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by vrganj2 hours ago |
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upvoteby andsoitis1 hours ago|
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> It's time for the means of production to be owned communally.

What does this mean in practice? That an individual cannot own a machine (which is a means of production)?

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upvoteby a2ff6eeb01 hours ago|
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What kind of political leverage do the useless have? This isn't a realistically sustainable outcome.

Today, people have leverage because removing them has real economic consequences. With AI, we need to be on the useful side of the divide to have any leverage.

And then we'd better hope AI has respect for property rights.

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upvoteby EMIRELADERO1 hours ago|
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Apathetic mass-murder is unjustifiable, and the ultrarich would need to justify it to their families, who would then need to justify it to other people they know, and so on. And remember that we're talking about the majority of the global population, an event like that couldn't be hand-waved away like one would do for a minority group.
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upvoteby dgellow44 minutes ago|
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I consider DOGE actions to be pretty much exactly what you describe, with their sudden destruction of USAID and defunding of climate science
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upvoteby jacquesm18 minutes ago|
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That all makes a lot more sense in light of the current hunger for power for data centers.
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upvoteby dgellow2 minutes ago|
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Yep :(
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upvoteby a2ff6eeb01 hours ago|
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Iran just mass murdered their protesters earlier this year, and they needed to convince humans to pull the trigger. It didn't seem to be that hard for them to justify.

It's probably a lot easier to convince the military AIs we're building to do it.

I don't particularly like the situation, but I plan to do what I can to be on the winning side. The world is going to be what we're all in on building, and for people on the winning side it may be a utopia. Either way, I know which side of the gun I want to be standing behind.

Also note that an AI well aligned with the people who initially trained it wouldn't need to actually kill anyone that didn't take action against the owners, it would just need to outcompete people for resources, and let them fend for themselves in extreme poverty. There's no need to act one way or the other beyond that.

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upvoteby EMIRELADERO1 hours ago|
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Not comparable at all. The Iranian protesters are/were a minority group within a country that itself makes up 1.1% of humanity.

I'm talking about morality here, not practical ability. The ultrarich have their circle of friends and family, who themselves have their own social circle, on and on until suddenly you're not looking at wealthy people anymore. Six degrees of separation and all that. How many people in the social graph can know about this extermination plan before the whole thing collapses?

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upvoteby a2ff6eeb01 hours ago|
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Why would they take action to exterminate anyone, when they can simply ignore them and let them live and die in extreme poverty, unable to participate in the economy? The west already accepts this kind of poverty with the sweatshop workers, and nobody bats an eye.

It's just disenfranchisement. Only the people who try to use violence to replace the political leverage they lose when they lose economic leverage would need any action taken against them, and that's easy to justify as self defense.

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upvoteby EMIRELADERO1 hours ago|
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Because 7.5 billion people with nothing to lose would quickly turn chaotic and mass-murdery. 90% of humanity in idle poverty is impossible to justify, at least today they do something of value that can be used as a retort by the morally unscrupulous. A black-and-white situation where a few get everything, most get nothing and do nothing for anybody else is beyond justifying, so the self-defense argument wouldn't work.
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upvoteby a2ff6eeb01 hours ago|
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It's already been here for much of the 20th century, and everyone seems to have just accepted it. We're just going to have Europe and America join sub-saharan Africa.

I think it's inevitable.

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upvoteby EMIRELADERO1 hours ago|
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The moral justification for the existence of poverty is one of purpose and worth through contribution to society. The family member of an ultrarich baron can sleep at night mostly due to the idea that those who are rich contribute value to humanity as a whole, ergo those who are poor simply aren't working hard enough or contributing in a meaningful way ("just world fallacy" etc)

When AGI becomes reality, that reasoning disappears. When everyone's worthless, no one is. Thus the scenario you speculate about would need everyone in the upper echelons of society to be consciously, openly sadistic power-hungry people, which is not the case even when taking into account the higher dark triad rates among them.

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upvoteby jacquesm1 hours ago|
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Property rights might be the least of your problems.
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upvoteby vrganj1 hours ago|
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What kind of political leverage did a French peasant have in the 1780s?
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upvoteby a2ff6eeb01 hours ago|
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Well, the gap in armament between them all the French military was relatively small.

Why did you think there's a massive uptick in surveillance and policing technology and automation? It's to make the French solution unfeasible.

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