Comment by verisimi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by verisimi | Hacker News Reader

This is the planned future for us all, unfortunately. Technocracy demands that scientific experts evaluate our reality and then determine what we are and are not allowed to do.

Too much carbon/water/energy use = restraints on your usage. (No restraints if you can pay though.) This is what smart meters, smart phones, smart cities are going to facilitate. (Smart = Spy)

If I agreed with their evaluations and was able to choose to opt in, I might even consider this. But this is not the plan. What will really happen is that the political and billionaire classes will find that it is right for them to assume the role of determining the technocratic goals that the AI driven system should achieve.

We will find that we have a tyrant computer to engage with. There won't be a friendly face to help you by bending the rules in some way. It will be like when you ring up your local governance office to sort something out... but worse. We are not going to be stepping into techno-utopia, that's for sure.

A bio-medical-security-id seems to be a required first step.

Having a friendly face to bend the rules creates a breeding ground for iniquity. We can’t have both - and the current direction seems to be to prefer reducing inequalities, rather than having people help break the rules for others that they like.

That's fine if the rules are applied everywhere, but the reality is that everything - even rules - are for sale. If there is a powerful controlling class that writes the rules that apply to the oi polloi but not themselves, how will you achieve equity?

Humans can learn to have an exceptional judge of character, see the big picture, and quietly subvert bad policy by feigned incompetence. These benevolent bosses/bureaucrats are history's unsung heroes and we need to be very careful before automating them out of our future.

It seems like most people think they’re better than average at judging the character of others, which cannot be true [1].

Under testing, everyone seems to be pretty bad at recognizing liars [2]. It’s especially hard to get good because it’s often an open loop, since good liars are never caught at all (classic toupee fallacy — you think you’re good at catching liars because you don’t know about the ones you missed), you never really get the chance to calibrate.

[1]: maybe with specific definitions of “average” and a very lopsided distribution, but I’m doubting that the people who think they have exceptional judges of character actually believe that they are above the mean but near the mode; usually, if someone is “exceptional,” I assume they’re in a high percentile

[2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/03/how-to-s... — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26607386

This context also creates a breeding ground for corruption. TINSTAAFL, it's all tradeoffs all the way down.

> What will really happen is that the political and billionaire classes will find that it is right for them to assume the role of determining the technocratic goals

‘They’ have power and money because ‘we’ give it to them. Not because they take it from us.

Yes. Partly we give it to them, because they do not present their case in a straightforward way. I think there is a lot of social engineering that occurs, that just happens to align and progress the pre-planned agenda. So, imo, we give our money and power over, as we are deceived.

> Not because they take it from us.

When you have a monopoly on violence (because you effectively own the government), you have a disproportionately large say about who gets what.

The idea that somehow you can have a revolution when the other side has machineguns and all you have is a beer gut and maybe a double-barrel shotgun is naive at best.

This point of view assumes any decision can be scientifically determined as optimal. In reality most large-scale decisions are tradeoffs, you pull from one side and another starts to crumble. Recent example: you introduce lockdowns and reorient hospital care towards COVID, and more people start dying from cancer due to missed checkups.

Such decisions are value-driven, and cannot be replaced by an algorithm. That’s what we have politics for.

The main difference is that business organizations tend to be more authoritative, but that already changes towards more balanced organizations that actually debate on their values.

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