
Historian Yuval Noah Harari on the Robot Revolution - AsasR
https://www.wsj.com/articles/historian-yuval-noah-harari-on-the-robot-revolution-1538057544
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decasteve
I don’t agree with many things Harari has written/said but he’s in the right
ballpark and I like his comprehensive approach. Some of it really calls back
to Bucky Fuller (and Marshall McLuhan). Bucky once said:

> We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to
> earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a
> technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of
> today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living.
> We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be
> employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian
> theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of
> inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect
> inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and
> think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came
> along and told them they had to earn a living.

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motohagiography
Framed in terms of "the logic of political survival," a more useful
characterization would be, "technology X will reduce the size of the coalition
of people necessary to achieve power, and the size of the group who must be
rewarded to maintaintain it."

Based on that, you could run most smaller countries with a resource revenue
stream to pay police to make examples, and Google data to find them.

Sounds horrific, but we may live at the edge of some very dark times.

I have a bunch of notes for an article pitch about how AI/ML tech could easily
create resource cursed economies and governance (akin to Jeffery Sachs
description), but don't want to wade into writing again yet.

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djpr
> I have a bunch of notes for an article pitch about how AI/ML tech could
> easily create resource cursed economies and governance (akin to Jeffery
> Sachs description), but don't want to wade into writing again yet.

Sounds like an important subject though. Any chance you can share or will post
an outline of your thoughts?

For me, the most interesting problems are governance & economic development
models. It's obviously broken and it's obviously being supplemented by
corporations to AI, so I'd appreciate your thoughts on this.

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motohagiography
I could really be a bore on this. Short version is DeMesquita describes the
underlying mechanism of the effects Sachs observes, and if you switch in AI/ML
for oil or mineral wealth in Sachs model, you can make predictions about some
of those consequences using DeMesquita.

Long version involves introducing and describing the relationship between
their ideas. DeMesquita gets rejected as being too abstract, but his model has
useful predictive power.

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dang
The submission broke the guidelines by rewriting the title to "AI will lead to
the rise of digital dictatorships". We've reverted it to the original now.

Accounts that do that eventually lose submission privileges here, so please
review
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
and follow the rules when posting.

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excalibur
[https://archive.is/DXqHh](https://archive.is/DXqHh)

(Edited to use SSL)

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amself
Weird. Looks like archive.is is blocked in Greece. (my ISP is Cosmote)

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excalibur
My original link wasn't encrypted, does it work now?

