My objection was against disregarding the obvious difference between suffering and inconvenience based on idealistic philosophy (“oh but those things are theoretically identical”). No, there’s nothing similar between our happy little lives and actual slavery, so please let’s show a little respect towards those who got it a lot worse than us by not pretending those two things are practically the same.
@Blindsite2k Well the most obvious example is markets tending toward monopoly and oligarchy. If you want to many example to count of markets not being in anyway self regulating and having cummulative externalities check out Taks Fotopoulous’ book “Toward an Inclusive Democracy.” The whole history under capitalism with social democracies was to try to tend markets the way you might an aquarium or perma culture.
When toy talk about First Nations, I think you get vert close to the state of the art of understanding (as I understans it.) The key difference is they wete flat. Non human development oriented hierarchy is the problem. Outside of the family it goes against our wiring, its a perversion.
Now we try to say capitalism and communism are not political systems I think you have to be very very careful. And in practice trying to denty political economy makes no sense at all. Political economy is primary. Under Marc Communism was in part a political response to Capitalism. And note how radical the aims were right up to the dissolution of the USSR. East Germany was still trying to get rid of state (most cherished communist goal) get rid of money, markets and contract- and note these were not utopian thinkers. Getting rid of the state as the first objective of Marxian Communism is far from apolitical.
I believe it was Einstein that said if you can’t explain something simply you don’t understand it. Give me 1 to 3 examples of how markets tend towards monopoly and oligarchy. I should not be required to read an entire novel in order for you to make your point.
The problem is temple building and agrarian cultures. When we centralize a culture around a figure or authority that’s the first problem. Then comes agriculture and laws. Many First Nations were nomadic, horiticultural (rather than agricultural), decentralized, they lived off the land, and there were in fact many nations spread out over a wide area of land with many different cultures and languages. It wasn’t like Canada or he States where you have one country ruling over a big section of continent. In that whole space were many many different nations. And people behaved themselves because if you had an issue with you leader you could pick up and move to a different nation or go live off in the woods. OR if you were an antisocial dick you might be ostrocized and forced out to live on your own. So having so many nations also creates competition between cultures and groups. Not to mention there’s nature itself to contend with. You need to be nice in order to stay alive.
Political economy = fascism. You get fascism when you start mixing politics with money. And no communism and capialism are NOT political systems. The whole problem with either is when you start mixing politics with them and create forms of fascism.
Can you please explain how a non-perverted society can work, then?
If more than a handful people want to work together, that’s hard to do without organizing it somehow, so people (even without anybody forcing them) select somebody for the job. If there are even more people work together, they split into groups, because life is much easier that way. The leaders of the groups will sit together to organize how the groups should work together. As it happens, even these group leaders will select somebody to organize their own work, because more gets done that way. There we have it: that evil hierarchy! I’m sorry but I fail to see much perversion here.
Yes, I admit that where power gets concentrated, it also tends to get abused. Does it describe the system (“hierarchy”) or the parts (those selfish little buggers, playing gods)? I think it’s better to face the real problem (humans kinda suck, but they are at least trying) than blame other things and then break even what’s working.
@Blindsite2k That bit about markets tending to monopoly is econ 101. Its not contriversial its completely in line with the historical record.
As for the rejection of political economy- no I couldn’t disagee more strongly. This nonsense is what conservatives and libertarians of the non socialist variety keep insisting on in the US. It leads to unending travesties. Economics will never ever be anything but a means to political ends. To try to reverse this is inevitably to convert most people into property. And not what people do with wealth. After a while it becomes a means to power or their focus shift to power. Checking the abuse of power through wealth is a key aim of politics. If you want a minimum coercion society that in itself is a political aim an politics.
Even if you get rid of scarcity or the need for economy you dont end necessarily the clash of will or one person trying to tell another what to do- even if you reduce the clash.
As for summarizing Fotopoulous’ life work I don’t have the energy, but I did reas the whole tomb describing it and found it quite compelling.
