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Last month, Balaji Srinivasan gave a lecture at Y Combinator's Startup School 2013 entitled "Silicon Valley's ultimate exit strategy". He describes the US as the "Microsoft of nations", and suggests in a calm, reasonable tone that Silicon Valley think seriously about seceding and starting its own (or possibly several) sovereign countries. You can watch the full lecture here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A Shortly after the talk, he published this piece in Wired: http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/11/software-is-reorganizing-the-world-and-cloud-formations-could-lead-to-physical-nations/ quote:For the first time in memory, adults in the United States under age forty are now expected to be poorer than their parents. This is the kind of grim reality that in other times and places spurred young people to look abroad for opportunity. Indeed, it is similar to the factors that once pushed millions of people to emigrate from their home countries to make their home in America. Our nation of immigrants is, tautologically, a nation of emigrants. I agree with a lot of this work, but the current of libertarian ideological nonsense runs through the approach (especially from people like Thiel) that needs to be addressed. So I wrote up the following essay in response: quote:A few days ago I reshared this talk from Balaji Srinivasan, along with my initial comments defending the position against what I took to be a superficial rejection from David Brin and others. It was my first watching of the lecture, and my comments were borne of the passion that comes from having considered and argued for similar conclusions over the last few years, against those I felt were resisting the alternative framework BSS was suggesting without due consideration. This thread should primarily be about BSS's argument in the lecture and article, and the implications of the ideas presented therein. If you want to insult me or my views, it might be better to just ignore the fact that I started this thread. I hope it is clear from the above that I'm not offering a full-throated endorsement of his view, but I think it deserves some critical engagement nevertheless.
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 07:52 |
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# ? Mar 28, 2024 17:37 |
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Sure, lease me a pod in the arcology I guess. I don't see how "cloud nations" will provide well-being for individuals whose bodies are, regrettably, still yoked to the physical world but let's see what happens.
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 08:04 |
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That guy has more clouds than mario.
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 08:07 |
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What a clever futuristic way of loving over the poor.
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 08:09 |
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redscare posted:What a clever futuristic way of loving over the poor. Huh?
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 08:26 |
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Oh cool, a guy whose personal wealth problems were solved by technology tells everyone how technology can solve a lot of different problems! Sounds great! I find the whole west coast startup culture insufferable. It's like great, you can write an app that makes millions of dollars from middle class people. What the gently caress does this have to do with social problems?
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 08:27 |
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Popular Thug Drink posted:Oh cool, a guy whose personal wealth problems were solved by technology tells everyone how technology can solve a lot of different problems! Sounds great! Jeez, SA can be quite a reactionary place at times!
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 08:29 |
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redscare posted:What a clever futuristic way of loving over the poor. The poors are the ones who by definition get hosed over by society. Why do you think a world run by software would be any worse at handling its least fortunate than the system we have now? Why would a digital world have more poor people in worse shape? It seems implausible to me, and against the trends.
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 08:31 |
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Having read the OP article and response, the main thing that jumps out at me is that neither of you consider that all of these wonderful new modes of software driven social organization are explicitly created by rent collectors seeking to collect transaction fees on using their service to cloudconnect with your etherpeers in the meatspace. Maybe I'm just horridly cynical about the impact of entrepeneurs trying to make millions by driving a paywall between the people they tout to connect.enraged_camel posted:Jeez, SA can be quite a reactionary place at times! I just dont trust a guy who made money on niche tech startups telling everyone how niche tech startups will trigger the next social revolution. RealityApologist posted:The poors are the ones who by definition get hosed over by society. Why do you think a world run by software would be any worse at handling its least fortunate than the system we have now? Why would a digital world have more poor people in worse shape? It seems implausible to me, and against the trends. "Why would a system designed by wealthy first world people for wealthy first world people exclude the global poor? I'm really confused by this guys it goes completely against what I expect to be true." boner confessor fucked around with this message at 08:48 on Nov 30, 2013 |
# ? Nov 30, 2013 08:37 |
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I'm taking for granted that any system will have losers. I'm asking why you think the losers in the system being proposed will be any worse off or greater in number than the people who are left out of the existing system. Because we're doing a monstrously bad job now, and it's hard to imagine an open system grounded in participation doing significantly worse. You seem to think it will inevitably do worse, but have given no reasons other than mistrusting the source. It's not a convincing objection.
