more careful than their predecessors - maintain social stability and not radicalize big parts of the society against you.
> A California-based company with ties to billionaire investor and Trump ally Peter Thiel announced plans Friday to build America’s first U.S.-owned, privately developed facility to enrich uranium in far western Kentucky.
A tale as old as time, power and control, over the means of production and (what those seeking this power and control consider lesser) humans.
If you think they're doing this for "the betterment of humanity," I would ask you strongly re-examine the evidence. "Watch what people do, not what they say."
"The wealth of the top-400 Americans surpassed 20% of GDP at the start of Trump's second term."
These guys have already all but built Elysium--just not in space.
They live their lives completely insulated and apart from the masses. They go to different events, they have other people shop for them and transport them around. They don't really interact with us at all. When was the last time you even saw a billionaire in person, let alone talked to one? They have private security to keep us away from them. They only interact with each other.
Certainly, and it isn't enough, is it? It's never enough. Political spending, lobbying, etc. That's the point, the accumulated wealth and their actions are simply symptoms of the dysfunction.
"Just another billion bro." Like a food driven shark, I acknowledge the shark's existence, while wanting the strongest cage possible between us when in close proximity. Never envy, always recognizing the danger and need for self preservation from the paperclip maximizers.
Several times a year in the USA during the last 15 years with several 'You don't need to knows'...
About 2008 in Hamburg, Germany. Some woman jogging with her St. Bernard dog along the empty beach of the Elbe river at around 4:30AM at earliest dawn(blaue Stunde), while I was tending the last glow of a camp-fire, alone, and she complained about the smoke. I complained back. We complained back and forth for about 30 minutes until she jogged away, exasperated :->
Interesting. Big house, but living alone, with the exception of some really nice horses.
Otherwise no extraordinary luxuries. No kitsch.
August 1988, Neuss, Germany. 'You don't need to know'. Fucked daughter which I knew from boarding school, because she had a crush on me, and her parents wanted to fulfill her wishes.
So I've been invited home for a weekend. Besides riding Freya and being ridden by her with full consent of her parents, I had much joy riding their horses with her in lush greens.
Yeehaaa!
About 1983 in Bonn Bad-Godesberg, Germany. Some Tanya (former classmate) 'You don't need to know', living right next to https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Spinat (been paperboy, and played with the horses), with some Bettina (then classmate(very well off, but not extraordinarily rich) of Tanya) at the same time :-)
Doubleplusgood Fun!
About 1983 in Bonn Bad-Godesberg, some Anja, daugther of 'You don't need to know', really big into pencils, pens, all sorts of stuff for painting and drawing. After her mother overheard what I've been talking about to her, of some extraordinary thing I did, which she got confirmation of behind my back via telephone from the hospital in which I did that, then I had 'carte blanche', and the adoration of her daughter.
Sweet careless fun!
About 1980 to 1981 in Bonn Bad-Godesberg, playing with Max, son of 'You don't need to know' , big into fire extinguishers, living right over the street from me. When he's been there. They lived elsewhere, too. He was also in boarding school most of the times, unhappy about it. Very, very smart and friendly mother, though.
Interesting. Because humble.
About 1980 to 1981 in Bonn Bad-Godesberg, some René, son of 'You don't need to know', Big Pharma by themselves, and the German exclusive distribution rights for other stuff.
Very unhappy child, they had it all, butlers, gardeners, security, really big house with laaarge garden, big indoor aviary with shiny hummingbirds. But something seemed to be always 'off', like tension because of domestic problems.
Interesting, because that made it obvious that money alone is not making you happy.
About 1980 in Pech, Germany, near Bonn Bad-Godesberg. One of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haribo heirs. Been watching the compound with the deers, but really hoping to see the private https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_CH-47_Chinook in Haribo livery starting or landing there on the private heliport. Someone came walking to the edge of the fence I casually leaned on, with a rifle or shotgun over his shoulder. Asked me what I wanted. I told him. He said bad luck, it's in Sankt Augustin for maintenance. We talked a little, and he said who he was. I asked him how it felt to be responsible for countless cavities all over the world?
Not good!
Luckily I've been really fast on my road bicycle, and just gave him the bird while speeding away while he cussed and cursed.
Considering that many people are not able to accumulate any real assets beyond their ability to generate wealth which is then captured by others, what meaningful comparison would you suggest.
If a small group of people fully automated all production and controlled it, they wouldn't need anyone to buy anything anymore; they could live off of it indefinitely and produce whatever they needed to in order to protect themselves from the masses. I don't see any obvious reason why this outcome would be prevented by a purely capitalist economic system (assuming that this sort of automation ends up being possible), which in my mind is an argument in favor of some sort of upper bound for wealth consolidation.