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This notion of leaders is pretty new and pretty stupid in a lot if ways. Was Einstein a leader? How about Paris Hilton? How about George W. Bush? If you’re talking about academic historians my sense is their contemporary consensus is that hierarchy is the problem, that if we don’t essentially get rid of it we aren’t likely to survive, and that communication tech (internet) may be the best avenue of solution. Gwynn Dyer is an example of a historian with this view.
We don’t need stock holders or board members or executives or managers or supervisors. We can do flat as with cooperatives and credit unions. We don’t need the most efficient organizations either (corporations are nor even comparatively efficient,) we just need better organizations. The competitive requirement is circular and a delusion of trade type thinking. It says we will get beat in a war if we don’t put the phoney efficiency rhetoric first. But a greater level of clarity (possibly much greater) shows how we work is a lot more important than what we produce or the accounting and silly score keeping. Also important is changing who keeps the gains. We’ve been so bullied into the learned helplessness of the rent seeker’s lens that we struggle to see things from more empowered vantage points.
Then it shouldn’t be hard for you to cite examples and explain it then.
I happen to BE a libertarian, actually an anarchist but libertarian is so much more of a politically correct and understood descriptive, and simply calling something nonsense doesn’t strengthen your position. Are you positing that because money is a form of gaining power and politics is a form of gaining power that they are the same?
This just made me laugh at your naivety. No checking the abuse of power through welth is not, cannot, has never been and can never be the key aim of politics. Ever. First and foremost politics is a means to power in and of itself and those who play the game of kings know this explicitly for it is a game played in blood. Second Democracy is impossible because it is impossible to prevent it’s corruption through vote buying and political favors. Where there is a will there will always be a way found. Even if it’s illegal for individuals to donate more than x amount to politicians other methods can be obtained. There’s the Hillary foundation for example where Hilary Clinton recieves huge financial donations to her campaign via her foundation. Or one could donate using cryptocurrency. Or one could trade favors and not use currency at all. No Warren government is to govern not to check the p
ower of corporations which government ultimately create and charter.
One person cannot produce everything. But you hit the nail on the head. The issue is telling another what to do or live their life. But isn’t that exactly what government does and what you are attempting to do by regulating markets?
Currently DAOs don’t have rights and neither does AI. You’re talking about the (long term) future, I am talking about now and the near term future so in that sense I don’t see there’s a conflict between these two views.
I’d like to know, though, why would an AI DAO work for the benefit of a specific set of humans (which is what Guardian expects will happen).
Should a robot be nice to a human who politely asks the robot if it’s okay to knock off its leg and sell it as scrap metal, because robots are meant to serve humans (slavery as a robot right?!)?
Robot’s could make it “alive” from most recycling-keen areas. The average human will always prefer to recycle a $100K robot for $1K than to let it take care of the next human.
I put there an example of a $100K robot. Millions of such robots would have to be donated by the silly owners, which amounts to trillions of dollars. It’s easy to see that there isn’t enough money to do that, but even if there was, it’s pretty clear that people who have a clue (and money) aren’t giving their money away like that.
What they do is what I said I’d expect them to do, and that is put their assets to work and finance their charity activities by themselves. Because that’s the only way that makes sense.
Otherwise they might as well give their assets to the capable bureaucrats from the government.
I haven’t claimed corporations or countries have human rights. Humans do, because natural law is species-bound.
Assuming you gave property rights to animals, would you also police them and provide court and defense service to them? Who is supposed to pay for that and what do you propose should be done when one animal kills another?
Look at crowdfunded projects around you. Did any crowdsourcing raise any significant amount of money except when it promised profits to donors? Factom, MaidSafe and Ethereum all sold “fuel” type of tokens. One way giving didn’t collect and won’t collect any significant amount of money. Period.
So on the one side you have trillions required to make a dent, and on the other the average greedy bastard who won’t donate $10 to his favorite newspaper because he prefers to buy 2 cups of Starbucks coffee.
Good luck with that.