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 08:57 |
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I think it's a great idea to start a new country that avoids a lot of the legacy costs that other nations have. It's a lot easier to build a strong welfare state if you start off with a bunch of people who don't really need a welfare state in the first place. On top of that, if you start a large country that steals a lot of these people from existing states, it will hurt their competitive position greatly, mostly replicating the white flight phenomenon.
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 09:07 |
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RealityApologist posted:I'm taking for granted that any system will have losers. I'm asking why you think the losers in the system being proposed will be any worse off or greater in number than the people who are left out of the existing system. Because this system presumes that people who don't have electricity will suddenly give a gently caress about open source software. RealityApologist posted:Because we're doing a monstrously bad job now, and it's hard to imagine an open system grounded in participation doing significantly worse. You seem to think it will inevitably do worse, but have given no reasons other than mistrusting the source. It's not a convincing objection. Yo let's bring participation to people first before we worry about what participatory license is being used. If technocracy was able to substantially improve the lives of the poor in a non-tangential way there would probably be some example from the last hundred years of history one could draw from. on the left posted:I think it's a great idea to start a new country that avoids a lot of the legacy costs that other nations have. It's a lot easier to build a strong welfare state if you start off with a bunch of people who don't really need a welfare state in the first place. On top of that, if you start a large country that steals a lot of these people from existing states, it will hurt their competitive position greatly, mostly replicating the white flight phenomenon.
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 09:08 |
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He's a neoreactionary piece of poo poo who should be shot out of hand when he and his fascist friends finally rise against democracy, happy to cleat this up.
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 11:35 |
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His piece is a little messy. He wants to establish that geography is a rapidly vanishing concept when you're in L.A. and can interweb with bronies all over the world. So these CloudCommunities eventually link up and form hardspace communities. But his rants about transitioning things to on-demand and cloud-ready systems is... shortsighted. For instance, the poor already have a service here in Los Angeles that functions something like Uber. It's called public transit, and it's entirely on-demand for most of the day. Why, it even allows you to form a temporary hardspace pod with other travelers! Additionally, it's great that fabrications and companies can be cloud-delivered.... except in an instance where you don't have the necessary infrastructure to support it. A lot of this presupposes you have means and capacity to take advantage of it. And that's before you get into more basic barriers to entry. I'm not exactly sure how someone that's blind or mentally retarded would integrate into the Cloudspace, for example. His ideas that CloudCommunities will form a critical mass and just metastasize into working communities is also a bit lame-brained. Have you ever put a bunch of fanfolk together in a room? By the end of the day they're arguing minutia and establishing hierarchies and poo poo. He also overreaches. Match.com people are cloud-members? By that logic, a bunch of Twilight fans waiting in line for a movie become the same if they so much as post on a forum or tweet about it. Really though, in a world run by software, you just hope no one figures out a way to game the system. Because the financial markets are already run by software, and a few years ago someone gamed them so that a major airline looked to have lost some serious cash (by posting a years-old article) and they made out like bandits.
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 12:15 |
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How, precisely, is your 'world run by software' different from that silly 'marble economy' thing you were ing about months ago? Also, how the heck is it different from a Soviet-style centrally planned economy? Aside from everyone in the Central Planning Committee having a Comp Sci degree from Harvard.
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 12:46 |
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He's advocating an anti-democratic political system owned wholesale by telecommunications companies and corporate fiefdoms. This is literally a dystopia and he's a moron if he's does not understand the consequences of this. I honestly hope he does secede so that American Civil War Mark 2: The Union vs. Neckbeards can get into full swing. edit: oh wow, should have read the custom title. I given Eripsa attention and therefore made him richer, dammit! rudatron fucked around with this message at 12:51 on Nov 30, 2013 |
# ? Nov 30, 2013 12:47 |
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I most certainly did not read all of that article but I was surprised when ctrl-f did not find any mentions of the singularity in that mess.
