The hand has been played and trend has been set, I don't see anything coming close to a reversal, short of gereatric nepo babies dying off but their replacements don't look any better..
Hoping for something like that without taking direction action today is naive.
Direct action won't fix shit unless critical mass does it, so also got to spread the word about the fuckening we are enduring, most people are really not aware of the conditions on the ground beyond their personal experiences.
is ironic because that’s exactly how mega corps vote
Peasants (as you said) wouldn’t be able to get their break without
that’s a needed. 100% agree
what about people who are already consuming the bare minimum? What are they supposed to do?
100% agree
100% agree
wrong. That’s a privilege. Privileges can be taken away. Freedom is the ability to retard and expect repercussions or advance humanity in a civilized manner. What you are referring to is anarchy, and anarchy doesn’t have to be bad. It puts the power in the individual with no government influence. However anarchy relies strictly on human nature and dependency
Peasants (as you said) wouldn't be able to get their break without
How are they getting a break now?
As for 7, we are talking direct action? i am not following this response.
what about people who are already consuming the bare minimum? What are they supposed to do?
there is always room to improve consumption patterns... low hanging fruit is high processed foods. this can be driven two zero without any serious consequences. that's more of my point here.
You can't stop eating tho, no doubt, but you can chose what you eat.
Yeah, but we’re talking about the possibility of a utopian society. It’s completely theoretical at this point. You are talking about the logical here and now. What do you want for people in the future?
i think we disconnected somewhere. but yeah the idea of direct action is to leader by example until critical mass is hit which would finally yield better QoL
just got to make sure direct action is actually fighting the right enemy, currently working people are fighting each other mostly.
Hey, that’s a reasonable thing to hope. The flip side, of course, is that I’m hoping I don’t have to live through Star Trek’s idea of how the 21st century goes. They definitely got all of the details wrong, but I’m afraid the vibes are matching a little too well.
I think it’s as relistic a future as the complete destruction of mankind, but your point of view makes life a lot more enjoyable. Here’s a nice quote to back it up:
“There is nothing like a dream to create the future” - Victor Hugo
It sounds like the beginning of a cast system, I can’t imagine it not being abused in our current economic system. It’s also essentially welfare + a bit extra so you can actually live on it.
How will this deal with home ownership and paying for your kids education? And then your kids end up being stuck in the same situation they were born into with absolutely no way forward. It’s already like this in a sense but UBI is very likely to amplify it imo.
My main fear is how this will affect renting and house ownership. Rents will probably go up as UBI comes into play and what’s left won’t be enough to save for any kind of down deposit. I doubt UBI will be enough for monthly mortgage payments in any case.
It’s already very hard to move past the renting stage, I imagine it will be impossible once on UBI.
The cast would be comprised of land and business owners. Again, it’s already almost the case, I just think UBI without careful considerations would amplify it.
Rents will probably go up […] and what’s left won’t be enough to save for any kind of down deposit.
It’s the same capitalism we have now.
Whatever it does to home and rent prices, as well as inflation generally, would be temporary until the markets adjusts. That can be softened by slowly phasing it in, maybe $100/m each year. The standard supply, demand, price balancing act at play. This time with the income floor not being at $0.
I completely agree with you. UBI is overall a good idea, I just think UBI alone won’t be enough to properly deal with massive job loss and certain aspects of our economic systems are going to greatly reduce its impact. It’s a very complicated problem and we have some serious decisions to make, it’s further complicated by the fact that the best solutions will probably end up dealing a blow to the billionaire class and big corporations and they will most likely fight tooth and nail to keep the status quo.
Depending on the details of the system… Who cares?
Sure, we can have a couple investigators working on gross abuse of the system, but we spend more money fighting social security and disability claims than it would cost to just pay every request.
Don’t think of people having money as an on-off switch. It’s a gradual shift, and it’s already started, before AI was a thing. AI is just another tool to increase the wealth gap, like inflation, poor education, eroding of human rights etc.
Capitalism is all about short-term profit. These sorts of long-term questions and concerns are not things shareholders and investors think or care about.
Funny thing is that capitalism accidentaly solves global warming same way as it created it - turns out renewables are cheaper than fossil fuel, and the greed machine ensures the transition to more cost efficient energy sources
The problem is that the previous accumulation of capital has centralized a lot of power in actors who have a financial incentive to stop renewables. If we could hit a big reset on everything then yes, I think renewables would win, but we’re dealing with a lot of very rich, very powerful people who really want us to keep being dependent on them.
Solar power is booming world wide, consistently since many years. At >20% annual expansion rate, the exponential growth will start putting a dent on fossil within few years.
Everywhere except countries that have subsidized non-renewables which means they’ll become dumber and polluted and regress. And these countries (the US, specifically) have nuclear weapons and a lot of authoritative policy power.
They are only slowing us down though. They really cannot stop the change, because solar power is simply cheaper than oil. Once governments stop subsidizing oil, the big oil companies will be done for if they haven’t innovated by than. That is also one of the reasons why they are slowing us down, so they can buy more time to innovate and remain on top with a new, green business model.
I hope all the big oil bosses get locked up for crimes against humanity, but I think they’ll just change their business model into something green and exploit us in some different way.
This is not “capitalism accidentally solves climate change”. This is the effort of many people pushing for more development in green energy until it was able to be produced at a cost efficient way. From there, capitalism took over, as intended. For green energy to be be feasible, we needed it to get picked up by the capitalist machine, because the capitalist machine has all the power and infrastructure in place to make it into a succes.
I predict that the same thing will happen with large capacity, small size home batteries once they become economically feasible. They are on the brink of becoming profitable and once they do, they will become a huge success and help reduce energy waste.
Same thing goes for fusion, but we’re a long way off making that economically viable.
