I choose not to be an idiot.
I want science and progress, but progress at the service of the wellbeing of mankind, not to enrich idiots who outsourced their critical thinking to chat GPT.
Post scarcity is kind of an odd man out here. The idea predates tech broism by a solid half century, and informs a lot of contemporary leftist theory. There is nothing inherently wrong with using utopian thinking as a guiding principle for iterative policy. I’d argue that anything which doesn’t do that is cynicism.
It occurs to me that I’d argue we’re heading towards a forced scarcity society rather than post scarcity. That’s the only way they can make sure we don’t get a Star Trek type future if/when we figure out fusion power. Hell, we’ve already basically been able to feed everyone for ages.
Artificial scarcity is definitely nothing new. Look at the diamond industry, for example. Diamonds are common as hell, but they regulate the supply so severely in order to sell these cheap chunks of carbon for thousands of dollars.
If there’s no competition in a market willing to race others to the bottom in terms of price, there’s no incentive to actually produce a reasonable amount of something people want. You can just withold supply and charge way more.
Diamonds
So we need cultured post-scarcity, the lab-grown stuff
Or just the fact that grocery stores throw away thousands of tons of perfectly edible food every day while there are people dying of malnutrition. They aren’t starving, they are being starved.
forced vs post scarcity
tbh i’m happy whenever someone at least acknowledges the tension between these two facets.
anyway my actual point, imo the “too many humans” propaganda is part of the forced scarcity lobby. there’s perhaps too many humans to live as wastefully as we are, so why wouldn’t reducing waste be our #1-3 top priorities?
but waste is more ‘profitable’ (in short term), so we go all in - while pretending Us Living & Others Not-Living is a moral obligation on our part wtflol
We aren’t heading towards that. We’re already in a forced scarcity society, and have been for at least 25, if not 30 years. That’s why all these “economic bubbles” keep happening. The ultra rich worldwide have hoarded $350,000,000,000,000 at the expense of the other 8,000,000,000 people. Maybe 5000 people have more than $50,000,000 in personal wealth. Not only do they have nothing to spend it on, they keep throwing trillions of dollars into the latest dumpster fire of an “investment,” so they don’t have to pay $0.01 to anyone that isn’t them.
If we killed the obstructions to progress and innovation, then we may have to kill 5000 people, but everyone in the world would be able to have a $400,000 stake in The Sovereign Fund for Humanity’s Poor, paying out an average of $20,000 a year per person while reinvesting 95% of the ROI. When you’re dealing with 100’s of Trillions of dollars, I have no idea what ROI % you could reasonably maintain, but 13.5% would mean that everyone on earth doubles their fund, and therefore their yearly payout every 7.8 years.
While post scarcity is excellent and I do believe it is possible in theory, it’s used as a buzzword to handwave away all the dystopian things being pushed.
There is also nothing inherently wrong with “optimization” and “automation”. It’s just that they are buzzwords and how the tech bros approach these topics.
I choose death
Depending on how serious you are:
Choose weed instead
Or the crisis line. You probably already know where to find it. Help is available. You do not have to suffer alone. I love you homie.
He’s an assassassin. He never said the death was his own…
The asses are never safe
They be assin’
Just kidding, unless given that exact choice lol. Weed has been a great help this year. Love you too fam, appreciate the thoughtful comment.
Or the crisis line.
What happens is that they “triage” you, where depending on how you answer their script you get cops at your door and a trip to hell on earth, or you are on hold for 20 minutes to speak with someone who also is reading a script and doesn’t give a rats ass about you.
Maybe states that aren’t Oklahoma have mental hospitals which are preferable to drinking yourself to sleep, but who knows.
“Everyone and everything will end in my lifetime. I’ll be here to see it all crumble just before I am incinerated in the blast.”
is another popular escapist fantasy.
No one wants to believe they’ll just have to hobble through a slow and painful decline.
we will make global anarchy by tomorrow. no more money, capitalism and suffering, trust
The thing about Anarchy is that, for many people, the cashless society where you own nothing and are fully removed from the machine of industry is already here. Its just called “poverty”.
The problem is that this kind of poverty isn’t equally distributed. You’ve still got this large, heavily armed occupying force that preserves money, capital, and the painful prodding of induced productivity for everyone else.