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 13:17 |
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rudatron posted:edit: oh wow, should have read the custom title. I given Eripsa attention and therefore made him richer, dammit! Attention Deficit Disorder The afternoon sun angled through a tear in the tent. Ma Bao-Zhi grunted, then shifted his face towards the shade and screwed up his eyes. In the absence of light, the retinal burns from his always-on pupil-tracking HUD-halo danced before his field of vision. He sat up and stretched. It was a new day. The corner of his visual field that was perpetually occupied by the DistroNet feed blinked. A major announcement was incoming from the most influential association of experts that he had ever been a part of: The Council Of Two Million With A Remit Of Everything. The upstart replacement of last year's not-hegemon, the Coven of Eight to the Seven; Masters of Knowledge, the Council had, yesterday, consisted of just over 50.3% of the surviving inhabitants of what had once been Taiwan SAR. However, as he scanned the headlines, he noted that an overnight disputation on the meaning of Buddha-nature had resulted in nearly two hundred being purged from the membership roster, and, more importantly, from the Council's ReDistroList. Ma had never posted to any discussion regarding Buddha-nature, for which he was now extremely thankful. Attention Distribution Cannot Be Gamed, he though, nodding to himself. It was a mantra every child knew, and it was obviously true. 'Gaming' would imply an illegitimate practice, and since the attention economy was inherently legitimate, any practice that arose thereof could not be 'gaming'. The use of randomly-assigned attention redistribution lists to strengthen the network-influence of an association of experts was one of the most powerful practices there was - without it, no modern association of experts could compete. With the saccadic grace of long practice, his pupils flipped to the updated, slightly smaller ReDistroList, and settled down to start his highly-encouraged ten hours of daily network-reinforcement. Ten hours - ten icons - each one painstakingly designed by the expert it represented. The Coven of Eight to the Seven had highly encouraged eight hours of ReDistroList attention, but the Council's superior attention ethic had led to an expert association network both wider and deeper in links, and thus, far more influential. The Coven defined their area of expertise too narrowly, and left themselves open to a ratio attack. It was a trivial task for the Council to dial down the attention ratio of key knowledge industries overnight, leaving the Coven rudderless and sinking. Ma had been a third-quartile defector, holding out longer than most; his punishment was to enter the Council with six month's half-ratio deficit. Half as likely to be randomly assigned to other experts ReDistroList, he counted himself lucky - the fourth quartile had been exiled entirely. As is, he was comfortably off in a deficit camp outside Taibao. Ma shook himself; introspection was an audience of one. The first icon belonged to Tracy Liu: 166kg, pink highlights and moderator by acclaim of a yaoi fandom for the ancient classic, Glengarry Glen Ross. The minutes ticked by, and as the completion bar for the first icon flipped over into green and Tracy's hand-drawn icon faded from sight - young Al Pacino gently cupping young Jack Lemmon's testicles on a bed of index cards - Ma decided that he would treat himself with an hour of free attention. He rucked the covers back from his legs and withdrew his 75MHz future-proofed laptop from its pouch. Minutes later, halfway through the boot-sequence, Ma heard the unmistakable whirring of a Bother-Gyro. He dug rapidly through the contents of the tent for the thick blanket he'd found the week before, to muffle the fans of the laptop, but the blanket had been redistributed. It was too late anyway: the Bother-Gyro's tracking software had heard the fans. "Go away!" shouted Ma. < Hello Friend And How Are You And Woo! > The Bother-Gyro hovered just out of Ma's reach. "滚蛋!" < Would You Like A Comestible?! Marmalade Is In This Week! > "gently caress off." Bother-Gyros were increasingly common, flying over the water from the Penghu Collective, and Ma had tangled with them before, when he was a high-ratio member of the Coven: an attractive target. The Collective were Min-speakers, and the language barrier was starving them of culture-based attention, and forcing them to desperate measures. He knew that while they would advertise to any moving object, their main purpose was to gain the attention of the victim. Even compared to the average camp member, Ma's influence ratio was low... "Hey! Bot! There's a high-ratio family just over that wall! You can bother them all at once! Think of the attention gains!" Unfortunately for Ma, the Bother-Gyro was also running off a 75MHz chip, which did not support voice recognition. Even more unfortunately, what little resources it did have to bring to bear were mainly concentrated on measuring the direction of gaze of the victim, and Ma's gaze had briefly moved from the Gyro to the wall he was gesturing at. The Gyro aimed a module at the RFID tag on