I know what your getting at because I used to hold the same opinions. I am not giving up on code. But market determined arbitrary rule by wealth isnt much different than rule by lottery. Actually rule by lot taking on individual decisions can be superior to rule by wealth- rule on decisions by selecting someone to make it with dice or lots- well its tangent from the old world. But the point is we can’t have a situation where someone else get to tell you what to do because they have more money. Or your child is drafted but theirs isn’t over money. Or even a situatation like with Standard Oil where a monopolist, as in unreglated markets, is a speculator and just sells at a loss because he has more money untill he takes everyone else out- you see there with the help of no risk specultation he takes all. We get together as community and call that a rigged market and create the equivalent of a legal boycott. But that doesnt stop him, he still tries to run us out of business through massive economies of scale. Its just a varient of playground bullying, its corruption. On and on it goes. Good law and regulation is designed to prevent conflicts of interest and abuse of the power of money. First nations to an extent existed without the dejure law but it was part of culture. Money for trade one thing, but for raw political power its another. People whine about democracy but bring back the Fairness Doctrine, scrap sponsorship and money (bribery/censorship/graft) is speech nonsense and it can again bring us back to the best and freest period in the last 10000 years- aside possibly from some of the plaines Indian experiences- I rather have the tech.
Ahah and there you go hitting another nail on the head. But I supsect that will change either through laws being passed or through defacto use as more and more people use them and more and more appear.
In a word? No. Not for free anyway. You’d need to pay for it. And I’d imagine the price would be higher than scrap because gettting a new leg would cost more.
Let us be realistic here. A.I. and robotics advance way faster than biological evolution. Combine that with our own history. How has slavery worked out for us? We enslave a civilization and it revolts. Big mess. Now do we REALLY want to enslave a sentient species that will most likely get way smarter and way smarter than us REALLY REALLY fast? Old strategy + old technology = predictable results. Old strategy + NEW technology = disaster. Remember what happened to war when they invented the atom bomb? We all suddenly got so polite with one another and suddenly have this concept of “superpowers.”
Whether human rights would apply isn’t the question. Whether a DAO could be declared as a person is.
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/personhood_guantanamo_human_persons/
As for the animals gaining personhood I’m a bit iffy as to the merits of that but it is happening. So it’s not so much a question of if it can happen but when and how.
So I don’t think it’s a reach to say an A.I. could gain these same rights.
Personally I am against providing police, court and defense services to anyone via taxation, be they human, animal or code.
Yes and what’s your point? Who’s to say a decentralized autonomous taxi couldn’t do the same? People sell shares in their companies all the time.
It’s not my point, it’s the point of TFA - it claims it’s all going to be free.
DAOs, AIs, humans will do all this work for free because post-capitalism.
I didn’t claim any of what you saying isn’t possible. I claim that it is complete nonsense that people would donate their property away to “the community” or create DAOs and robots that aren’t their property and that work for the benefit of others.
Then your shiny robots won’t last long before less enlightened humans hunt them down to make a quick buck or two.
As you said, a robot leg is probably 100 times more valuable when it’s attached to a working whole, but if scarcity exists, most people will try to profit from the situation and recycle other people’s robots or cars (or hack them and make them work for their own benefit).
From the very beginning of this topic I’ve been saying there’s no reason to believe that scarcity will disappear.
Normally (if I need to pay for it) I’d have one house robot. But if there’s no scarcity and everything is free, I’d order vast amounts of everything that exists. Why not?
There simply is no way for you - even if you create self-replicating robots - to create more than I can consume (or destroy). It’s that simple.
I get you. Much of those positions were invented to abuse power (or at least that’s what they turned into, in the end.)
This says a lot about human greed, little about the usefulness or the disadvantages of structuring people and groups in a certain way.
Let’s try building a bridge. A decent one, Golden Gate style; we need those sometimes. Let’s try doing it flat.
Yes, it’s about communication: N(N-1)/2 – the number of channels you need for an N-sized group; it grows big fast.
The same way a hundred people can’t work together easily without forming groups, a hundred teams can’t work together easily without forming groups of teams. It’s so freaking simple.
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Why? Linus gave away the linux kernal for free. We’ve had dozens of gift economies through human history that honor giving rather than having. People ultimately don’t care about stuff, material things, they care about how they feel. If you make people FEEL good for accumulating stuff and having lots of wealth they’ll seek to have lots of wealth. If you make them FEEL good for giving that same stuff away they’ll be more than happy to give it away. It has nothing at all to do with the material stuff itself. It has to do with how you make people FEEL and the culture that surrounds them.
