Greek states were neither particularly stable nor particularly long-lived. Irrespective of its moral merits, the Greek system was outcompeted by monarchies and eventually the Roman Republic. It’s hard to pinpoint the blame, exactly, but I’d be cautious, especially since modern democracies arguably came about due to the pressures of industrialization, and previous models developed in very different environments.

Good idea. Random selection is interesting but I don't know if it can work today. A solutions for the issue you mentioned "Nobody knows anything about any of the candidates" is a system that allows people to vote only for people they know personally, and use some algorithm (maybe something like the PageRank algorithm that Google used) that rates each citizen according to the votes they get but also the votes are valued according to the rating of each citizen. That way the rating flows to the people who are really trusted by the people and not the best funded career politicians. Just an idea. maybe there are problems with that too if it can be gamed but it's worth trying.

I don't see how selecting the Lion, the Robot or the Scarecrow at random is going to help with any of the issues you mentioned. Now some rando (or group of randos) that you didn't even know existed gets power based on pure luck. You will still need media to learn about them and they could still be made up.

At least elections have a veneer of consent since people are asked which of the available options they prefer. Can you imagine anyone going to war because people chosen by a lottery wheel asked for it?

This is a problem of scale. The Greeks back then lived in small city-states where random selection meant that every able bodied male had a good shot at holding an important office at least once in their lifetime. You didn't need to hatch devious schemes to come to power. You couldn't abuse your fellow men because they would be in charge tomorrow. That's the true power of random selection and it's completely inapplicable to today's society at large.

There are elements of truth to this, but it’s a wild exaggeration. It feeds into exactly the kind of political cynicism that stops people voting and makes the problem worse.

> The Greeks already figured out thousands of years ago that the best way to implement democracy was via random selection.

The greeks ( socrates/plato ) figured out that democracy was a terrible form of government. Then again, the greeks did vote for socrates to drink hemlock.

> everything people think they know was told to them by the corporate-controlled media

Is there anything sweeter than fox news, a "news" company owned by an australian, railing against foreign influence in american politics?

> They're so sure it's all legit, they'll viciously argue their candidate's position as if they were a family member they knew personally.

At this point, I'd prefer we ban campaigning and silly staged debates altogether. Just have each candidate post who their masters are and then let the people vote off that. It's far more value to the voter if they knew who the politicians owe their allegiance to than empty campaign promises.

> best way to implement democracy is via random selection

Long ago I had the same thought as you and a question occurred: the life anyone is born into is a lottery, so hereditary rulers == democracy?

It would make more sense, to vote on policy by giving priorities and preventing impossible votes (cant have tax reduced while demanding more for services)- and then the policy votes get mapped to the corresponding candidates.

No, voting is not dumb. Direct voting (referendum), representation and sortition (random selection) are 3 basic democratic mechanisms (they distribute power equally among people).

But each mechanism has different tradeoffs. How much you get involved, how much expertise you need, and how well your interests are represented. A good political system uses all 3 to public's advantage, to reinforce each other.

OK, so I get selected at random.

I haven't got the first clue about governing a country, so I'd rely on people telling me what to do. If they can convince me (which will be easy, trillion dollar companies and powerful billionaire oligarchs convince people to act against their own self interest all the time) they end up running the country, but the blame can be taken by me.

> It will have to be displaced and reset by a nonviolent popular uprising.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. What do you think the newest pet project of Musk is about? I'm talking of his America's Party initiative - an obvious attempt to direct any popular uprising, be it nonviolent or otherwise, into he same old river bed.

When you say "popular" you have to take into account who decides what's popular these days and why billionaires are tripping all over themselves to get equipped with "social" media of their own.

"displaced and reset by a nonviolent popular uprising" none of these words are particularly comforting... tough times are a-coming.

All corporate media has done this. For example, it's made left leaning people think that only Fox News is the issue when it's all corporate media

> Almost nobody applies critical thought to politics

Because they have different concerns, and time and attention are scarce. With all possible social changes like the article suggests this focus could change too. Ultimately, when things will get too bad, uprisings happen and sometimes things change. And I hope the more we (collectively) get through, the higher are the chances we start noticing the patterns and stopping early.

