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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25896 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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Useless mouths still vote and affect culture. Enough useless mouths can theoretically reject automation in increasingly violent ways. Useless mouths can do a lot of damage. There’s a reason the Catholic Church wants you to raw dog your wife endlessly and have 9 children before she gets too old.

I agree, I think "a useless mouth and his clout are soon parted". To the extent that competition still operates at any scale, I worry that anti-automators will be eventually marginalized, no matter how many kids we have.

USA imported black slaves to pick cotton, not needed anymore, and they are now a net drain. They are not "soon parted" but have privileged status.

Good point. I agree they have de jure privileged status, and that this leads to some substantial concrete benefits. But I'd counter that, to the extent that competition operates, it naturally disenfranchises them from almost all angles and makes their own self-advocacy ineffective. E.g. affirmative action spots mostly go to non-ADOS, BLM was a corrupt waste of political energy (compared to e.g. the at least-somewhat effective ADL), high-income people move away leaving places like Detroit.

I'm saying that a human worker advocacy org, in a world of more sophisticated machine actors, would similarly end up being a useless skinsuit pretending to advocate on behalf of humans, but wouldn't be able to avoid the important sources of influence all naturally routing around human agency. E.g. if you were a rich human, would you use an inferior (by supposition) human-run investment firm to manage your assets, or a machine-based one?

So my ultimate claim is that we have to choose between freedom and competition versus the continued relevance of humans. I really don't want to have to choose between these things, but I think we do.

They vote. BLM wasn't just waste, it did a lot of damage.

I agree, but I'm saying that it also managed to not even help ADOS. And that a future "Human Lives Matter" movement would be similarly ineffectual at its ostensible aims. And that our future votes would similarly buy us a wretched welfare bureaucracy at best.

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