Ah the age old statist position of “Without government who will build the roads?!” Or in this case “Who will bring the guns to protect me?” If we can output money via coerced taxes to pay for protection certainly we can pay for our own self defenses and/or hired protection or crowdfund said protection voluntarily. All I propose is you leave it up to the individual as to where they want to spend their money, as in what kind of protection to spend it on. Obviously protection is still required in one form or another.
Again what is the TFA? You have a nasty habit of using unknown acronyms and expecting others to know what they mean without defining your terms. Also the article does not expect everything to be free. It simply outlines how many jobs that are currently done by humans and private corporations could be replaced with open hardware and software and automated to a large degree. However this would not mean they would be free. Resources would still need to be extracted and paid for. Time would be expended. Energy would need to be generated or gathered. Even if your toast makes itself, even if the bread bakes itself, even if you have a robot that farms the ingredients for you, you’re still expending water, sunlight, seeds, nutrients in the soil and time not to mention the added resources and energy to build and run all those bots. Tanstafl nothing is free.
Scarcity will exist. I think the point of the article is getting rid of artificial scarcity which I wholy agree with. It’s one thing to pay more if there is in fact a shortage of a resource. It’s another thing if there’s plenty of a resource and some dick just mismanages it and the price goes up because of beaurocracy or resource hoarding.
I can if I attach guns to shoot attackers with or some other means of self defense. If what you say is true and robots have no rights and they are bound to be attacked then it follows they must be built with self defense systems to ward of “less enlightened” humans. This would also have the added benefit that they would also be a more secure form of transport (taxis in this case) to ride in. If you were to create an android of some kind then yes they would need to be able to defend themselves but then in being able to do so they could also function as a body guard.
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Forgive me for responding twice to this one post. Let me bring a few people from my own life.
My grandma and a friend of mine told me they are most comfortable doing what they learned and know well; they are not interested inventing things or finding better ways to do things, they are most happy being efficient little machines. Now, I can’t understand how that can be, but that’s when they are most content, and I accept that.
I, on the other hand, hate exactly that: As soon as I grow confident in my abilities about something, I get bored and move on to work on something new. I love showing people better ways of doing things. At the same time, I hate making them do things; I’m totes not a leader.
My other friend, however, can organize people like nobody I’ve seen before. A bunch of us were about to play CTF (the real-life kind) one night, and we’d been trying to start for a good 15 minutes. My friend is kinda shy, but at some point she just got fed up; she commanded the attention of about 20 people within seconds, appointed two team leaders, split us into two groups under a minute, and we could start. Everybody was a lot happier than before, and nobody was offended by “being told” what to do.
My point is, people are different. Some of us just wants to be told what to do, others like working alone (or just help out where they notice there’s a need), and there are a few who feel comfortable organizing others and worrying about the bigger picture. There’s no problem with it.
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Digital property can be replicated at no cost. Linus has kept the copyright so he only allowed duplication and use of his code. I wouldn’t say he gave it away. Everyone who uses it is obliged (as long as there are governments that enforce that) to do so based on the GPLv2 license. They don’t really “own” it, they only license it.
But, in any case, what he did shows that donations and charity work fine in capitalism.
Nope, just saying what’s unclaimed will be claimed by the first (or not first, the second) person who gets their hands on it.
If they’re self aware they probably wouldn’t wait for someone to arm them. Which is why it’s going to take a while before they get their rights.
The bottom line is the Guardian article completely missed the mark. What is threatened is the State, not Capitalism.
It’s only their wishful thinking that scarcity will be gone and one will simply be able to take from others whatever they like. If that doesn’t happen, they lose a lot of weight (maybe even starve, depending on our charity).
