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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4345 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 4, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I don't know, is it inconceivable that UBI+light wireheading through superstimuli could keep the vast majority of people sufficiently placid to prevent widespread upheaval until the problem solves itself through birthrate collapse? This would have the same effect as a genocide of the poor, but not involve a lot of violence or even generally offense to revealed ethical preference.

Capitalism relies on a social contract in which people have the opportunity to better their situation. The end of employment takes away that opportunity.

I'm not so convinced of this, insofar as my impression is that over the past 1000 years, most societies were sufficiently "capitalist" in the sense that private property and ownership stakes were mostly honoured most of the time, but in the majority of them most people did not have a meaningful opportunity to significantly better their situation.

I don't know, is it inconceivable that UBI+light wireheading through superstimuli could keep the vast majority of people sufficiently placid to prevent widespread upheaval until the problem solves itself through birthrate collapse? This would have the same effect as a genocide of the poor, but not involve a lot of violence or even generally offense to revealed ethical preference.

And what would be the appeal? Disregarding morality entirely, I think I'd prefer ~postscarcity + large population to small population.

The appeal, from the perspective that's being talked about here, is deciding what kind of people (or some other agents, or infrastructure for some long-term purposes) to spend post-scarcity on, instead of sharing the Earth – nay, the entire light cone – with 9 billion unrelated poors. And if you don't share much, well, once again there's not really a lot of a point to them.

Western elites currently expend colossal resources to unnecessarily prop up domestic and foreign economically unproductive underclasses for ideological/‘compassionate’ reasons

We do not see any "compassion", we see healthy class instinct in operation, without reading even one word of Marx (who needs books, books are for losers).

We see good understanding what lumpenproletariat is and why it is natural ally of aristocracy and big bourgeoisie, mortal enemy of proletariat and petty bourgeoisie, reactionary force inimical to all progress.

The lumpenproletariat, this scum of the decaying elements of all classes, which establishes headquarters in all the big cities, is the worst of all possible allies. It is an absolutely venal, an absolutely brazen crew. If the French workers, in the course of the Revolution, inscribed on the houses: Mort aux voleurs! (Death to the thieves!) and even shot down many, they did it, not out of enthusiasm for property, but because they rightly considered it necessary to hold that band at arm’s length. Every leader of the workers who utilises these gutter-proletarians as guards or supports, proves himself by this action alone a traitor to the movement.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/peasant-war-germany/ch0a.htm

‘akshually, it’s in their self-interest’ explanations, as you have yourself often argued, don’t hold much water

Well, since the elites destroyed all what remained of working class organization and built for themselves large army of lazzaroni avaliable 24/7/365 at their call, are they better or worse off? Is their wealth bigger or smaller, is their rule more or less secure?

Are kings of Naples of old really bad example to learn from?

A lot of net tax recipients are not really lumpenproles, they’re ordinary working class people who happen to be poorer or have more kids than average(or simply be female). Most of them either have jobs or did for the majority of their working life.

In practice, if you run the numbers, UBI requires redistribution to increase substantially. ... Maybe the singularity brings such unimaginable abundance that money ceases to have any relevance, but even if it does there will still be a transition period.

A classic joke:

– Vodka has gone up in price, son.

– So Daddy, now you'll drink less?

– No son, but you'll have less to eat.

What I mean to say is that there are other solutions to the problem of unproductive masses, and they don't involve either outright genocide nor communism. Such as...

The government had finally figured out that giving choices to people on welfare was not such a great idea, and it was also expensive. Instead of giving people a welfare check, they started putting welfare recipients directly into government housing and serving them meals in a cafeteria. If the government could drive the cost of that housing and food down, it minimized the amount of money they had to spend per welfare recipient.

As the robots took over in the workplace, the number of welfare recipients grew rapidly. Manna replaced tens of millions of minimum wage workers with robots, and terrafoam housing became the warehouse of choice for them. Terrafoam buildings were not pretty, but they were incredibly inexpensive to build and were designed for maximum occupancy. They clustered the buildings on trash land well away from urban centers so no one had to look at them. It was a lot like an old-style college dorm. Each person got a 5 foot by 10 foot room with a bed and a TV — the world’s best pacifier. During the day the bed was a couch and people sat on the bedspread, which also served as a sheet and the blanket. At night the bed was a bed. When I arrived they had just started putting in bunk beds to double the number of people in each building. Burt was not excited to see me when I arrived — he had had a private room for 10 years, and my arrival was the end of that. At least he was polite about it.

