Comment by dns_snek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dns_snek | Hacker News Reader

> The problem is that the owners of these disruptive technologies must be convinced to do something that does not come naturally to them: share. Taxes in the US amount to less than 26% of GDP, 8 percentage points less than the OECD average. Capital taxation amounts to just over 2% of GDP. These numbers will have to go much higher, since people will no longer have wages to live on and will rely more heavily on government largesse.

The tone of this article is really frustrating, the author is seemingly living in a self-imposed box in which capital has an inalienable right to rule the world. "owners must be convinced to share" - No sir, they're not kings, nor were they elected into any position, and we don't have to "convince" them of anything.

We need to have a thorough discussion about what a future without human labor should look like, and whether we really want to live in a dystopia when the only thing preventing us from living in a utopia is the ego of a few rich assholes.

One way or another they will lose their kingdoms because they don't actually have an inalienable right to control the world's resources. They only had these ownership rights because they were [thought to be] good for society as a whole. In a robotic AI future that's no longer the case and those rights will no longer exist.

The only question is whether this transition will be peaceful or extremely violent.

The thing is, in our current legal system, property rights are fairly fundamental; they own certain things, and that gives them a legal right to control it. And the money they derive from that has become more and more influential in our politics, to the point where they can influence a minority share of voters who have outsized voting rights, while also suppressing the votes of other voters, to achieve minority rule.

Without a vast reshaping of our sense of property rights, taxation, and redistribution, it's hard to see how this would change. And it's becoming increasingly hard to see who that vast reshaping could happen via peaceful, civil means.

> the author is seemingly living in a self-imposed box in which capital has an inalienable right to rule the world. "owners must be convinced to share" - No sir, they're not kings, nor were they elected into any position, and we don't have to "convince" them of anything.

That box was something that humans imposed on themselves on the scale of a civilization. At this point, I agree with the author's view because I can't see how it can ever change. Every little additional bit of the scales tipping in their favor means an exponential amount of additional effort that will be needed to undo the imbalance.

By the time society wants to talk about transitioning to a different model (if they ever want to talk about it - remember, humans are shockingly vulnerable to informational warfare and many opinions can be changed with the tweak of an algorithm), the amount of power will be more imbalanced than it likely has ever been in history. If this future comes to pass, they'll be 10x as powerful by that point. And they will have effectively endless amounts of money and power to buy themselves the best armies, automated defenses, production facilities, employees, bunkers, drones, whatever, to ensure their safety. In this worst-case scenario where demand for human labor is a shadow of what it is today, how is this in any way winnable? They could take whomever they need and clock out, automatically overseeing the rest to ensure they won't have anyone threatening them ever again.

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