I see no indication that current human intelligence is at anything close to a historical pinnacle. Human knowledge, yes, but intelligence? No. Collectively, we're dumb and trending dumber, and the tendency towards lazy thoughtlessness which AI engenders will accelerate that trend.
It really is a remarkable picture, but I'd like to note that it's all physicists, not scientists in general. It was the golden era of physics.
Also, science used to directly correlate with improvements in life standards. Nowadays we see advancements in science (AI, psychology) used to actively reduce the standard of life.
Like renewables were on track to bring us peak oil, maybe AI will bring us peak human intelligence.
While all those are true they are not reflecting the level of intelligence of people: intelligent people take personal stupid decisions because while intelligence is a function of let's say the more "abstract brain", decisions are emotionally driven and influenced by the "ancient, threat focused, pleasure driven brain".
Here is a quick way to think about this: some intelligent people are obease, some others don't exercise, and others don't take their health seriously while also working on the most amazing problems we ever solved. You know what's the biggest paradox here: they all have the capacity to understand fully the impact of their lifestyle on their health but still making a life style change is hard due to not being driven by knowledge and logic.
Intelligence is the same but for mental faculties. A human is intelligent when they develop their critical thinking, memory, focus, logical reasoning, etc. A human is unintelligent when they fail to develop these things to their personal potential. And when I look around me I see a culture of inustrial-strength distraction that has robbed people of their ability to focus, I see encyclopedias in everyone's pockets that have robbed them of any incentive to remember, I see a society of comfortable complacency that has shielded them from any consequence of poor logical reasoning, and with LLMs I see a mass surrender of the need to exercise critical thinking in exchange for the warm embrace of thoughtlessness.
There's no reason that things need to be this way. The human hardware hasn't fundamentally changed in 100,000 years, and we have so many more resources today that it's easy to imagine that we could all be, collectively, more intelligent than ever if we could somehow inspire people to care. Sadly, we don't seem to be able to.
We are at a peak in absolute terms, though the decline is coming quickly:
https://x.com/jonatanpallesen/status/2034755779501105321
But in relative terms intelligence has indeed been declining for a long time:
> I see no indication that current human intelligence is at anything close to a historical pinnacle. Human knowledge, yes, but intelligence? No. Collectively, we're dumb and trending dumber
Also, I think we (non-scientists) might be overestimating the average historical intelligence - see Flynn Effect [1] - perhaps because of a bias in our perception of the past levels based on who published books and thoughts - basically more intelligent members of our species.
> and the tendency towards lazy thoughtlessness which AI engenders
----------------
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
[2] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 1.20 — 5th c. BCE Greece. “So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand.”
[3] Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1.2 — 4th c. BCE Greece. https://kairos.technorhetoric.net/stasis/2017/honeycutt/aris.... Aristotle treats public persuasion as necessary partly because ordinary audiences cannot easily follow complex chains of reasoning. He says rhetoric addresses deliberative matters before people “who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument, or follow a long chain of reasoning.”
[4] Plato, Republic, Book V — 4th c. BCE Greece. https://topostext.org/work/768. Plato distinguishes philosophers from the many “lovers of sights and sounds,” who enjoy appearances but do not apprehend deeper truth. The text says their thought is “incapable” of grasping the underlying form or nature of beauty, and that few attain that deeper vision.
[5] Confucius, Analects, Book 2 — 5th c. BCE China. https://www.chinastory.cn/ywdbk/english/v1/detail/20190722/1.... "Learning without thought is pointless, Thought without learning is dangerous".
[6] Buddhist tradition, Dhammapada, Appamāda-vagga. https://suttacentral.net/dhp21-32/en/sujato. Dhammapada contrasts heedfulness with heedlessness, treating heedlessness as a central human failing. In one translation: “Heedfulness is the state free of death; heedlessness is the state of death. The heedful do not die, while the heedless are like the dead.”
[7] Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, “Idols of the Mind” — 1620. https://history.hanover.edu/texts/bacon/novorg.html. Bacon argues that the “Idols of the Tribe” are rooted in human nature itself, and that human understanding distorts reality like a false mirror.
Excellent question. Global GDP estimates going back to 1 CE are here [1][2]. I would argue that GDP is a good proxy for an estimate of the summation of per-capita intelligence being used for "productive" ends, by definition.
But, the global average GDP per capita is [3] with a similar hockey-stick curve, and it is unclear whether the per-capita intelligence used for "productive" ends has also been increasing similarly, because the confounding factor is the effect of tools as force-multipliers (impact on productivity). The Flynn Effect is the strongest indicator that yes, average intelligence has been rising as measured in certain populations where cultural differences do not wreck the applicability of IQ tests.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-gdp-over-the-long-...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20260525015042/https://ourworldi...
[3] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-average-gdp-per-ca...
> Human knowledge, yes, but intelligence?
of the post you responded to?
But that shouldn't be any surprise. We're already at more than a hundred years of deliberate dumbing down of the population through schooling and mass media. These effects are exponential through generations.
Introducing a machine to a manufacturing role obviously makes the manufacturer less fit, but it enables society to break through fitness barriers in general
If your point is that it's not orders of magnitude fitter, that's a good one. I don't think people will be much more intelligent in the future than they are today but they'll probably just be more specialized and have deeper knowledge
The other factor is that we all get significantly less physical activity than before, and obesity is a increasing problem.
And while the first effect is a effect of the machines, it is the latter effect I think most easily maps onto today's situation.
Personally I am quite certain that if you could teleport 100 random 20-year old from 1820 they would be better than 100 random 20-year old today at most physical tests, especially if you gave them food first.