Automation just needs more automation, and access to energy and natural resources, both of which don’t require money if you have enough automation.
Ultimately, Money is only used to pay wages, nothing else… so no wages to pay, no money required. In the post employment scenario, money is not needed by industry. You don’t pay the forest to cut the trees, you don’t pay the dirt to mine the iron, and you don’t pay the sun to grow the crops.
Capital doesn’t need to produce goods for customers. It just needs coercive power to gain and maintain access to resources and energy. You know what gives you that power? An army of 20 million self manufacturering robots.
It’s the grey-goo scenario, only with a few humans nominally involved, and on a macroscopic scale instead of nanotechnology.
Humans are the main impediment to unchecked capital growth. Soon, that impediment could be largely removed. So long, and thanks for all the fish.
With automation, there is no need for the rest of us to exist in order to support the capital class. Ai enabled robotics won’t just eliminate employment, it will make money (and increasingly, people) irrelevant to capitalism. The new capital is automation capability, and you only need energy and raw materials beyond that.
You don’t buy a yacht, you build a one-yacht factory and build it from raw materials. With a few million self manufacturing robots, you don’t need money to have enormous wealth and power.
When they want money, they will mine it. Gold, bitcoin, whatever doesn’t involve hiring people. The rest of us outside the gilded walls will be increasingly irrelevant scavenging over the scraps and trying to maintain some kind of agrarian society since manufacturing will be largely pointless.
Wasn't much of the population too poor to buy most stuff, back in the day? It seems to have worked out fine for, say, European Aristocrats c. 1400s-1700s.
you just need to have a balance.
- enough rich people like you so you don't feel alone
- enough middle income people that buy to keep you rich and strive to become rich
- enough poor people that try everything possible to become richer and throw middle income people to poor.
so you are super rich while others are busy fighting to defend their position or to rise their position.
Where this demand for the "end game" comes from? Why do you people assign some long-term vision to a bunch of sociopaths with money and influence that came from being born in a proper family and having lot of luck, whilst ditching any moral integrity along the way?
The is no plan, there is no endgame. There is greed and complete lack of morals, and a completely inhumane system so often praised here - capitalism. It has a single logic, logic of accumulation. Everything else is a mean to that end. System doesn't question its purpose, as its purpose defines its essence.
I think you're arguing against something that is made up by doomers. They truly believe (evidence by the comments below yours) that the billionaire class are all a of one mind and want to eradicate other humans, live in cloud cities, and have robots cater to their every need.
I don't even really know how to start refuting this. It seems to absurd to even start.
We have an entire history of rich elites abusing their wealth and power at the expense of everyone else. It's lead to various conflicts and social upheavals. And we currently have tech elites selling the idea of full automation, machine godhood, and opposition being the antichrist. Also they like talking about replacing democracy with some sort of digital feudalism.
How it all plays out remains to be seen (predicting the future is hard), but calling people who point this out doomers is very dismissive and one sided.
I think people think this because many billionaires outright say it. We can’t pretend they aren’t salivating at the idea of eradicating labor when they literally talk about how excited they are to eradicate labor.
Ok fine, I guess not all billionaires. But the other ones are reaaaal quiet.
Look at how they fantasize about humanoid robots and you will understand.
Why the humanoid form, with all of its engineering inefficiencies and difficulties? Because it is a thing which can be dominated.
The whole purpose is domination. Ever seen Apocalypse now or read Heart of Darkness? They are little colonel Kurtzes. The will to dominate for these people goes to the depths of their soul.
Does that mean it is 170000 * 10 * 3 = 5,100,000 per month (assuming 10 users per org)? Isn’t that less than found in the cushion level money for a trillion dollar company?
Amazon has been getting bad press for years now - union busting shenanigans, poor working conditions, low quality products, customer reviews being gamed etc. Why would they care? Unless bad press directly and measurably affects their bottom line, they wouldn't care. Just this week there was news about a massive datacenter they are planning whose power generators would become single biggest polluter in the country, if it gets built.
If they ever cared enough about bad PR, they have much bigger items to think about, like the proposed data center. Rare books probably wouldn't even make it their top 5 bad-press list
From a purely economic standpoint, this would make sense. Not sure what to feel about the ethics of it though - at least part of the Russian war bill was footed by the money India paid for Russian oil. One can argue the Ukraine's problems are not India's problems. One could also argue it would be nice to not fund shitty wars, even a little, even indirectly.
Geopolitics is a complex subject I suppose, for a layman like me.
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