... Downstairs there was the cafeteria staffed by robots. The robots were not bad — the food was acceptable. They also kept the bathrooms, hallways and rooms spotless. Every day at 7AM, 12 PM and 6 PM the breakfast, lunch and dinner meal shifts began. There were six 15-minute shifts per meal to save on cafeteria space. Burt and I had the third shift. You sat down, food was served, you ate, you talked for 5 minutes while you drank your “coffee” and you left so the next shift could come in. With 24,000 people coming in per shift, there was no time for standing in a cafeteria-style line. Everyone had an assigned seat, and an army of robots served you right at your table.

... Because no one had a window, they could really pack people into these buildings. Each terrafoam dorm building had a four-acre foot print. It was a perfect 417 foot by 417 foot by 417 foot solid brown cube. Each cube originally held exactly 76,800 people. Doubling this to 153,600 people in each building was unthinkable, but they were doing it anyway. On the other hand, you had to marvel at the efficiency. At that density, they could house every welfare recipient in the entire country in less than 1,500 of these buildings. By spacing the buildings 100 feet apart, they could house 200,000,000 people in a space of less than 20 square miles if they had wanted to. At that density, they could put everyone in the country without a job into a space less than five miles square in size, put a fence around it and forget about us. If they accidentally dropped a nuclear bomb or two on us, we would all be gone and they wouldn’t have to worry about us anymore.

.. Ultimately, you would expect that there would be riots across America. But the people could not riot. The terrorist scares at the beginning of the century had caused a number of important changes. Eventually, there were video security cameras and microphones covering and recording nearly every square inch of public space in America. There were taps on all phone conversations and Internet messages sniffing for terrorist clues. If anyone thought about starting a protest rally or a riot, or discussed any form of civil disobedience with anyone else, he was branded a terrorist and preemptively put in jail. Combine that with robotic security forces, and riots are impossible.

The only solution for most people, as they became unemployed, was government handouts. Terrafoam housing was what the government handed out.

Example from fiction which goes a little bit into genocidal scenarios: To The Stars (Madoka Magica hard sf fanfic), or rather its backstory. It also explores incompatibility of capitalism with full automation / high unemployment described by @2rafa (specifically paragraph 2 and 9. 1, 2, 3. I brought it up on the old sub already, but I'm unsure how many have seen this back then.

With Vladimir Volokhov’s 2136 unraveling of the principles of AI, the dam finally broke on over a century of economic trends. Steadily rising structural unemployment and slow concentration of wealth became instead soaring unemployment and exponential concentration of wealth. With the advent of cheap, easily programmable artificial intelligence, the world’s industries no longer had a true need for human labor, and relentless cost-cutting left greater and greater proportions of the population out in the streets.

2

The paradox of plenty had truly arrived. Factories were more productive than ever, but even at the lowest prices, the only clients with money were the increasingly opulent capital owners, the hyperclasses the newly emergent economic class that would come to define the following century. Economic production stagnated, even as potential production skyrocketed.

Nations where the hyperclasses sympathized with the masses handed out basic incomes to keep them solvent. Those that didn’t handed out pittances or, often, nothing, content to rely on increasingly brutal oppression.

As the rank-and-file of the MSY isolated themselves deeper and deeper into cocoons of wealth, their cultural connections with the people they nominally served frayed, and increasing portions of the membership began to display attitudes similar to that of their crueler hyperclass peers, evincing contempt for the “handout-seeking layabouts” that now constituted most of the population.

It was only in a certain proportion of nations that it was able to mutate into true Detachment, with the hyperclass extending their beliefs to include the proposition that it was morally correct for the lower classes to be kept down, that it was morally incorrect to hand out relief food or money, and so forth. (...) the nations where the hyperclasses held onto their moral compasses, implementing relief and welfare programs–though never giving up their hold on power – began to form a second visible power bloc

The last meeting of the UN General Assembly, in 2160, collapsed entirely when the delegates of the non-detached faction walked out in protest at the organizations inability to take meaningful action against abuses. The remaining delegates dissolved the organization and formed their own international organization, the appropriately Orwellian Freedom Alliance.

The Incubators added their own input to the situation, warning direly that Humanity was at substantial risk of a “low-productivity, low-utility” end-state, and even offering direct intervention, if requested (this was refused).

Events crystallized in 2163, with the revelation of the so-called St. Petersburg atrocity. The local hyperclasses had resolved to do the unfathomable: annihilate an entire segment of the city’s population for anti-governmental behavior.

9

Eventually, agonizingly, and cataclysmically, the FA collapsed under weight of its economic inferiority, its own ideologies rendering it incapable of effectively mobilizing its populations, or even preventing its populations from being co-opted by the other side.

The following is somewhat less relevant, but it implies that things turning out fine is unnatural. Similarly, figuring out friendly AI (in 2136) wasn't either (through it's not explained in the text here).

