Never a shortage of those, it seems. But only for insiders, of course.

I do not know that word. I looked it up and found nothing helpful. What does it mean, and what do you mean?

Also, may I ask you to use more punctuation and things like currency symbols, because your message lacks so much context I can't even guess.

The usual English term is "mid-level".

So, no, they were not, or I would not have asked.

No it doesn't. But as a human being, you and everybody still deserves a decent living. And our current system clearly does not provide that for a lot of people.

I want my son to live on a livable planet, and not under the constant threat of destitution. And I want that for all children, not just mine.

High trust societies, a feeling of place and well-being in a culture, connectedness, etc.

https://data.worldhappiness.report/map

Note: Look at the US continuing to move down the report year after year.

There's more to life than one's material standard of living. I think people were mostly talking about the other bits.

It can be circular.

MS invests 5 billion in OpenAI.

OpenAI invests 5 billion in MS.

Do have 10 billion now?

Sure it does. Our species is social, meaning we form societies for evolutionary success. Both of us being members of that society, it is in my interest to see your child survive. It is a tragedy to think your child may not survive because human greed prevents them from accessing resources we have in abundance.

The opposite perspective is anti-social in a literal way: the greedy cannot use all of the resources, can't eat all of the food; they want control so you can't have it without their permission. You are entitled to eat, seeing as we have more than enough to feed you. That others think you are not is disagreeable, to put it mildly.

Even in a tribe, there’s a lotta suffering and very little remorse for it.

We may say we chase a society that would see everyone understand the principle of ‘your child should also get a decent life’, but what we see now, across nearly all societies is really the opposite. And it phrases like this - we don’t care if your children live or die for as long as our children get better chances.

This statement is rather plainly not true. It describes child rearing and claims it does not happen in one breath.

There is a concept of "fairness", which I don't want to discount, but there's not much of a history of people being bottom feeders who do nothing to help those around them. Sure, there's a lot of sentiment to that effect but it is somehow something I fail to observe to this day. It is in the eye of the beholder and I worry for the souls of the beholders who judge so harshly.

This idea that someone is not deserving of food because they have not earned it a sad, anti-social thing to believe, perpetuated by psychological attacks from those who have more than they could ever need. You and your children deserve to eat and disagreement with that statement says more about the one disagreeing than it does any other, regardless of the judgement inherent to the nature of the disagreement (really, because of it, I suppose).

kind of the point of living in a civilized society i reckon

It's been so long since we've seen actual bread riots I fear we forgot how nasty those are.

I think the notion is that with new automated systems of violence and control, some of them built onto the people themselves, our "future civilization" can dial back the worker's compensation to below subsistence. There was a big zillionaire conference where they talked about slave collars, for example, or humanoid AI workers. I'm always a little distressed when the masters of industry fall back on science fiction in order to build a machine that needs to function in the, well, in the present.

[1] One person's output in terms of agriculture

What? Do you have a link?

It was a private 2017 desert retreat where five wealthy tech and hedge-fund investors flew out media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, ostensibly for a speaking engagement.

Rushkoff wrote it up first as a Guardian essay and later expanded it into his 2022 book Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires.

The problem's super duper obvious if you studied history, but it is also pretty obvious if you can think about second order effects. In collapse the wealthy obviously need security forces to hold on to their stuff, but in a collapse your stuff will - presto changeo - become the security force's stuff. Essentially the singular founding story of all European royal families. Barbarian general took the house, banged the wife, now he's king. Or King-Sound. Kai- Zar

At the end of the day all these little lords and lordettes figured out the time honored lesson that to be actually safe you want to make friends with the locals. And that's part of being new king types as well. But "making people like you" isn't a popular notion with the Revenge of the Nerds types who love this "Lord of the Bunker" kind of thing.

I've seen zoo chimpanzees make a mockery out of this sort of device in VERY short order, and I would dread to impose it on a Delta Force psychopath who also has more higher degrees than I do. Because he's going to know who it was who did it and have all sorts of ideas about what he's doing about that. So the basic premise is also idiotic.

Sorry, I was a little more snide than I usually am on HN, it's been a long day.

So, yes, in order to have a society one perhaps and most likely needs to define how rights are guaranteed. But it does not mean anyone is entitled to it by definition. Otherwise millions of dying children throughout modern history, and now also, would see the perpetrators get a ‘fair’ treatment. But they don’t.

Perhaps only as second order effects that are hard to understand and are not entitlement.

I'm not really sure how your reasoning here is in line with your previous post.

At no point in any of that was anyone coddled or told that they will get to keep their job forever. Learn new skills. That's the game.

It's not even unique to tech. Doctors have to do this too.

There's so much work in the industry right now around LLM implementation that folks not looking into that are sleeping on good jobs.

"minor professional development refreshers" lol

Also known as (unpaid) hard work during the weekend.

Education? Safety? Medical help? A home? Food? Transport? Communication?

These are things society needs to provide.

In turn, we provide society with labour, applied skills, decision making etc.

If there is no (trusted, working) social contract - society breaks down.

If we allow a small elite to monopolize the productivity gains and efficiency increased from new technology - the results will be dire.

I see the more feasible solutions to be some kind of universal income or negative tax - combined with reduced work hours (eg 30 hour weeks, to start).

That's obviously false. What's the point of society if that's true? Do you think there should be no government roads, no government health care (if you're in the US, you may think this, but only because you're indoctrinated), no legal system (or enforcement thereof) to protect you from criminals, no legally enforceable human rights whatsoever? Etc., etc.?

Once they actually understand what they're saying, no sane person believes that society doesn't owe them anything.

I don't think Society means what you think it means.