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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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I disagree that it's absurd or inflammatory. I think it's probably wrong, but it seems an entirely reasonable belief, not just about US leaders, but basically anyone in general. Erring on the side of "people won't give a shit about megadeaths and megasufferings of people who are useless to them and powerless to stop them" doesn't seem like a major error, even if it is an error.
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