Re:Elon Musk on How to Build the Future
by muninn_ on Thursday September 15, 2016 @07:34PM
(#12510745)
Hmm that doesn't seem to make sense. Free markets (which include the vast majority of countries on the planet) enable people to create wealth. Maybe some sort of mix of a planet-wide initiative and the normal free markets we have would make sense. Calling free markets "the problem" doesn't really do anything for anybody.
Re:Elon Musk on How to Build the Future
by Applejinx on Thursday September 15, 2016 @07:59PM
(#12510895)
Free markets are an optimal pachinko machine for distributing capital, that needs no oversight or central direction.
It doesn't generate its own pachinko balls, that's utterly orthogonal. Free market capitalism is what you DO with a population that has disposable income. You can't feed the bottom of it into the top, it doesn't even work that way.
It's not even optimal for reaching the highest developments of ideas and inventions, because local maximums will starve out the newer ideas that need to grow and become competitive. It does nothing about network effects and tends towards monopoly.
But it's a fantastic distribution mechanism for the wealth of existing populations: no overseer required! Within some known limitations it works very nicely.
NO wealth is ever created.
Politics - which includes economics - is a much bigger challenge than AI.
We've completely transformed our understanding of science and technology, but our political and economic thinking would be recognisable to a Roman senator and a medieval banker.
Politics and economics are still waiting for a Copernican revolution. Our survival prospects as a species are limited until that revolution happens.