Ma's halo. *pffffsss* "gently caress!" Pepper-spray will catch anyone's attention. Whilst Ma rolled around in the dirt, the Bother-Gyro gently settled on the ground next to him, conserving battery. Proximity was worth less attention than direct eye-contact, but it was still worth something. After a minute, the database updated the Gyro on Ma's uninspiring attention value, and it buzzed off in search of less deficient prey. ---- The afternoon was nearly over before Ma's eyes stopped watering, and the pupil-tracker started to update correctly. Luckily, his HUD-halo was undamaged - it could still receive and transmit audio, video, pupil-tracking data and, indeed, record everything that Ma did. Nine hours of ReDistroList remained on his schedule, but he had bigger things on his mind. Of all the places, his deficit camp was lucky enough to be in viewing distance of a celebrity battle. It wasn't entirely by chance, of course. Celebrity Mechas were very power-hungry, and required tethering to the grid network, and deficit camps had the tendency to spring up in unused land along grid lines. While city dwellers might have had the massed influence to force such a destructive event outside their municipal margins, a deficit camp by definition could not face up to even the most minor celebrity's choice of land-resource. This particular battle was between the gigantic robots piloted by a pornography magnate and a man who was extremely good at making videos of cats. Hovering cameras darted about the provided every possible angle around the machines, while in-cockpit vision was granted by cameras attached to both control modules. There were no adverts - the battle itself drew all the attention the participants needed. The pornographer had outfitted his mecha with water sprinklers, providing the substrate for projected holograms of noted starlets and their riveting performances. The cat man, showing disdain for the practice of up-attending, had a far more stripped-down mecha, bowing to demand only by having a control module shaped like a cat's head. While his initial surge in influence had been off the back of a pet British Shorthair, his true power came from his decision to breed several thousand of the creatures and lock them in a vast complex filled with pastel colors and assorted common household items. Cuteness, too, can be brute-forced. As the two machines started to stride towards each other, Ma watched camp-dwellers who sought influence more than health run between the legs of the mechas. Like so much in the attention economy, it was a dual payoff. Simply being near a mecha guaranteed a proportion of the attention that the pilot was constantly exuding, and that was worth the risk of injury in itself. But, if a camera tracked by millions happened to autofocus on a lucky expert? Why, a single second's worth of attention was more than the expert might otherwise see in a lifetime. The battle was joined, and as the mechas stamped to and fro, they came closer and closer to the western edge of the camp - the edge furthest from Ma. Even those experts in the camp whose lack of attention ethics had placed them dangerously close to exile from their associations could not help but pay heed. Lasers flashed, missiles flew, and clouds of smoke emerged even when not strictly necessary. In fact, the battle, like most battles, was more bark than bite: it was considered bad form to actually kill another celebrity, not least because it tended to alienate part of your potential audience. After all, who didn't enjoy both pornography and cat videos? The din didn't just attract the attention of experts - from miles around, Bother-Gyros wheeled in, guided by the very human tendency to correlate decibels and attention. Ma gazed in wonder as a two flocks of gyros of different manufacture, bathed in the proximity wash from the mechas, each mistook the other flock as the source of attention. Overriding the normal guideline that led them to disperse for maximal coverage, the gyros spiralled madly in ever decreasing circles as they sought to increase that flow. As he watched, the gyrating super-flock, consisting of nearly a hundred Bother-Gyros, whirled into the cloud of spray being produced by pornographer's mechanical contraption. A hundred automatic protection circuits flared into action, and the mass of gyros punched in the opposite direction - straight into the air intake ducts of the cat-mecha. One gyro would have been unfortunate. Five would have led to an emergency shutdown. But no mecha-designer had considered such a freak occurrence as the emergent behaviour so briefly displayed by the gyro-flocks. Admittedly, QA and Safety were neglected disciplines ever since the advent of the attention economy - who would dedicate their lives to a discipline that involved something so unquantifiable as preventing rare occurrences? After all, it's not as though someone might lose their accumulated attention - just their lives. With a massive crunch, the flywheels at the center of the cat-mecha broke apart, releasing a torrent of kinetic energy, and sending parts of the mecha in every direction. The pornographer tried to backpedal his mecha away from the burning debris, but his attention elsewhere, he stepped directly