Someone once wrote that power corrupts, and the greater the power, the greater the corruption. So there is a more concentration of power, more privilege, deeper inequality, and an enhanced capacity to amass further power—all of which creates a perverse feedback loop. It is an age-old story, resurfacing today with greater speed and intensity than ever before.
And if the so-called democracy —where it truly exists— is a heuristic method for distributing power across such a broad base that the level of corruption per capita remains below a critical threshold, a point at which moral and cultural antibodies can still function?
Who knows.
Forget Billions or even 100s of millions. If I had a single digit million dollar fortune to my name, nobody will hear from me again. I'll go to a quiet corner and just read books or garden or whatever. If I can be of any help/use to those less fortunate than me, I will. If I can't do that, then I'll keep quiet and live out my life.
I cannot fathom going out of my way to create chaos, to be cruel, to make lives miserable for millions of people, and worst of all, call it "progress". I just don't understand how these people think. Maybe I am just too poor, too dumb...
The personality defect that leads you to become powerful is the same defect that makes you want to become even more powerful.
It's the job of the rest of us to restructure the system to prevent this kind of pathological runaway power accumulation. It means new laws, but also a more enlightened culture.
Yes!
This is the multi-polar (or Moloch) problem, where (ruthless) individual rationality leads to collective ruin.
Unless the system makes it unprofitable, ruthlessness will always out-perform good behavior. Players who make suboptimal (ethical) decisions will lose over time. Corruption will outperform unless the cost of that corruption outweighs the benefit of it. The root cause isn't a moral failing of the players.
If incentives are aligned so that the winnginest behavior is also the most desirable, it doesn't matter if there are defective or unscrupulous players. We can harness selfish ambition for the collective good.
E.g. CEO compensation and behavior differences between Japan/USA, Potlatch (wealth redistribution) festivals among the Pacific Northwest indigenous.
Said defect is called *avarice". Left untempered, it's one of the most destructive of vices.
It may even mean a revolution, either the soft or hard type.
A lot of people do exactly that, but by definition, you don't hear from the people who nobody will hear from again.
What's left are the folks for whom power and influence is a game. If they were to fuck off to the sunset and live a quiet life which harms nobody, they'd be abandoning the game. And it's become such a part of their identity that they can't live without that anymore.
Ironically, these folks are the best argument for replacing human decision making with machines. Cold, logical, emotionless machines that don't have identities or a need to win the game. Then all the folks whose sole purpose in life is controlling others would either need to find another purpose or off themself.
> these folks are the best argument for replacing human decision making with machines.
So the best way forward is to succumb to the tech oligarchs' plan?
I strongly disagree. Machines aren't neutral nor fair. They exist to impose the will of the people operating them. Have you already forgotten what social media algorithms, that "cold, logical, emotionless machines" that you speak so highly of, did to our society?
That's where these optimists are incredibly naive. They forget that machines will always be controlled by people. And that those who already have control will never cede it voluntarily.
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
> Cold, logical, emotionless machines that don't have identities
is exactly how people described those who did the dirty work in the concentration camps
They have already taken part in every conceivable pleasure known to man that money can buy (legal and illegal). So much so that they have been desensitized to any stimuli barring extremes. And that's assuming these billionaires started out as ordinary folks in the first place (which is doubtful). All they got left is a God-complex to sustain them emotionally.
Let us be neighbours, so we can play a little bit Counter Strike or Q3A :-))
I would buy a small house near forrest & mountains.
Earning billions and being cruel are inseparable. It is simply not possible to lay hands on such astronomical amounts of wealth without massive exploitation, which is why billionaires have the character traits that you describe.
> I just don't understand how these people think.
A lot of it stems from EA (effective altruism) - paraphrased very roughly, it could argue that you are being immoral or selfish by not using the million dollars to invest and make a humanity changing discovery (FWIW I don't believe this, I'm explaining how they view things).
If they harm a billion people, but it benefits trillions in some theoretical glorious future, then it's the right thing to do. Of course it's all bullshit and they bake in a ton of assumptions at the core of their arguments that make the math of greed 'feel' okay, or at least palatable.
I find this not good Argument. We cannot predict the future and thinking about the good of people living in the future is therefore Not possible. We should think about the now and here and it's problems. Case: climate change, These people do Not waste any thought about that.
If they harm a billion people, but it benefits trillions in some theoretical glorious future, then it's the right thing to do
By the same logic, if harming one billionaire benefits million normal people, will they be okay with it? None of this makes any sense. Who gave them the right to decide all of this anyway?
I came across this satire recently, and I think it captures some of the pseudo-intellectual inanity.
https://morewrong.lol
Same. Non-sociopaths understand that with power comes responsibility and I don’t want to be responsible for everyone else so I don’t want power.
sociopaths also understand that to gain power, you need to step on many people heads, which brings its own risks.
So peacefully sitting on millions and not billions may be winning strategy even from sociopath's point of view. Those people who wants billions likely have some other mental differences (getting adrenaline rush from power they can't get from other activities, etc)
This is the inevitable result of a system that equates capital with power, and relies on an uneven distribution of said capital-power. A system designed for inequality will result in equality, and those with power-capital will only find more and better ways to increase their power-capital, to the detriment of us all. Humankind is doomed if we do not find a better way than capitalism.