By 2200, while a few UF governments were still nominally in power, they existed with armed forces commanded by EDC commanders, economies commanded by EDC AIs, censorship imposed by EDC regulations, and it was abundantly clear that the EDC was the UF, and was unlikely to cede any power as long as there was still an enemy left to fight. As it turned out, the EDC never ceded power at all, absorbing the few remaining independent governments at the end of the war with the bluntly honest explanation that the EDC believed that future peace could be best secured under its own, direct rule (...) removed any remaining illusions that the EDC was anything other than an oligarchical, unelected, secret military junta.

(...)

If the UF could successfully rebuild the world, its directors hoped to use the gratitude of the populace to entrench their ideology and successor government forever. To this end, on top of its ambitious rebuilding objectives, the Council promised grandiosely to construct Eudaimonia on Earth (...) the Council inaugurated a set of projects ambitious both in scope and name, intended to be Manhattan Projects for a new age: Project Eden sought clinical immortality, Project Janus sought FTL travel, and Project Icarus sought to use solar satellites to harvest the light of the sun, making energy not just cheap, but free.

When the Council finally ended martial law ten years later, dissolved itself, and made way for its successor, Historians were already considering it one of the most successful governments ever, despite the fact that its most ambitious projects had yet to bear fruit. In recent years, there has been speculation that the Council’s ambitious goals and seemingly ludicrous optimism were prompted indirectly by the Incubators, via MSY intermediaries. No evidence has ever emerged to support this claim…

The ten-year post-war saga of the EDC seems almost impossible, more dream than reality, and the official explanation, that this effectiveness was due to the successful incorporation of AI planning and modeling, seems to many unsatisfactory. The idea of a group of oligarchical technocrats governing so effectively, despite the well-known flaws of human nature, had more in common with the fever dreams of early twentieth-century utopians than anything the weight of history would suggest. (...) vast majority of records remain sealed, allowing an immense amount of speculation to pour into the gaps, especially with the recent revelation of the existence of the MSY and the Incubators. It is suggested the MSY used its magic to keep the EDC under its thumb and help propel research innovation, or that the Incubators regularly advised the interim government, providing experience and examples of social structures, economic designs, and even technology. Additional speculation focuses on the nature of Governance, whose opaque operations engender distrust. The EDC, some allege, was the site of a quiet takeover of Humanity itself, by its AIs, by its magical girls, by the Incubators, or by some combination of the three.

And a fragment from third link; about nature of governments, singletons, in context of automation. I mostly decided to quote that too given similar focus to your post on the old subreddit

Eventually, the balance of power shifted, and the government, in all its organs, exceeded the power of its own people. Freed of the fear of the mob, that power that in its time had removed crowned heads from their bodies and elected officials from their seats, governments experienced a fundamental shift in motive–no longer bound to the whims of that which had humbled even the Tsar, those who governed found that they could direct their nations in whatever idiosyncratic direction they pleased, in directions that did not have even a theoretical bearing on the interests of their subjects, and were in fact often openly hostile to those interests.

Let us not delude ourselves as to the transient nature of this victory. This was no victory of the powerless over the powered. This was the victory of some with power over others with power, and as such bodes only ill for the future.

The lessons of the current era are clear: with the advent of fully mechanized warfare, and of fully mechanized means of production, if we allow ourselves to fall, or to splinter, or be peacefully broken up, it is only a matter of time until the world is again unified under one government, even if the world must first be buried under another wave of fire to do it. Eventually there will come into being a government powerful and willing enough to hold its grip on power.

And without anything external to destroy it, such a government will be eternal, assuming it does not destroy the species first.

It is impossible to return to the past, or restrict our development, as some still delude themselves into advocating. The lessons of industrialism, of plenty, can never be forgotten. The rightful craving for more wealth, more plenty will always be there. The people, the government–they will crave it, and between them they will destroy anything in their way.

No, while we still live, we should do what we can to become that eternal government, and to ensure, while we still live, that those who follow can never stray from the path. Before we can even begin to do that, it is necessary to know what the path is, and that can only be done by careful study of what the path is.

My allies and I therefore humbly submit to the Committee the following set of guiding principles, or let us be frank about it, ideological tenets:

1) That our future government dedicate itself wholeheatedly to the problem of staying in power forever. This is not a matter of power-lust; it is a matter of what is necessary. Of course, this entails the suppression, ruthless if necessary, of competing ideologies and organizations.

2) That, as much as possible, no one being shall ever rule, or experience what it is like to rule. What Nietzsche called the Will to Power is a fundamental part of the human psyche, and it is this Will which has driven some individuals to seemingly unattainably heights. Yet, if it this Will that has driven some of the worst atrocities and abuses ever recorded. If Humanity is to survive, this will should be chained, and denied ever tasting the forbidden fruit of Power. This should be our unabashed goal.