on one of the experts that had been trailing his footsteps. As his machine overturned, the pornographer clutched at the control panel, seeking the emergency eject key, but by chance also fat-fingering the steam overcharge system. The porn-mecha's control module blasted off the chassis - straight into the side of one of the few fixed-wall buildings in the camp. The steam explosion, while softer, was far more deadly. Ma had hit the ground as soon as he saw the first gyro sucked into the air-intake - luckily so, as burning debris had taken out several of his neighbours. Now, his view obscured by what remained of the same three foot-wall he had urged the gyro to surmount earlier that day, he flicked his eyes to open a newsline. The events of the past minute had gone viral - his feed was already filling with commentary from the other side of the world. Every last survivor would soon be bombarded with requests for commentary on the death of the celebrities. Celebrities plural? The feed from the cat-mecha was still active. In fact, the explosion had blown the control module right over the camp, landing to the east, far from the screams of the scalded and poisoned camp dwellers. Ma held a rag over as much of his mouth and nose as he could reach through his HUD-halo, and levered himself to his feet. The cat man was alive. In fact, he was almost unhurt - a mere fractured collarbone. He was, however, trapped inside his module, and mouthing something - the audio feed from his cockpit had cut out. Ma tore his attention from his HUD-halo and looked out, directly at the smoking module in the distance. Never mind proximity attention - to be the man who saved a celebrity from almost certain death? To be the only source of an audio feed for the sole celebrity survivor of what the international feeds were calling the Disaster of Taibao? Ma started to trot towards the control module, avoiding the prone bodies of those less fortunate survivors, around some of whom flames still flickered. He tore his foot away from the grasp of one, whilst muttering thanks for the last few seconds of absolute attention they granted him. He stepped over a corpse, then briefly glanced behind him. The least concussed of the able-bodied camp survivors were already moving after him. Turning his back to the setting sun, Ma broke into a run.
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 13:55 |
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RealityApologist posted:I'm taking for granted that any system will have losers. Well don't loving do that.
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 14:01 |
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https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-plus/apmlngnhgbnjpajelfkmabhkfapgnoai?hl=en I installed this and op makes a lot more sense now
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 14:02 |
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That written piece is a combination of wishful dreams and technofetishism. Technological advancement can expand possible options and methods, but it's ultimately fixed within the social, economic and political norms of the nations it's part of. One cannot look at Google or Microsoft or Apple without recognizing that they are shaped by capitalism and our modern day culture, and to suppose that individuals similarly influenced are going to break free from the yoke of the world around them because of technology conveys astounding ignorance of the life that billions of people live day to day: not connected to the cloud, but scrabbling to survive and washing clothes by hand and dying to easily treatable diseases or starvation. It's nothing new though; Popular Mechanics did the same thing in the 1950s: Where's my waterproof living room with a drain in the middle so my housewife can do all her daily cleaning with a hose?
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 14:28 |
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The second article in the OP advocates a meritocracy with badges as a reward system:quote:Executors are the "working class" of the traditional caste system, but in a world run by software every worker is guaranteed recognition for the work they do. This will take the form of gamification techniques where people earn "badges" that represent the many dimensions of their skills and mastery. This system of rewards not only motivates work and encourages a competitive atmosphere, but also serves to more efficiently connect requested work with the people in the best position to handle the job. It also frees the executor from any institutional obligations, so they might follow the vocation of their choosing. I would love a system that rewards a garbageman with an achievement pop-up through his Google Glasses as he picked up his first 10 thrash bags. Good job, plep, you'll have enough badges to advance in rank in no time. The rest of the article is filled with bad IT metaphors and oversimplifications about society, industry, technology, self-organizing systems, and human beings most of all. Perhaps the author of this article should flesh it out all his ideas and expand it with how to transition to this system and what will happen to those on the bottom of this system.