Maybe we need to stop measuring success based on the number of IOU notes passed around. Even measured on a per capita basis the number goes up doesn't mean better outcomes if the variance also goes up (as you've mentioned with inequality).
Some kind of eudaimonia metric with the whole cohort of people happy, healthy and thriving reducing the variance.
> Humankind is doomed if we do not find a better way than capitalism.
better way is regulated capitalism. Its just citizens don't stand ground when capitalists compromise regulation, and our regulated capitalism becomes not regulated.
Your "better way" is what got us here. Capitalism has always been regulated. You cannot create a system where having more money == having more power, and expect those with more power not to tilt the scales in their favor. It's not possible. Double standards for the rich and poor has been a trope since there were poor and rich people, and that's because by design the rich have more power.
We can't even keep laws on the books that were passed as a result of the Great Depression or Great Recession. All normal people agreed that we should not repeat those catastrophes, and yet the rules were repealed because they inconvenienced the rich people who wanted to make more money, and what they say goes.
We need a system without coercive hierarchy, and without a system of haves with power and have-nots without it.
> Your "better way" is what got us here. Capitalism has always been regulated. You cannot create a system where having more money == having more power, and expect those with more power not to tilt the scales in their favor.
If citizens stand ground I think we can. I consider Scandinavian socialist capitalism as success. If citizens don't care then capitalists do regulatory capture as you described.
Should human beings remain in control of planet Earth? Or should we be replaced as the dominant species?
Without thinking too long or too hard I can most definitively think of some dominant individuals that should be replaced. As in, ASAP.
These technofascists are today's equivalent to the eugenicists of 100 years ago. They believe they have the singular vision and the moral authority to dictate the future of humanity.
But it's also different this time because these maniacs come with the power of perverse amounts of money and control over actual technology.
We let them become that big and powerful and I have an inkling we might come to regret it.
I've always seen using an adblocker as a moral imperative to avoid giving the parasites any money. I also segment my browsing / shopping / buying to avoid referral tracking etc.
Imagine if that been mass culture! Imagine Doubleclick never getting off the ground, so it would have been unable to kill Google and walk around wearing its skin as a costume. Imagine if when all of the tech companies wanted profitability, they had to ask for subscription fees in exchange for providing actual value, rather than merely optimizing for "engagement" (aka time wasted).
This is Bernie Sanders not quite getting what's going on.
Computers getting more powerful in a Moore's law like way has been going on for decades and if human brains are something like computers of somewhat constant abilities it's inevitable the computers would overtake at some point. It's not really sci fi or an oligarch plan or especially new - I wrote about it for my uni entrance exam 45 years ago and the ideas go back at least to Turing.
Most of the stuff mentioned will inevitably happen, oligarchs or not and we should plan to make the best of it. Some of the things - merge, immortality and super intelligence could be quite cool. I imagine it'll be voluntary and some people will live traditionally, some will embrace the tech.
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This is tim333 not quite getting what the article is about.
> I imagine it'll be voluntary
But sure my sweet summer child, just come in and take a seat...
Does anyone have a better long term plan for the species? The full article is paywalled, so does Bernie (who seems generally great) have a 10,000 year plan for the species?
We can’t even solve 1 year problems as a nation, so the probability of global human community aligning to stall our breakneck self destruction via AGW or war is zero.
Humans have only dominated the planet for 250,000 years, who says we’re supposed to continue that?
Dinosaurs dominated for millions and they are gone there’s no universal mandate that humans are the final form of intelligence and no reason to believe we are.
Last I checked we’re all extinct within 1Billion years and humans can’t survive mass migration off of earth because there’s nowhere to go.
This is the only option
There's plenty of places to go. Space is literally infinite. We even have multiple options within our own star system.
> Space is literally infinite
It is literally not.
But you can’t get there cause unless we invent near light speed travel it will take decades of flight time…
…And even if you did all you did was move human problems to some other place we weren’t built for
Sounds like you’re suggesting colonizing space with biological humans and I’m not sure why that would be preferable
If you are thinking of the sun overheating the planet you could just move further out in the solar system. A billion years is a long time.
And move into what? There is no possible engineering effort that would yield a long term plan for humans to survive infinitely
Is that the goal? Immortal humans? Seems less plausible in every possible dimension (and undesirable imo) than making superhuman machines
You’ve also not solved anything like food/water etc…there’s an entropy problem that isn’t solvable.
The universe is hostile to a stable species and we’re not even stable genetically what exactly is the future people are thinking is possible?
Like where, exactly?
As someone brighter than me put it, let's colonize Antarctica first. We're nowhere near being able to survive there, now, without regular support ships. Even with those, it would be considered a miserable existence by the vast majority of people. Tell me, where in the world would you go?
Maybe make Earth a socialist garden of Eden / national park / Butlins thing. Uploaded humans go off to space and get building a Dyson sphere?
You just described the world from elisium
> This is the only option
You are free to delete yourself. Don't impose it on others.