> Almost nobody applies critical thought to politics

Not only that, but they actively stop applying critical thinking when the same problem is framed in a political way. And yes it's both sides, and yes the "more educated" the people are, the worse their results are (i.e. almost a complete reversal from framing the same problem as skin care products vs. gun control). Recent paper on this, also covered and somewhat replicated by popular youtubers.

they way this comment is downvoted goes to show

that most people are viscerally reacting to feeling insulted by being called out about how most of what we think most of the time is simply chorus-like repetition of the general vibe we lead ourselves into believing is the vibe of "our" kind of people. our tribe of like minded individuals; the hacker crowd.

but at least I can admit this. it's only at certain sparse points in anybody's life that we are forced to really think critically; but this experience is terribly difficult and if/when real enough it comes with the existential dread of impossible choices weighted by real world consequences. I remind myself of this so to feel better about how I am indeed a mindless bot preaching to the choir, repeating what I was told to repeat, and pretending that I am fully present and fully free at all times (nobody is... that would be exhausting)

> Almost nobody applies critical thought to politics

Including you. This is a 3000 year old critique you just uncritically parroted. It is the the original thought terminating cliche. People have always been calling each other ideologically brainwashed NPCs and themselves independent maverick free thinkers.

Except my thoughts are original and critical, everyone else is just a sheep. /s

I don't want to get into politics, but to shift things slightly --- what technological and business structures might help to shift things for the better?

I rather regret not being able to justify buying:

https://daylightcomputer.com/

since it was set up as a public benefit corporation.

Similarly, there are co-operatives for electric still --- how are they handling solar? Do they afford an option to use one's share of the profits to purchase solar panels and batteries?

What would be an equivalent structure for an AI company which would actually be meaningful (and since circling back to politics is inevitable, enforceable)?

Neither future is good. Sure the Australia one with chips in your brain to alter your thoughts might seem better, but it's still a dystopia.

  > Mass immigration is

There is always crime to report. But notice the narratives are never about white collar crime. That might come to close.

> Mass immigration is making it hard to maintain order in some places

Where is this happening? I'm in the US, and I haven't seen or heard of this.

On any serious task, it's not even close. There's no free lunch.

This isn't a serious contender. You need dual AMD EPYC CPUs and 400 GB of RAM for a proper affordable Deepseek self hosting setup

Claude Code, where it can use tools and iterate; if it makes mistakes it will know as well and retry, this is a massive boost from copy pasting into chat and getting the trust broken by the LLM confidently making mistakes. By having it be responsible for the results, it has increased utility. E.g. "when I run the program I get error X, see if you can find out what caused it. Run make in ./build and run the program to see if the error is gone". In addition, Claude has written some nice code on occasion that was simply no different that how I would have done it. In a few sentences I can explain my coding style and the rest is derrived from existing code.

Bit obvious isn't it?

A girlfriend simulator

So do you argue that printing press was a net negative for humanity?

The individualism of the poor and working class cannot out compete the collectivism of the ultra rich

This is one of the deepest ironies of our era.

A lot of advances led to bad things, at the same time they led to good things.

Conversely a lot of very bad things led to good things. Worker rights advanced greatly after the plague. A lot of people died but that also mean there was a shortage of labour.

Similarly WWII, advanced women's rights because they were needed to provide vital infrastructure.

Good and bad things have good and bad outcomes, much of what defines if it is good or bad is the balance of outcomes, but it would be foolhardy to classify anything as universally good or bad. Accept the good outcomes of the bad. address the bad outcomes of the good.

Did paint and canvas kill human innovation? Did the photograph? Did digital art?

"The very process of human innovation" will survive, I assure you.

The invention of the scientific method fundamentally changed the very process of human innovation itself.

The resurgence seen so far has been for the populist right, ones led by the rich and powerful.

Exactly. And as implied by the term techno-feudalism, the owners are okay with a greatly reduced economy, and in some cases a severe reduction in quality of life overall, as long as they end up ruling over what's left.

> This a late 20th century myopic view of the economy. In the ages and the places long before, most of human toil was enjoyed by a tiny elite.

And overall wealth levels were much lower. It was the expansion of consumption to the masses that drove the enormous increase in wealth that those of us in "developed" countries now live with and enjoy.

> Increased productivity means greater leisure time.

