
Software Is a Superpower - flaviocopes
https://flaviocopes.com/software-superpower/
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threatofrain
Boring advertisement blog full of choppy dreamy sentences.

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brandly
The tiny paragraphs are really jarring to read.

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esperent
These are not paragraphs.

They are lonely disjointed sentences.

Floating freely.

In a sea of whitespace.

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yepthatsreality
It’s a draft for the blog post the author never wrote.

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davidlinc1
I agree with the underlying sentiment and even find the subject matter
inspirational, but the post falls pretty flat.

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xwdv
I disagree with the article, for thousands of years _slavery_ was how you
automated tasks at scale, and you could build massive impossible things this
way.

Software is the tech equivalent, except the slaves are machines and tiny shell
scripts.

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esperent
By definition, machines (at least any built so far) cannot be slaves, so this
is not a great equivalency.

At the very least it's a sign of amazing social and technological progress.

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invalidOrTaken
It really is pretty great. Getting automated out of a job sucks, but it beats
being a slave forced to do that same job by a country mile.

It's interesting that as machines have become more powerful, slavery has
become less and less profitable---but so has employment!

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esperent
The logically conclusion is either mass starvation or abolishing wages.

Basic income is just a stopgap. In a hundred, or two hundred, or five hundred
years, if technology continues apace, basically all work that is not
science/caregiving will be done by machines. How can an economy based around
wages exist in a world where humans don't work?

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invalidOrTaken
There's something of a Scylla and Charybdis thing going on, where if humans
become too valuable, it becomes worth it to exploit them, but if they're not
valuable enough, it's not worth it to pay them.

Tech can move things either way---automating things can make people worthless,
but providing new tools (Engelbart's "bicycle for the mind") can make them
_more_ valuable.

Formula 1 drivers are valuable athletes, but in 1850 they'd just have been
guys with slightly better reflexes.

