
Atlas Smug | Alex Payne | Jacobin - AmadKamali
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/06/atlas-smug/
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dang
A dupe of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7907535](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7907535).

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3pt14159
Imagine it's 1940 or 1950 and someone starts asking "Who is going to own the
computers?"

The answer is that everyone is going to own different robots. The whole point
is that a robot is going to be so much more efficient than a human, that for
less than 1/50th the cost of a median house a human could buy a robot that
could create enough economic production for his whole life.

There will be challenges, since many people live paycheque to paycheque, but
ultimately a very simple Basic Income (backed on land taxes, ideally) would
catch those that would fall in the cracks.

I used to worry about robots a lot more, but I don't really anymore. The rich
just want the poor out of the way while they become more rich / powerful. The
most effective way of doing that is to just pay the poor people off while they
start organizing greater and greater things.

The real thing I'm worried about is actually hard AI. I can't predict its
motivations.

Edit: You guys fundamentally don't get it because you don't understand that
I'm arguing about _economics_.

> This isn't a question of who is going to own a dishwashing robot. Its a
> question of who is going to own the means of production.

People are going to, at the very least, own their own means of production.
Look at it from an economics standpoint, at the margin, why would I buy a
chair rather than get my semi-intelligent android robot to cut down a tree,
plank it, and build it. The chair would have to be essentially free. Then who
cares who owns the means to production. At the margin I could always revert to
having my personal robot build it.

Furthermore, I would argue that most of the computers that make most of the
value in the world are owned largely by everybody. I have a computer that I
use to make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on, and it will be the
same with robots. People with vision will direct machines of greater
sophistication towards and end they desire.

Whether you own something or rent it is always going to be a economic
decision. I own my Macbook Pro and I installed Ubuntu on it, but even if I was
renting it, that doesn't change the fundamental nature of what I'm saying.

I used to think that we were marching towards this awful grey future where
99.9% of people were going to be treated like cattle and ultra-corps were
going to be running the world with all their machines. Most people talk like
this is what's coming, and, barring AI, I no long think this is the case.

Edit2: I wrote my first edit when I had negative points, now it seems to have
positive points, which is why I opened up the edit with "you guys don't get
it".

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drzaiusapelord
>Imagine it's 1940 or 1950 and someone starts asking "Who is going to own the
computers?"

You can manipulate bits and bytes at home, great, but these robots are
industrial producers that make things, are subject to regulations, etc. This
isn't a question of who is going to own a dishwashing robot. Its a question of
who is going to own the means of production.

The funny thing is that your answer is antiquated. What computer do I really
own? My android phone that is controlled by google, managed by a telecom
carrier, and all of my data at google. Or all the servers I work with that are
VM's at some cloud provider? We're not landlords anymore. We're renters.

~~~
NoMoreNicksLeft
> We're not landlords anymore. We're renters.

This is why I like Plex instead of Netflix. Netflix has more movies after all,
for a subscription.

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vegancap
The premise of this article is entirely wrong. We haven't had a 'massive
deregulation', taxes across the west have rose, as has regulation and
centralisation. THAT is why conditions for workers have declined. THAT is why
the rich have gotten richer and the poor have gotten poorer.

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mindcrime
Yeah, there may have been some limited de-regulation here and there, but we
are no where _near_ an actual free-market situation. For somebody to come
along and decry de-regulation as the problem, in this environment, is
absolutely absurd.

~~~
vegancap
Exactly! I've read a lot of posts recently claiming the 'free-market' is the
problem. Well, I can't think of many countries in the world who have a
currency not owned by the state, a banking system entirely independent of the
state, a country with a real, none-fiat currency, a country with minimum to no
forms of tax etc. It just isn't the case, and it's not heading that way by and
means either. I'm not sure where people are getting this from

~~~
mindcrime
_Exactly! I 've read a lot of posts recently claiming the 'free-market' is the
problem._

Yeah, it's a symptom of the kind of elitism that modern day "leftish wing" /
"liberal" types (as opposed to classical liberals) are infected with, where
they believe that if only we'd let them micro-manage every little detail of
society, the economy, culture, etc., then we could live in a "perfect" world
where everyone is uniformly happ and "none suffer".

The thing is, that's never been possible and I don't think it'll ever be
possible... and if it were possible, it's not desirable. "Uniformly happy"
also means "uniformly sad" and "uniformly oppressed". None for me, thanks.

~~~
vegancap
Perfectly put! I got down-voted to -6 karma for challenging that attitude,
good to see someone who agrees at last.

What baffles me the most if when they refer to what we have now, in the west
as a 'free-market'. What we have is the end product of the social-democrat era
of conflating big business and big government.