It seems impossible to construct a power structure simultaneously capable of governing effectively without leaders of some sort, and it may be so. Nonetheless, recent work by our researchers […] have suggested a possibility. By making the leaders mental combinations of their followers, their subjects, it may be possible to construct leaders who would no more enjoy abusing their power than you would enjoy abusing your power to control your own limbs

6) The maximization of the freedom perceived by sentient individuals. It is clear that for any sentient, human mind, the feeling of coercion is wholly repugnant, so much that many other of the other sources of physical and mental satisfaction are often declined in the pursuit of freedom from coercion, or more briefly, freedom itself. And yet the attempt to maintain a true absolute freedom is impossible, impractical, and even unpleasant in many circumstances. The intersection of the freedom of action of multiple individuals, the tendency of individuals to often choose disastrous courses of action…all of these are well-known. In the end what matters is what the individuals involve perceive as being free, and this is what should be sought.

7) The maximization of economic prosperity, defined as both the average and minimal amount of resources that can be accessed by any given sentient. Fundamentally, this was the goal of human economic life since the beginning. Note that this encompasses both an average amount of resources and a minimal amount of resources–the government cannot consent to deliberately allow one sentient to starve, no matter the gain accrued to another sentient or set of sentients.

I guess we shall see how China deals with more unrest. The surveillance aspect already happens in most western countries anyway, tho I assume China acts on it more (see the aftermath of the recent protests in china - police searching people’s phones for western apps and pictures/videos etc, or Chinese cops using relatives still in china to force ppl in australia to delete tweets etc). AI will be insane in china in the near future. I mean they can already ID you based on your walking gait…

Ironically @2rafa is a big fan of this particular technology, gait recognition, as a tool for suppressing violent crime. It's not like those programs and models are secret – any developed nation can do it.

But of course only rather intangible things such as «social contract» can stop the state from redefining most any dissent to crime.

Ironically @2rafa is a big fan of this particular technology, gait recognition, as a tool for suppressing violent crime. It's not like those programs and models are secret – any developed nation can do it.

No need for all this fancy stuff. Victorian England in 1870's managed to drive violent crime down to the asterisks, without any technology higher than telegraph - not even fingerprinting and card catalogues existed at the time (Moldbug writes about it in his usual long winded style, too lazy to find it).

It is not about superior genetic peacefulness of AngloSaxon people - the same country was extremely violent and gang ridden in 18th century and now is again.

What is the secret sauce?

The secret is understanding that violent crime is gang crime, that police must not be the biggest gang in the hood American style, that police must be the only gang and no other gangs must be allowed to form.

Easy to to, if you have the will. Why the modern ruling class does not have the will? Because they are smarter than Victorian ruling class.

What happened in peaceful Victorian and Edwardian UK - working class organized itself enough to demand some concessions.

What happened in modern world since the sixties when gangs and criminals were give freedom to run wild? No need to elaborate about it, we all know.

It kind of seems like the PMC class defense strategy here is to regulatorily require human bureaucrats for ‘compliance audits’, complete with required certification, and tell the call center workers who actually get replaced to smoke weed on the dole or do sex work.

Capital’s interests are to tell the PMC to get stuffed, and the red tribe’s interests are to let automation take its course, rather than making special exceptions for the PMC(who would not, after all, return the favor). The last human to be fired will be a security guard previously overseeing Jose the Guatemalan peach picker somewhere in Georgia, after all, and the third to last will be Joe the plumber.

I predict a red-tribe/capital alliance arrayed against the PMC with hangers on as a response to accelerating automation, and that’s essentially exactly what we have.

Marshall Brain is, from what I understand, a socialist, and thus given to conspiratorial reasoning where the class of actual, as-recognized-by-Marx capitalists are organically hostile to the rest of the society, more powerful and more connected. I think you raise valid objections against this viewpoint and its implications.

But it's a matter of degree, not kind. For those of us who are neither PMC nor large property owners, it mostly changes the schedule of going into terrafoam. The incentive of efficiency is the same.

Besides. In Manna, he says that this largely dehumanized welfare population is <230.600.000 people (<1500*cube capacity). The main character could work for 10 years after the major breakthrough in automation, and even had a stint as an administrator. So in our timeline that's 2032 at the earliest. Population Pyramid says there'll be 352 million Americans by that point. Census Bureau is more bullish and expects more like 360 million. So very naively, 360-230=130.

36-37% of the population is quite a lot more than Peter Thiel and Brussels class. We don't have that many NYT journalists either.

In practice most states historically undertook massive spending as a share of GDP by using government monopolies or significant state owned property as either direct sources of funding, or collateral on debt, rather than through taxes.

So, is it possible that the government will choose to nationalize large chunks of the economy to fund enormous welfare programs, rather than raise taxes?

And, BTW, Argentina, Russia, and Lebanon have all seen declines in middle class standard of living without massive political instability within living memory, haven’t they?

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