We are all stardust though. Billion-year-old carbon.
yes but do you consider that important in any way? if you do you are closer to the person on the left
I would say it is a neutral fact.
Imo there is no meaning to life, everyone decides for themselves what to live for.
If someone likes the fact that we are made from starstuff, why yuck that yum specifically? It is kind of a nice perspective to take sometimes when life gets stressful.
It is also a part of a nice song by Joni Mitchell and a nice speech by Carl Sagan, both people I admire, but not something I think about a lot…
And we got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
I mean scientifically speaking, we are all made of stardust. Everything in the universe is. Including the existential crisis your trying to forget by disassociating.
And blue light does keep you awake. Are we team Esotheria?
I have met the guy on the right irl. He was unbearable
Stellaris players: How it feels to have a Spiritualist empire on one side of your border and a Materialist empire on the other.
My Pacifist Egalitarian Xenophile space elves: “Just be nice guys!”
You know… there’s a Space Hippies AI Personality mod on Steam. It’s actually really funny.
Basically the dark shadows of the Hippy Age Of Aquarius and sandal-wearing tech Utopianism corrupted Into evil by the baby boomers ageing into the dominant political class in the West.
At this point they basically have all the money and all the votes that they need, not to mention the cognitive dissonance they are capable of withstanding is absolutely INSANE
I choose neither, and instead day dream about fully automated luxury gay space communism, knowing I’m gonna die before such a thing could ever come to fruition.
That’s just the guy on the right but with less hope and no capitalism.
No capitalism = more hope.
This is so overwhelmingly hyperbolic I’m not sure what to take from it
Really? Are people out there that thinks that death is a design flaw? I know it’s shitpost, but it’s based on something after all
Depends on how literally you mean it, in general, those most likely to say it wont think that humans are literally designed not to die and only do so because someone made a mistake, but more that humans might be redesigned or modified not to (or at least not from biological aging). Not a hard to find sentiment if you hang out in spaces with transhumanists, but I find the ones that overlap with AI bros, that tend to have an attitude like “this will totally happen in my lifetime and with no effort because the AI singularity is going to come and give us everything in a few years” impossible to talk to, because all too often they will cite even the tiniest listed improvement in any AI system as proof that literally everything possible or impossible is about to happen and then insist you arent paying attention when you give them skeptcism.
Yes, there are people who believe we will find a way to transcend death via technology. I personally think a world ruled by immortal omniwealthy methusalas that will never let even death release their boot from the necks of the common man is a bad thing, but…
Once I read a creepypasta where the wealthy spent a lot of money paying research and development of immortality, only achieving a worse version of cancer. The wealthy obviously went dead.
That’s the good ending. Bad ending is it works and the dictators of the world crush everyone else, tantalizing just enough people with the immortality carrot to make the system eternal.
I’m also hung up on “Crypto is UBI”. Surely this is a one off crackpot quote and not a thing, right?
This one is empirically falsified. I never heard it before, and even though I can believe somebody is saying it somewhere, it’s an incredibly stupid thing to say.
Oh almost forgot
More than three years ago we founded Worldcoin with the ambition of creating a new identity and financial network owned by everyone; the rollout begins today. If successful, we believe Worldcoin could drastically increase economic opportunity, scale a reliable solution for distinguishing humans from AI online while preserving privacy, enable global democratic processes, and eventually show a potential path to AI-funded UBI.
https://world.org/cofounder-letter
It’s the iris scan one
Oh, so a con-man, not a stupid man.
I believe this is an idea most legitimately championed by Nick Bostrom. Here is a video explaining his perspective.
I feel like, at least from the stance of abstract philosophy, he makes some good points. And I’m not enough of a philosopher to refute them (though I’m sure some have). Personally, my stance is “I’ll cross that bridge when I arrive at it” - I expect to die before that happens.
I honestly think most of these bugfuck crazy views stem from we humans not having evolved to deal with the modern world. People feed us the simple answers we crave.
We were meant to subsist off of grubs, berries, and whatever your extended family could hunt as we trekked around, dying randomly of infections and bear attacks. Then some fucking asshole started farming and it’s all been downhill since!
