‘Capitalism is dead. Now we have something much worse’
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
"The inequality r > g implies that wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages. This inequality expresses a fundamental logical contradiction. The entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier, more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labor. Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases. The past devours the future." (27.6)
- Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century
But other than that, accumulated wealth and inheritance is going to play much bigger role than it was last century, which historically was a fluke.
Better save some money so you can get your children a place to live of their own.
Anti-circumvention law applied massive legal weight to this, preventing the world from delving in & understanding the various devices around us. Which is now often defined by millions of lines of code, compiled down to devices, anyhow.
Whether the seller is free to create arbitrary restrictions & constraints on usage during sale, or whether the buyer is free to use purchases as they may is a huge tension here.
And there have been so few corrective actions or regulations to tilt things back in people's favor. GDPR a small collection of rights to data, but does nothing to help enlighten us as to the machines & their functioning. This all feels so infernal, trapped by law which doesn't let us look, trapped by machines where the mechanism inside is often inaccessible & invisible.
Sounds like a sentence that was taken from some pulpiteer's sermon when talking about god or afterlife. In other words: this promise is rather some nice fairy tale for some naive nerds and investors who love to believe in it.
> I don't think they understand what exponential growth in processing power implies.
This is very easy: for the data points (x_i, y_i), you can draw a decent straight line through the data transformed data points (x_i, log y_i). Thus: exponential growth is just some fancy term for "we do linear regression/linear Taylor approximation in this transformed space". I'm deeply impressed by such deep mathematics *sarc*.
Implications involves things like https://ourworldindata.org/brief-history-of-ai + little extrapolation. Interestingly, as I look at that article, it appears AI is actually solving college level math now - https://blog.research.google/2022/06/minerva-solving-quantit.... I wish I'd had that when I was at University.
[0] Ironically, ChatGPT doesn't usually make that mistake, because it always tries to be calm and helpful it consistently makes a better-than-human attempt at reading comprehension whenever I've interacted with it.
Looking back, what use do you think you would have today by having it in university? I'm asking because I don't think such a help solving the exams would have helped in your career later. Yes, would have made an easier university time, and left you less prepared for after that. We can (continue to) use ChatGPT for everything, it's just this will be also eroding our own capacity to do that thing, less exercise of our mental muscle. Maths and puzzles are said to help maintaining mental health with age, by outsourcing them to AI we also lose faster our own I.
I find it easier to learn when someone (now, something) intelligent is on hand to explain the material. You both must be geniuses or psychics, because otherwise it is not clear how you gentlemen intend to learn otherwise.
Indeed! But as yet it is still just future promise - not much has materialized at large scale so far (to my knowledge - maybe copy writing? Seems to be a push back against obviously AI scripted content though).
A counter example might be spreadsheets - their introduction revolutionized book keeping (and lots of other things too). We wait to see whether AI will have a similar impact (I suspect it won't).
FTFA: "We’re now in servitude, Varoufakis argues, to the fiefdoms of our new global masters, Lord Zuckerberg of Facelandia and Sir Musk of the rotten borough of X."
tl;dr The working people live as interest serfs in an economy that has become impossible to afford for many. Meanwhile, enormously wealthy people have unchecked power over politics, technology, and public policy. These wealthy people can alter the workforce and fund movements according to their unrestrained and unscrupulous caprices.
Public policy in the US is in tatters (and is under heavy strain elsewhere), affordable lodging is a quaint hypothesis, and the current middle class cohort (i.e. anyone with what used to be a good salary) is trying to characterise its debt despair as temporary embarrassment.
Yes, painfully. See, for example, Battle of Blair Mountain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
I feel more and more that those in power - the capitalists - have done a tremendous job of conditioning us from birth in the last 100+ years that capitalism is “the only way”.
Yet if you read a book like “Debt: the first 5000 years” by David Graeber, it put things into perspective. And there is so much more to read.
Also, learn the difference between a political system and an economic one. Of course they're related (see "collusion" above), but it's a mistake to act as though they're the same thing.
I do think we've been heavily trained to do this however.
Again, this issue is orthogonal to the economic model. Authoritarianism can and does exist in every economic system. The antidote IMO is institutions which define and enforce rules without bestowing permanent favor on any one group. Democracy, federalism, checks and balances, yadda yadda. I even mentioned social democracy already. But don't take my word for it. I suggest you actually study the issue for yourself, not just polemics from one side but the actual history of how these systems have developed and the theories that have been developed with them over centuries, then reach your own conclusions. They might not be the same as mine, but I guarantee they'll be even further from the laissez-faire extremists.
It seems that it's more effective to leverage this natural desire (as in capitalism) rather that punish it (as in communism). The important part is "natural", i.e., people are born with it, as well as animals, and you cannot prevent it. That's not a minority at all. So the only way for communism is to constantly fight it on a great scale, which is possibly with turning into a authoritarian government.
Ideally the planned state leaves room for art and culture. Who how and where the state supports creative endeavors is an open question. I'd ask similarly for open source. Ideally the state provides some spare capacity for individual development, that people can establish themselves with & start getting rewarded for.
Overall I see such a starkly different view. Coersion into behaviors & punishment seems low on my list of concerns for non-authoritarian communism.
Putting capital (or socialism, growtn etc) as ultimate goals, and not tools, are on he higway to the disaster, how much of the actual economic/financial global system will exist if at every step in the development the pool of basic rights and true alternatives are respected more...
(to me) progress is (mainly) the creation of alternatives and possibilities.
similarly, someone says progress is actually the speed of the race but not it's direction..
Both privately owned companies and worker owned companies tend to have far less issues in this regard and helps stymie the cycle of capitalism. Grocery stores are an example of where our choice is increasingly non-existent because all grocers operate under the same company.