Re:The Spaceballs Argument for Unconditional Basic Income
by Dylan16807 on Thursday January 12, 2023 @05:57AM
(#34351807)
I think you might have misread me. When I said "significant power" I meant that in a proportional sense. The 1% getting much more than 1%. I wasn't arguing against the 99% getting 99%.
Re:The Spaceballs Argument for Unconditional Basic Income
by ben_w on Thursday January 12, 2023 @10:17AM
(#34354721)
Ah, thanks; that explains the apparent discrepancy between what I thought you were saying here vs. your other comments.
As for why the 1% may have much more than 1% of the power in practice… that's kinda where I was going with the Hyper-Dystopia vs. Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism example: whoever controls the AI gets to play as Gods to a much larger degree than mere billionaires get to act like real life is a Civilization/KSP/SimCity game, and the default for who controls the AI is whoever has skills such that they can't be replaced with an AI. Or the current rich, if everyone can be displaced by AI.
As for "why should they get significant power?" — well, 'should' is a question of values. Do you believe in democracy and self-determination? Or is it fine to treat them all like animals, by which I mean spay, neuter, euthanise without asking their opinions, and/or selectively breed to be decorative and fit into handbags? Because the worst horrors that Charlie Stross and Ian Banks and Harlan Ellison have imagined are all as easy as Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism if you have an AI which can automate almost everything, regardless of whether anything remains purely in the domain of a tiny elite.
I'm going to support democracy. That's why I think an unemployable 99% should have, in a reasonable sense, 99% of the power.