Productivity has been increasing steadily for decades. Do you see any evidence that leisure time has tracked it?

IMO what will actually happen is feudal stasis after a huge die-off. There will be no market for new products and no ruling class interest in solving new problems.

If this sounds far-fetched, consider that this we can see this happening already. This is exactly the ideal world of the Trump administration and its backers. They have literally slashed funding for public health, R&D, and education.

And what's the response? Thiel, Zuckererg, Bezos, and Altman haven't said a word against the most catastrophic reversal of public science policy since Galileo and the Inquisition. Musk is pissed because he's been sidelined, but he was personally involved, through DOGE, in cutting funding to NASA and NOAA.

So what will AI be used for? Clearly the goal is to replace most of the working population. And then what?

One clue is that Musk cares so much about free speech and public debate he's trying to retrain Grok to be less liberal.

None of them - not one - seem even remotely interested in funding new physics, cancer research, abundant clean energy, or any other genuinely novel boundary-breaking application of AI, or science in general. They have the money, they're not doing it. Why?

The focus is entirely on building a nostalgic 1950s world with rockets, robots, apartheid, corporate sovereignty, and ideological management of information and belief.

And that includes AI as a tool for enforcing business-as-usual, not as a tool for anything dangerous, original, or unruly which threatens their political and economic status.

You aren't seeing the end goal clearly enough.

The end goal is to ensure the survival of a small group of technocrats that control all production on Earth due to the force multiplier effect of technological advancements. This necessitates the depopulation of Earth.

Let's say AI gets so good that it is better than people at most jobs. How can that economy work? If people aren't working, they aren't making money. If they don't have money, they can't pay for the goods and services produced by AI workers. So then there's no need for AI workers.

UBI can't fix it because a) it won't be enough to drive our whole economy, and b) it amounts to businesses paying customers to buy their products, which makes no sense.

The most likely scenario is that everyone but those who own AI starves, and the ones who remain around are allowed to exist because powerful psychopaths still desire literal slaves to lord over, someone to have sex with and to someone to hurt/hunt/etc.

I like your optimism, though.

>exclusively entertainment related

We may find that, if our baser needs are so easily come by that we have tremendous free time, much of the world is instead pursuing things like the sciences or arts instead of continuing to try to cosplay 20th century capitalism.

Why are we all doing this? By this, I mean, gestures at everything this? About 80% of us will say, so that we don't starve, and can then amuse ourselves however it pleases us in the meantime. 19% will say because they enjoy being impactful or some similar corporate bullshit that will elicit eyerolls. And 1% do it simply because they enjoy holding power over other people and management in the workplace provides a source of that in a semi-legal way.

So the 80% of people will adapt quite well to a post-scarcity world. 19% will require therapy. And 1% will fight tooth and nail to not have us get there.

Let's clarify that for a serf, support meant military supply, not swinging a sword - that was reserved for the knightly class. For the great majority of medieval villagers the tie to their lord revolved around getting crops out of the ground.

A serf's week was scheduled around the days they worked the land whose proceeds went to the lord and the commons that subsisted themselves. Transfers of grain and livestock from serf to lord along with small dues in eggs, wool, or coin primarily constituted one side of the economic relation between serf and lord. These transfers kept the lord's demesne barns full so he could sustain his household, supply retainers, etc, not to mention fulfill the. tithe that sustained the parish.

While peasants occasionally marched, they contributed primary in financing war more than they fought it. Their grain, rents, and fees were funneled into supporting horses, mail, crossbows rather than being called to fight themselves.

True, nobody is in charge other than investor ROI. If anyone's safety or common sense gets in the way of that, that "anyone" will be replaced.

Though "improving" is in the eye of the beholder. Like when my AI code assistant "improves" its changes by deleting the unit tests that those changes caused to start failing.

There are many remarkable leaders throughout history and around the world who have done the best that they could for the people they found themselves leading lead and did so for noble reasons and not because they felt like they were better than them.

Tecumseh, Malcolm X, Angela Merkel, Cincinnatus, Eisenhower, and Gandhi all come to mind.

George Washington was surely an exceptional leader but he isn't the only one.

I still think they'd come to their senses. I mean, it's somewhat tautological, you can't control something that's smarter than humans.

