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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29310 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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I don' think automation will have a net-destructive effect on jobs--that is, new jobs will replace old ones. But to go along with the hypothetical, probably a continuation of what we have now: more welfare spending, but also occasional on-time universal remittances like in 2020-2021, but it will not be a UBI.

Eat The Poor. Catch-all for socialist visions of capitalist dystopia (eg. Manna, Elysium) in which the poor are either slowly or quickly genocided, or waste away in awful conditions on earth while a small number of wealthy capital owners continue humanity.

Likely not because in a consumerist capitalist society elites derive their wealth from the lower classes. Who is clicking those Facebook, Google, or Instagram ads? There will be more business to business activity, bypassing the consumer altogether, such as Facebook selling ad space to NGOs and multinationals, Amazon selling cloud storage to big companies, Microsoft servers, etc.

There will always be some scarcity, such as social status or between the merely rich and ultra-wealthy.

The critical point is when the expected economic value of a typical human goes negative. That's when things start to go screwy, and I worry we're crossing that line soon.

Presently deriving wealth from large numbers of the lower classes is the most common route, but what if you could derive your wealth from large numbers of robots instead? Unless the aggregate poor can sell something to the aggregate not-poor, cash will flow away from the system until the population dies out.

This obviously concludes with Mongolian supremacy, since they have land to build with and fewer mouths to feed. Steppe Nomads at it again

Unless the aggregate poor can sell something to the aggregate not-poor

Status goods. "hand made" is already used this way.

One obvious thing (though far from an utopian answer): prostitution. (and if people missed this, then then they missed also other things)

Odds are, if you can replace people doing physical labor, your tech level allows replacing prostitutes with cyborg prostitutes that are much prettier, cause no drama. never talk back and feel just as real.

But most people just don’t want to get into the Experience Machine.

Cyberwhores wouldn't be an experience machine, just better prostitutes.

Are you sure about that?

Well, maybe Zoomers are built different. She did say it had never happened before.

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