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You're drastically overestimating how cold blooded those at the top of society are. I find this sort of rhetoric so infuriating - do you really think elites all walk around with a view that they are better than all others, and the peasants can just die if they're useless? No, that's not how it works.
Most rich or wealthy folk want the approval of the masses. Status is arguably more desirable than wealth for many. They conceive of themselves as popular, someone that others look up to, and that helps give elites their sense of self. Even if there were absolutely no point to "peasants" living, which I still doubt, elites would let them live out of a sense of care for other human beings, and a need for adoration.
Regardless, humanity still produces quite a bit of important work, and will continue to into the era of AI. We can judge things, laugh, provide companionship, and generally instill meaning in a meaningless world. Even though we have a foolish scheme of employment vs unemployment that disregards vast swathes of human work, I'm optimistic AI will help us reimagine what it means to work. We very well could have people building community, caring for themselves and others, child rearing, discussing novel ideas, etc. after AI rises to swallow most of the economy. It depends on what we want to see happen.
None of the things you described except child rearing has any way to cause continued existince!
People at the top don't need to cull everyone for there to be no reason for the peasants to exist,.and without reason to exist what mechanism is going to provide for them or select for their existence?
Religious fervour in the elite driving them to care for the masses? this is delusional thinking and dangerously naive in my opinion.
Peasants dying out due to a lack of fertility is very different than being actively culled by elites in my book.
The peasants dieing out because they can't sustain themselves because they don't own the resources necessary to do so is no different to genocide in my book.
Resources or access to the material world to gain them. If you can't grow your own food because you don't own any land, but you could if you did, then it's not communism or its many flavours that I am implying are the solution. Just that there is no mechanism for your existence that requires you to exist in this increasingly real hypothetical.
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Yes.jpg
Maybe it works differently in your country or for globalist elites, but this is exactly what elites in my life explicitly say.
Perhaps I should’ve chopped off the “better than others” part, which is probably largely true. I still doubt the rich would be okay with people actively dying in droves, if it’s cheap and easy for them to prevent it. Which I expect it to be, if we can keep developing AI and reach a less scarce state.
Hell it’s relatively cheap already to just pay for someone to have an internet connection, computer, food and rent. It’ll only get cheaper as we go.
And I might have been too hasty with the “explicit” part. True, since the start of school and forever then every official messaging says that you're worth only as much as what you do for the country, but they still shy away from a straightforward second part, l'état ç'est nous, if I got my pronouns right.
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I agree with you about status and wanting to be loved, but I think you can both be right. Mass immigration is the perfect example - no matter how bad it makes life for the peasants, the problem is most easily solved by forcibly re-educating the peasants to say they love immigration. The governments really care about not letting anyone complain about immigration, and having people tell the elites that they appreciate their big-hearted care for refugees.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever, while the face says "unlike those intolerant right-wingers, I'm open-minded enough to appreciate boot culture and cuisine!"
Haha, sorry, that was a little self-indulgent. Your criticism is fair. I was venting a little at my real-life neighbours and colleagues for so full-throatedly and unthinkingly embracing whatever cause-de-jour is being pushed by our national media.
But I do think immigration is a good example of how elites thread the needle of wanting to be loved and respected while also, in practice, largely ignoring the desires and well-being of their constituents.
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You can't expect absolute neutrality from people at all times. This forum does have a certain political slant, it's unavoidable. But that doesn't mean you should feel discouraged from commenting if you dissent from the consensus view.
The rules are, and always have been, subjectively interpreted, not according to some algorithmic rubric. We do try to be more or less consistent, but consistency and a robotic pretense of objectivity has never been the goal here - avoiding what @ZorbaTHut calls "negative dynamics" and optimizing for light over not heat, is.
The level of strictness with which we apply the rules is a bunch of sliders, not a pair of buttons.
@astrolabia's comment isn't high quality, but I don't really see reason to mod a vague complaint about "elites" and their supposed attitude towards "peasants." It's obviously making use of cheap rhetoric and Orwell memes, but who exactly is he being unkind to or weakmanning? Hypothetical elites who consider the rest of us peasants?
Don’t boo out group is a reporting bucket.
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If someone said "Joe Biden doesn't care if millions of US citizens die," yes, that would be an inflammatory claim and without some pretty substantial argumentation to back it up, would almost certainly be modded.
As I said, it's a sliding scale. A comment that makes no contribution but is also low heat isn't great, but the more heat or the lower the contribution value, the more likely it is to get modded.
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"Elites", "AI companies", and "governments" are not the outgroup. They're stand-ins for Moloch. "Progressives", "woke PCMs", or "democrats" are the outgroup. If @Azth's were writing about them in this way — or implying anyone reading this forum or talking to him thinks it's fine if peasants die — he'd be modded within a few hours.
For an alternate example from the left side of things, it's possible to write extremely mean things about "capitalism" or "corporations" without getting modded.
Unfortunately I think I have bashed the out-group. The out group is those who don't think the molochian forces of selection, competition, etc can possibly result in a extremly bad outocome for all us peasants because they don't want it to, have feelings, etc. Also moloch, who is evermost the outgroup to actual living beings as it, or he, is a normative manifestation of emergent evils.
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Yes it is definetly out group bashing to an extent, but bashing both elites and those who I consider naive enough to think compassion and flourishing and deep meaning will provide enough reason for the continued existence of peasants. Outgroups bashing. I don't want to go and wipe out all the peasants (myself included).
Moving to a world where non-elite existence is an unnecessary adornment to civilisation, and non elite actions cannot do anything about this, even in violent we will take you with us last resort style violent protest, is absolutely horrifying to me.
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Hardly. He's applying the Dictator's Handbook hypothesis that the powerful don't need to (and can't) care about the population in countries where the workforce is economically irrelevant to the AI automation problem. Unlike @astrolabia's comment, @Azth's isn't more inflammatory than the underlying idea, so I disagree with you lumping them together.
Yes it's the same broad idea but phrased in a careless way. If a dictator in the prototypical primary resource extraction economy, say the classic example of a gold mine, doesn't need.to care about some subsistence farmers when he has his gold revenue then why would he?
In the hypothetical (or not, depending on perspective) economic disruption AI world this shifts to something new. If a dictator previously dependant on E.g., agriculture discovers gold to mine,
why would the new gold mining dictator care about the useless peasants who can't even perform subsistence farming (assume they don't own any land and merely worked on someone else's, who hasn't given them land now gold ha been discovered, or perhaps the gold mining has polluted the land, either case assume they can't subsistence farm), as well as the bureocrats who formerly administered the sectors of the economy that now don't exist?
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Uhh, yes. I could give you an example on this very forum but I'd get banned for it.
Id link 2cimafara' post from about 5 years back about how society should promote euthanasia as a solution to poverty as a rebuttal but it seems to have been deleted.
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How curious that yours is the only reply. Anyway, what is so unbelievable about leopards progressively eating every face save one?
It is not the only reason. The need to expend the resources on us is another reason why you would want to do that. How is it destruction of wealth when you now have SolarSystem/1e6 instead of (SolarSystem - 1e10*UBI)/1e6?
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