This is the effort of many people pushing for more development in green energy until it was able to be produced at a cost efficient way
I think this oversimplifies it a lot. There were a lot of different actors involved - I'm sure a lot of development was coming both from the semiconductor industry, and from state funded research, but in the end, the greed machine (aka capitalism) takes care of further researching and scaling it to the global level.
Also it's not like there wasn't any money in that business years ago - even back then solar was commonly used as a remote power source in mobile applications (calculators, camping and so on). Also NASA, but this was purely state funded
Last I heard, there were proposals already put forward that would quintuple the current natural gas supply. Even though it’s more expensive than renewables.
The companies that got natural gas off the ground in the first place might not see a return on that investment for another decade or two. There’s a reason every year demand for natural gas has been going up.
Back around the housing collapse, natural gas was being touted as a “bridge fuel” that could get us away from filthy coal and serve as a temporary energy source until we got renewables up to speed. Funnily enough, what’s been built doesn’t seem like much of a bridge because there’s no plan for ramping down natural gas.
Yup, economics are all about “LiNe mUsT gO uP!!!” It’s infuriating as all hell for people that can actually see further than the tip of their own nose.
Here’s the problem with that: it relies on things like the LUCAS CPR assist machine which doesn’t fit on a lot of people. I’ve done CPR on a lot of people, and only a handful of them would have even fit in a LUCAS in the first place.
Tha makes sense. My point was only to refute the “AI can’t do CPR” comment. Every technological breakthrough in history was imagined as impossible by some, so to claim that because something is hard to do means it probably won’t be done has been shown to not be the case
Q3 2026 will come around and the AI will report that revenues are down. The CEO will respond the only way they know, by ordering that costs be cut by laying off employees. The AI will report there is no one left to lay off but the CEO.
And if you then go around wandering “oh, but not every AI builds something those few people want”, “that’s way too few people to fill a market”, or “and what about all the rest?”… Maybe you should read Keynes, because that would not be the first time this kind of buying-power change happens, and yes, it always suck a lot for everybody (even for the rich people).
The vanishingly small amount of people that will be unfathomably rich in a privatized post-scarcity economy will give us just enough in UBI to make sure we can buy our Mountain Dew verification cans. And without the ability to withhold our labor as a class, we’ll have no peaceful avenue to improve our conditions.
Except it's not. That wealth isn't cash in some bank account, in most cases it's a stock in companies these people built from scratch - Bezos made Amazon, Gates Microsoft, Buffet Berkshire Hathaway and so on
The wealth of super rich is allocated in places that produce goods and services
In the 2000s, there was a strong angle about how programmers would no longer exist thanks to drag and drop programming tools and website builders. The average office worker would write little programs as easy as a excel formula, and a “programmer” would cease to exist.
I remember CS professors fearing for the future as they talked about the doomsday scenario of programmer jobs ceasing to exist, going the way of human calculators and the people who put letters together for a printing press.
Of course, business is still normal. It ebbs and flows.
But more seriously: There is a lot of stuff that AI can't do. And is far off of. It can barely do anything at all for me. Like translate stuff or re-write an E-Mail. The rest is hype. It can't do my laundry, clean up the kitchen. It can't drive the train that gets me to work, not fix a toilet. And it's years if not decades away from being able to do it. I'd be worried if I had some callcenter job or first level support. Or was a useless manager who just pushes paper around all day. These jobs are going to be replaced fast, yes. But it'll take some time for lots of other jobs.
And if we (at some point) advance to a future, where we live in abundance, and technology can do all the hard work, so humans don't have to... Wouldn't that be great? We could do whatever we want. Of course culture and society has to change. We can't have concepts like salaries if we don't work. But by definition we'd have our basic needs met. Food will be enough, or we wouldn't not work anymore. So I guess we just do away with money. Or everyone gets a fixed amount. You could make up your own job. Do arts and crafts, or travel, or spend the day with your kids.
There is one big caveat, however: We won't automatically arrive in a Star Trek post-scarcity utopia. Currently all the AI is owned and designed by big corporations. They also own the computers to run it and they are in control of it. And there is a lot of corporate greed, lobbyism and generally unhealthy divide. I'd say it's very likely that rich people and big, greedy corporations will want to keep everything to themselves. The rich will get richer and assert their dominance with this powerful tool. The poor will get poorer. And can't compete with that at all. And despite theoretically living in a sci-fi world, it'll be a dystopia and end in a big mess / class war / oppression.
But yeah, you're right. Our current form of economy with supply and demand, and money, won't work under those conditions. And I don't think there is a fix to it sou we could keep it.
That hasn’t really been an issue for more than a decade at this point. Domestic manufacturing production in developed nations has actually been increasing. They just don’t use humans much. You’re not losing your job to poor people overseas. You’re losing it to robots, and you have been since before the current AI craze.
What, do want a shitty graveyard shift call center job? Trust me, you aren’t losing out by not having access to that.
Unemployment isn’t even high right now. Why are you whining about a non-issue to begin with? What good would it do you to have more low paying jobs when the problem is that all the jobs are already low paying as it is? We just saw that if there are more jobs then people they’ll happily crash the economy until there aren’t just to make sure wages don’t go up. What do you hope to accomplish by spreading 30 year old conservative propaganda?
Hell yeah! People in 50s and even 20s worked 40 hours per week to feed a family of 4! Now we can do that by working much less than… wait, not even 2 working parents safely feed a family of 4? Even with all the gains in productivity?
I agree it’s going to be problem. It’s already happened when we exported manufacturing jobs to China. Most of what was left was retail which didn’t pay as much but we struggled along (in part because of cheap products from China). I think that’s why trinkets are cheap but the core of living (housing and now food) is relatively more expensive. So the older people see all the trinkets (things that used to be expensive but are now cheap) and don’t understand how life is more expensive.