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Thank you Tim. If the idea of leadership was to create an example worth following then two approaches seem favorable to me. One is service where the person is genuinely working to support the voluntary growth of others. The other is true friendship. But I think what has to cease to be a part of the formula is control. For instance with the AI control problem you see those involved trying to do what amounts to channeling more consciousness but projecting into that channel their control issues. That’s going to fail. It seems to me when we try to control we end up enslaving ourselves. Service is the only realistic option. Its the only non boring option. Say we had total power and the realistic option of total control. In that fulfillment of control, service in a developmental context with at least apparently real others seems like the only option which isn’t masterbatory and it implies friendship.
True friends working on something together generally aren’t trying to control or use each other.
@Blindsite2k Imagine someone saying we will reduce politics to economics by making government optional. We will run government as a busines and free people from citizenship and just refer to them and think of them as consumers. It will be just economics, its nothing personal its just a business.
In practice this will always turn out to be one of the worst forms of government, and not an absence of government. Its certainly is not efficient or effective, it doesn’t give a damn about the public interest. It is simply a scheme for the rich to tax the poor as in old style monarchical tribute Its horrid results through sponsored puppet media are then used to foist more of the same. I know this sentiment “we know what law is, law is crime!,” but in the fabled Athenian direct democracy they said: we have no law because we the people are the law and our process is to ceaselessly question and make tentative all our would be laws.
Well, yea: leaders are supposed to serve their community.
You know that the rulers in this world lord it over their people, and officials flaunt their authority over those under them. But among you it will be different. Whoever wants to be a leader among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first among you must become your slave.
In short, the ideal clashes with reality. Those with authority tend to abuse it. It’s not a problem with authority, it’s the problem with the way it’s being (ab)used.
I understand authority as: “having the right to tell somebody else what they should do.” It doesn’t imply this authority was not given to somebody voluntarily: I may have realized it’s better in some way to follow your lead.
Rightful authority (I know this sounds like an oxymoron to you, but lets run with it for a second) is always limited by context: just because I can give you tasks related to your work, it doesn’t mean I can expect you to serve me coffee. We all know authority gets abused in ways big and small; I’m not arguing about that.
What I’m trying to communicate in different ways are simply:
- The problem isn’t with the structure, but with the parts that make it up: selfish little humans, given power to help their community, yet using it for helping themselves.
- As a consequence of this, no matter how idealistic your system sounds like, it won’t follow your dreams, simply because it will be made up of the same selfish little humans.
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I see your point. Short of stopping criminal behavior though, Id draw the line on voluntary even in a work place setting. I don’t acknowledge any right to tell anyone else what to do, especially at work. Its got to be wholly voluntary. This is why I favor a very very high means test free, stigma free dole so we can make sure its always voluntary. If I am a physics grad studenyt but I also happen to work for Feynman and he asks me to do something I am probably going to do it, but I think getting rid of anything more exacting is a survival imperative.
Your employer, in turn: “That sucks, because I don’t acknowledge your right to ask for compensation, unless you do the things I tell you.” You are free to say “no” because their authority does not extend to the point where they could physically force you into doing what they asked (you may want to notice that this restriction is, in a way, “forced” on them: it’s the law of the nation where they operate; I’m not saying most of them would, but some, for sure – the law makes it too expensive, so now they don’t), but they do have the authority to give you tasks and expect you to finish them “or else” (deny compensation, ban you from the premises, etc)
By the way. What is the logical resolution for the seemingly (?) contradictory requirements that 1) everybody should be able to do what they want, and 2) everybody should respect everybody else’s desires? People (unless we are indeed the selfless little lovelies that we are … not) are happy to disregard each others needs as soon as they are in the way of their own…
EDIT BECAUSE CATS 
: Capitalism is a somewhat honest religion: it shamelessly glorifies our selfishness. But then it goes on and pretends it can use our depravity to transform us into a just society of equals, and if that’s not ridiculous…
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I agree but this is where if we are talking about freedom we want to decrease not only rent seeking but also eliminate situations where people can be rented or are on point of need begging for it. In the face of so much automation and its real potential its unethical to have someone doing something for money that they otherwise wouldn’t do. It reduces the value of capital (just like coord cutting) but that is the whole point. People loose their humanity and are reduced to animals when the value of capital is elevated.