Posted by WillDaSilva 5 hours ago
Yeah, tech billionaires sometimes show large gaps in their education. But it doesn't matter. Reading the right books doesn't prevent people from chasing wealth and power, it just makes them more articulate while they do it.
It's not that these individuals are not smart or capable, it's that they lack the dedication or care required to do these ideas justice. It's easy to see how someone can read Girard and obsess over the antichrist in the twilight of old age. However, a more rigorous engagement with philosophical foundations would offer them the breadth and perspective to be free of that narrow obsession.
It's about diagnosing why billionaire/CEO intellectual hubris makes them incredibly dangerous and sloppy thinkers.
As Hume said, reason is the slave of the passions. E.g. JD Vance read enough history to call Trump "America's Hitler"... but became his VP anyway.
To put it crudely, education gives you tools to identify when people are getting screwed, but it can't force you to care.
Unless the bubble pops and destroys all these companies, I don’t think the leaders of AI companies will die natural deaths.
You don't even have to go that far back. The New Deal that everyone fawns over was in large part the compromise of the wealthy with the workers to form the Middle Class, in lieu of being murdered in their own homes like had been going on for decades prior. The rise of Communism and Socialism in the US was a dire threat to their power and wealth, and even leveraging the US Military in bombing union workers couldn't stop the momentum of a populace in need of basic necessities that corporations and industrialists had stolen from them for personal profit (shelter was increasingly in Company Towns, payment was in scrip, jobs were precarious and dangerous and unreliable, the government offered nothing but harm). The deal on the table was they surrender power and keep the wealth, or they fucking die when the masses finally had enough of their bullshit.
Thus the New Deal was struck. Communists and Socialists were weakened by Capital and Politics immediately thereafter to try and ensure a future uprising couldn't occur, but the real saving grace was a citizenry who, at least for the white majority, had all their needs met with stable employment and had ample time to engage with their community as a result. That is what ended up building the Middle Classes everyone wants to "go back to" but without enacting the policies that brought about its rise (like a +70% tax level on the wealthy, for instance).
Fire bombing of personal residences, gunning down CEOs in broad daylight, firing shots at politicians supporting further theft from the populace or outright ignoring their plight - all of it is reprehensible, but also completely foreseen by literally anyone with a cursory knowledge of World History.
This always stuck with me and baffles me why we aren’t listening to that now.
There is this bizarre math now where it’s for every person we cut the remaining with 5-10x with AI but I’m not seeing anything like that yet at all.
virtually all the resources from oil, food and land, IP and tech (semiconductors), even human capital, and advanced IT. everything is captured already. from free laisure entertainment minutes, to internet search, to social. every single resource is captured and you are stepping on somebody toes. worse, most industries are monopolies/or-close, meaning couple whales dominate everything, and nobody else really matters.
whatever "new" pie comes out, it is usually at expense of something else.
this "creation of pie" is such an illusion. go and try to "create a pie". it is such an illusion.
just go and try to even grow food out of earth with sunlight and water (which all should be free), yet farmers notoriously unprofitable and would not survive without government subsidies.
We need to consider that by automating and replacing the work of people who have an income, those people stop consuming and no longer generate profit for capitalism.
How is this sustainable?
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!hbbY!,f_auto,q_auto:...
Like what is this?
Edit: Also this article has so many AI-generated images. I hate that I can't tell if the words themselves are AI-generated or not as well.
And yes, that's more or less the endgame.
But human labor does not actually need to be as expensive as it is. How cheaply could you house, feed, and clothe people? There are parts of the world where people get by on very little income. Of course we could aspire to better living conditions than the world's poorest, but that's what the robot revolution promises: abundance.
Imagine if AI suddenly was in more demand than human labor, simply due to the price. Excellent quality output for cheaper than somebody with a degree. What would be the second order effects?
Human labor, being in less demand, would have to lower its price to compete. This is the death of the middle (and lower) class future we fear. But ironically the price of goods and services would lower as everything, even complex engineering, medicine, construction becomes affordable. With the right policy, human labor becomes cheap again. Maybe even competitive to machine labor in some niches. Improvements in machine labor could have a compounding effect on how affordable it can be for humans to survive.
So where's the gap here? Well, most wager earner's income worldwide goes towards housing. Food and water and medicine can be bottlenecked causing price gouging. Monopolies and lack of competition in the market can raise the prices of things until everybody is spending all of their disposable income on necessities. I think the price of human labor is currently very high (in the developed world) due rentier capitalism.
The transition will upend much of our economic investments and probably involve a great deal of human suffering until nations figure out the right mix of solutions.