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 14:31 |
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I don't really understand this article on how this software revolution would necessarily lead to a better life for everyone else. Ultimately no matter how open sourced the services are going to be the main infrastructure (data center's,automated mines/farms etc.) is going to be owned by the powerful so we are going to end up with the power relations that already exist in capital but much worse if we are going to scrap civil service entirely and simply have it directly administrated by politicians/"executors"
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 16:27 |
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I would like to know from RealistApologist, in what ways would this society actually be better than the one we currently have? It seems to me that the big advantage your proposed society has is that it sounds cool. There'd are probably other strengths I'm not getting from my cursory reading of the OP however. Feel free to go over hypothetical weaknesses as well.
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 16:35 |
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Literally the dumbest article I've seen posted in D&D. Thanks.
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 16:39 |
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Jumping right into a world run by Helios is a terrible idea, the computers will just be a kabuki mask for unaccountable humans. If you want to use IT to change society there are more feasible concepts, like a federally mandated central listing for jobs and housing. It makes supply/demand more efficient, simplifies tax collection, and we can start cracking down on scams and MLMs.
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 16:50 |
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Mo_Steel posted:
It was never developed, even though it easily could be, because middle class people decided that reducing the number of household chores isn't as cool as paying Mexicans to do them.
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 16:55 |
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McDowell posted:Jumping right into a world run by Helios is a terrible idea, the computers will just be a kabuki mask for unaccountable humans. Yeah I really wish something like this exists. I think about it sometimes and it seems pretty stupid that we don't have it.
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 17:21 |
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Amarkov posted:It was never developed, even though it easily could be, because middle class people decided that reducing the number of household chores isn't as cool as paying Mexicans to do them.
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 17:27 |
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Ocean Book posted:Yeah I really wish something like this exists. I think about it sometimes and it seems pretty stupid that we don't have it. It is something we have to fight for. Right now information technology is only being seriously applied in ways that serve the people at the top (the NSA panopticon being the prime example). We need to start making noise about common sense, populist applications.
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 17:28 |
Amarkov posted:It was never developed, even though it easily could be, because middle class people decided that reducing the number of household chores isn't as cool as paying Mexicans to do them. Who are these middle class Americans with personal servants?
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 17:49 |
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nononsense posted:I would love a system that rewards a garbageman with an achievement pop-up through his Google Glasses as he picked up his first 10 thrash bags. Good job, plep, you'll have enough badges to advance in rank in no time. This is something that's slowly happening as a way to be more engaged. If after getting an achievement for collecting trash you could turn it in for free pizza drat straight you're keeping count.
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 18:05 |
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I don't understand why software would care about the vast majority of people who, in all likelihood, would have little to "offer" this Libertopia. In the real world, technological advancements have been leading to tremendous amounts of job losses, as technology's benefit is in making interactions more efficient and cutting out the middle-man, which includes bureaucratic positions, communications positions, etc etc. The more that technology does for us, the less need we have of all these people that we have in the system, so I just don't see where we think people are going to go, or what this software world is going to put together to offer people who don't have much to offer that system. In our current world, we have things like welfare and make-work jobs so that even if people aren't able to produce offerings to get them out of poverty, they can subsist. But I have a strong feeling that a world run by software wouldn't bind itself to these views of morality, especially when technology can provide exact measurements of how little poor people have to offer this system. In fact, this is the conversation we need to have nominally around the country (and even the world), and I definitely won't be trusting a software bureaucracy until we've had the question answered by humans: What do we do with the poor when we've eliminated even the potential for them to hold jobs? I mean we can put people in micro-apartments and give them highly-efficient commutes to their work-pod, but we have a planet of 7 billion people and the ultimate conclusion of technology will have to include a realization that the vast majority of people will have nothing to put into this system and are instead subsisting for the sake of subsisting. RIght now inefficiencies in globalization is what gives people room to exist and subsist - if efficient robots in the most fertile parts of the planet could produce all the food we would need, what would we need with farmers? I have a pretty good feeling what people like Balaji Srinivasan would think we should do - which is why I don't think letting silicon valley libertarians design said system would be a very good idea. I do think it's inevitable, but I would push back on it as long as possible to make sure we figure out what to do with all these people when we do get to these issues. Films like Wall-E solved it by only having a few humans living in the spaceships, which is a fine solution for the 1% of us already at the top, but what about those of us who are poor and don't have the kind of skills a software-run world would find useful?