Though that said, the other problem is capitalism. Investors won't be so face to face with the consequences, but they'll demand their ROI. If the CEO plays it too conservatively, the investors will replace them with someone less cautious.

Can you explain a little more about Norway?

Sure, maybe the Grand Algorithm could do what the market currently does and decide how to distribute surplus wealth. It could decide how much money you deserve each month, how big of a house, how desirable of a partner. But it still needs values to guide it. Is the idea for everyone to be equal? Are certain kinds of people supposed to have less than others? Should people have one spouse or several?

Historically the elites aren't just those who have lots of money or property. They're also those who get to decide and enforce the rules for society.

Well, aren't the working class also superfluous, at least once the AGI gets enough automation in place?

So it would depend on which class the AGI decided to side with. And if you think you can pre-program that, I think you underestimate what it means to be a general intelligence...

The AGI, given it has some agency, becomes the upper class. The question is, why would the AGI care about humans at all, especially given the assumption that it's largely smarter than humans? Humans can become superfluous.

> Many organisms in the biological world adopt the same strategy.

There isn’t a single organism at the top of the biological pyramid.

There are multiple economic enclaves, even ignoring the explicit borders of nations. China, east asia, Europe, Russia would all operate in their own economies as well as globally.

I also forsee the splitting off of nation internet networks eventually impacting what software you can and cannot use. It's already true, it'll get worse in order to self-protect their economies and internal advantages.

...yes, and? Every capitalist company wants to become a monopoly. It's just not always easy to do so. We have dozens of companies in the USA that have been trying to become monopolies for years, with tons of reporting on it. Only tech companies get this intense scrutiny. I feel like it's some weird quirk of human fear, like how people fear planes the most even though they're by far the safest mode of transportation. People are just wigged out more by tech companies than grocery stores, coffee shops, pharmacies or telecommunications companies.

Coefficient voting control, like kind of PID. reduce effect of early voters and increase effect of later voters. Slope of voter volume as response to an event determines reactivity coefficient. Might dampen reactivity and create an incentive for people to not feel it's pointless to vote after a certain margin is reached

Sure!

* Review of wealth sources with respect to food

* Socioeconomic ramifications of a free food distribution system

* Implications of artificial wombs, longevity pills, and nefarious people

* Benefits of personal, real-time DNA analysis devices

* Organic, bioluminescing street lamp replacements with 500+ year lifetimes (a bathtub curve extension analog)

* Robotaxi services using machine learning to optimize owner income

* How optimal prisoner's dilemma strategies resolve Hume's guillotine

* Strategies for evading capture in a surveillance state

* What plans an AGI would give itself (that don't involve conquering humanity)

* Ways an AGI could completely disable our emergency call centers

* Rationale behind a Galactic race towards harnessing black hole energy

and more.

I think they meant for you to replace the word username with their username in its place.

Human brain is nowhere close to AGI. Its intelligence that we can definitely replicate, but that intelligence would be as "dangerous" or "powerful" as any other human today.

The human brain demonstrates that human intelligence is possible, but it does not guarantee that artificial intelligence with the same characteristics can be created.

This is like saying "planets exist, therefore it's possible to build a planet" and then breathlessly writing a ton about how amazing planet engineering is and how it'll totally change the world real estate market by 2030.

And the rest of us are looking at a bunch of startups playing in the dirt and going "uh huh".

The human brain is an existence proof? I think that phrase doesn’t mean what you think it means. I don’t think dualist or non-dualist means what you think it means either. When people are talking about AGI, they are clearly talking about something the human research community is actually working towards. Therefore, they are talking about computing equivalent to a Turing machine and using using hardware architecture very similar to what has been currently conceived and developed. Do you have any evidence that the human brains works in such a way? Do you really think that you think and solve problems in that way? Consider simple physics. How much energy is needed and heat produced to train and run these models to solve simple problems. How much of the same is needed and produced when you would solve a sheet of calculus problems, solve a riddle, or write a non-trivial program? Couldn’t you realistically do those things with minimal food and water for a week, if needed? Does it actually seem like the human brain is really at all like these things and is not fundamentally different? I think this is even more naive than if you had proposed “Life exists in the universe, so of course we can create it in a lab by mixing a few solutions.” I think the latter is far likelier and conceivable and even that is still quite an open question.