This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
While AI continuing to be exceptional at mathematics doesn't particularly make me think that it's more likely that most/all labour is imminently automatable, I do agree with your point that if this is truly the case, there's really no point in trying to get rich to avoid dying on the streets when the 0.01% decide to mass unemploy the entire population or whatever. Coordination issues amongst the powers that be aside, it is obviously just not a stable equilibrium for the middle class to be unemployed and starving, while some dude who happened to own the right stocks at the right time is allowed to enjoy a nice lifestyle in perpetuity.
Either most everyone manages to secure material abundance via some combination of make-work and redistribution, which honestly already describes significant swathes of modern economies as you say, and having been rich perhaps confers some marginal status advantages and nothing more, or Something Happens that having a bunch of cash doesn't meaningfully insulate you from: e.g communist overthrow of the state (for real this time), violent state repression and expropriation of most the population, or AI loss of control where everyone dies.
I don't think I'm really all that sanguine re: the question of meaning though. The middle-class in developed countries are already mostly post-scarcity relative to a pre-industrial and a pre-computing basis in nearly all ways (the big exceptions would probably be in zero-sum usage of land and the decay of the body). Yet despite this, most people in the middle class are various flavors of miserable, generally aren't able to generate their own meaning ex nihilo, and mostly drive themselves mad via status comparison and/or the culture war.
If you thought hyper-partisan politics and status competition was bad in 2026, just wait until it's impossible to better your position via actual economic contribution, and the only way to access more resources, status and positional goods is to take it via the political process out of the arms of another. Even if the "utopian" world pans out, I frankly can't see this leading to anything but mass misery even if material needs are met in abundance.
Yeah, this whole "permanent underclass" thing is a load of baloney. You aren't being saved from the permanent underclass if your net worth today is $10m or even $25m vs $1m or $10k. If that very specific scenario plays out, having a moderate amount of assets doesn't insulate you, instead it makes you juicy food worth concentrating on for the real big multi billion dollar players.
I'm decently well off and I've come to the (very sensible, I think) conclusion that in the unlikely event of rich oligarch AI dystopia, my lot lies with the ordinary man rather than the centimillionaire+ class.
Yeah, rich people also aren’t coordinated, most don’t have bunkers, they’re highly divided by ideology, and most have some loyalty to some non-super-rich groups (for reasons of tribe, faith, nation, ethnicity, political belief and so on). This plus the speed of the true singularity will make the requisite coordination almost impossible.
The ‘permanent underclass’ thing is a legacy of Great Recession (‘Humans Need Not Apply’; Elysium) or even dotcom bust era (as in the case of Marshall Brain’s Manna which I think was 2002) AI fiction where self driving cars and self checkouts and robotic nurses and cashier screens at McDonalds automate low paying service jobs while the rich and upper middle class prosper, without overall productivity seemingly increasing much, which means the poor basically live off worse-than-section-8 level welfare forever. This was nonsensical even if one agreed with those predictions (automating a lot of these low level service jobs would be a huge productivity uplift that would make things like welfare much cheaper to provide and afford those on it a much higher quality of life), but of course it turned out that actually white collar work was the easiest thing to automate (before truckers in many cases, even!).
It also features impossibly misaligned incentives, since the ‘bottom of the rich’ would know they were next in line for the permanent underclass at any time, something that eventually cascades until there’s what, only one man left out of the permanent underclass? That doesn’t really make sense.
I don’t think democracy or what now passes for it can really survive AI, and I question whether that’s a particularly bad thing anyway, but I expect that any non-extinction scenario eventually plays out as abundance almost impossible for us to imagine today (like a wild animal subject to constant hunger, thirst, sickness, fear, predation, injury, etc ‘imagining’ life in a nice Northern European zoo), such that twenty first century distinctions become irrelevant. I also think AI plays the role of the zookeeper in this scenario, and so the idea that it lets Elon Musk control star systems just because he happened to be very rich and powerful in the years before it took control seems about as likely as the zookeepers letting the big elephant eat all the others’ food just because it happens sometimes in the wild.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link