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 18:06 |
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McDowell posted:Jumping right into a world run by Helios is a terrible idea, the computers will just be a kabuki mask for unaccountable humans. Are you saying that you don't trust The Computer, citizen? The Computer is your friend!
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 18:10 |
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bassguitarhero posted:RIght now inefficiencies in globalization is what gives people room to exist and subsist - if efficient robots in the most fertile parts of the planet could produce all the food we would need, what would we need with farmers? I have a pretty good feeling what people like Balaji Srinivasan would think we should do - which is why I don't think letting silicon valley libertarians design said system would be a very good idea. I do think it's inevitable, but I would push back on it as long as possible to make sure we figure out what to do with all these people when we do get to these issues. Films like Wall-E solved it by only having a few humans living in the spaceships, which is a fine solution for the 1% of us already at the top, but what about those of us who are poor and don't have the kind of skills a software-run world would find useful? This is the huge issue to me. I don't know why anyone but a 1%er would be cool with a libertarian trying to set up Galt's Gulch. You know what the final result is, (massive class cleansing and the "creative destruction" of existing society to give the few an ivory tower) so why would you do anything but try to subvert this idea?
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 18:19 |
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rkajdi posted:This is the huge issue to me. I don't know why anyone but a 1%er would be cool with a libertarian trying to set up Galt's Gulch. You know what the final result is, (massive class cleansing and the "creative destruction" of existing society to give the few an ivory tower) so why would you do anything but try to subvert this idea? Because if you flatter our lords enough, they might show favor to you! You might be permitted to co-author a paper with them to lend them gravitas, or you might be invited to speak at TED, or more likely at TED's walled ghetto, TEDx. Putting TEDx on your C.V. would be considered gauche, of course. "Don't cleanse me! I believe in the Singularity! I'd wear a silk shirt and earpiece too, if my lord allowed it!" This is what you can plead.
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 19:03 |
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shovelbum posted:Who are these middle class Americans with personal servants? I know of only one couple and they are both doctors. So yeah, definitely not middle class.
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 19:16 |
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FilthyImp posted:For instance, the poor already have a service here in Los Angeles that functions something like Uber. It's called public transit, and it's entirely on-demand for most of the day. This must be some kind of joke. Do you know what Uber is? Have you used it before?
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 20:02 |
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enraged_camel posted:This must be some kind of joke. Do you know what Uber is? Have you used it before? It's crowdsourced transportation for people that don't like calling Taxis and wouldn't ever consider jumping on a municipal bus. What the author fails to realize is that it is not a reliable option for the working class. Especially considering the relative volatility of the model (oh it's busy now? Ok, your ride is now $40 kthanx). But it sure is something swell for yuppies! It's like a charter school for mass transit -- in that it doesn't really do much to solve the underlying issues in the system. But ooh I can track the little cars as they go around and send a geotag that serves as a pickup location. Shiny!! FilthyImp fucked around with this message at 20:28 on Nov 30, 2013 |
# ? Nov 30, 2013 20:13 |
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# ? Mar 28, 2024 17:37 |
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enraged_camel posted:This must be some kind of joke. Do you know what Uber is? Have you used it before? Reading up on it makes it sound almost exactly like a cab company to me (and the fact that they started out as 'UberCab' has surprisingly little to do with that impression). I'm not sure why comparing it to public transit is some sort of laughable joke, I mean, yeah, a taxi service does fill a niche even with good public transit service, but you're making it sound like Uber is some sort of revolutionary idea without precedence when it's just a cab company with an app instead of dispatchers.
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# ? Nov 30, 2013 20:23 |