We also know that testosterone levels (which are connected with muscle mass, recovery etc.) are lower today than even few decades back.
I’m not sure what it means if we want the average person to be fitter, it seems like we’d have to reinstitute manual labour if that was the goal.
Which is maybe a good analogy for not using AI in the classroom and forcing kids to use their minds
Mechanical replacement cannot be compared with thought replacement anyway, but the most thoughtless pro-AI comment tends to be at the top.
Sure...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/694199/u.s.-depression-rate-rem...
>this would be a tool usage which will take human intelligence to another pinnacle.
Between the endless slop, loneliness and depression epidemics, record low reading comprehension, attention shortage, we're not in any pinnacle today. We're in a regression from a few decades ago, getting worse.
Think about it: everyone has characterized AI slop, as slop. Which means that we negatively value it in terms of originality. Combine that with the fact that there will be a lot of it, this means that original work will 1. stand out or be very distinct from slop, and 2. have its value amplified as a result of this polarization.
basically, we value originality more AND are able to identify it more readily.
related is also the fact that originality will literally be valuable as training data for future models
Also there have been dozens of HN submissions and comments where the poster didn't even bother to remove the em dashes. Most people just don't care. The people who continue to post like this wouldn't have been as visible had they not discovered AI and pounced on it, but they were always there. The idea of posting with an AI voice, em-dashes and all, would likely have still appealed to them if you'd asked 5-10 years ago. Nowadays it takes hardly any energy for them to have a persistent voice.
Slop has always been around. AI has cheapened its creation.
If something is able to generate things with soul and true originality... we're talking about something incredible, a new intelligent species potentially
think about how in music, when an artist comes out with something original and awesome, and then everyone starts copying it and creating their own derivative works, like Jimi Hendrix or something.
Did Hendrix become useless? Did everyone end up thinking he sucks or something? No, he is even more revered, as the originator of a new type of sound that probably created multiple genres
The same thing applies here. Originality will be valued and even empowered as extrapolation and development off of it can increase in speed and quality in the case you mention
True, but some nuance is that a LOT of artist/creative types lean exclusively on the mechanical skill needed to create, without anything really much to say. They also very frequently copy other's styles, etc.
I'm not defending AI pumping out crap, but this also shows a lot of folks don't have much to offer beyond the mechanical aspects and we shouldn't glorify churning out stuff by hand as high art either.
For example, I want to make:
- A mini OS on top of SeL4
- A UI framework based on SolidJS, for native apps, in rust.
- My own photo manager (which can do backups & sync across all my devices). And a gallery to share photos with friends
- A local first data store, built on top of CRDTs
- My own programming language
And lots more.
Each of these projects on their own would take months of time. If LLMs can speed up development, that's great! I don't care if nobody else uses what I make. I want a personal computer full of my own software.
There are a ton of opportunities available right now to make new things. And make them better, more customizable, and more sovereign.
To the replies: be the change you want to see in the world, guys. That may be trite but focusing only on the negative will just make your own life shitty.
For example, the photo backup system I want to make will let me manage my ~400gb photo library. I want my library backed up on a couple devices, running linux and freebsd. I want my mac and iphone to have a local mirror of all the favorited photos, and when I'm at home, I want to be able to browse all photos from those devices by streaming them over the local network. I want native macos & ios app interfaces to view and manage all that.
I don't know any existing software that meets my requirements. I don't think any such software exists. Apple, Dropbox and Google will solve this problem for me if I store all my photos in their cloud and pay them an ongoing subscription for the privilege. I'd much rather make something myself, and back up my photos on my own hard drives.
Making something like this is simple enough, but very time consuming. If claude can take the drudgery out of it, well, I think that's just delightful.
AI is seen as a way out of drudgery but you're just trading one problem for another.
It's actually quite similar to buying the services of a programmer off Upwork to build something for me, only with LLMs it's way cheaper and faster, with a shorter feedback loop.
If I spend a weekend standing up a self-hosted media system or something, I doubt anyone would dispute that's a fun building exercise.
If I do the same thing but use an LLM to build out instead, somehow it's not.
Yeah it's not the same kind of building as what we might have done pre-LLM but it need not be any less satisfying or rewarding.
The real disconnect seems to be the classic dichotomy: people who see coding as the point and the purpose, vs people who just want an outcome.
And that's fine!
I'm just don't understand why the one camp feels the need to deride the other.
I don't enjoy CSS, so I delegate that to an LLM. Just like I don't like writing assembly by hand, so I delegate that to a compiler. So what?
Take woodworking for example. When I build a kitchen cabinet, I can get lumber that's already smooth and treated, I can buy drawer tracks, I can use power tools instead of a handsaw and a screwdriver, I can use a pocket hole jig to make joints easier. I still have to do more planning and assembling than with the Ikea cabinet, which also takes more work than having a contractor do everything for me.
I'm doing it my way because it's fun for me. Other people might enjoy other parts of the process - or different things altogether.
There's a whole spectrum between doing everything from scratch and paying someone to have it done for you.
What do you think architects do? Or interior designers? Or civil engineers?
Architecture certainly isn't building, and neither is interior design. Civil engineers calculate and specify the loads in excruciating detail, because if they didn't, people would die.
The biggest value proposition of an LLM is being able to focus on the truly high-value activities while allowing the machine take care of much of that reification.
That you think architecture or interior design isn't building tells you prefer to downplay or devalue any work that isn't hands on construction. It's an interesting perspective, but it's one I'll never be able to understand or agree with.
For someone who's been around the block a few times, there's little new under the sun. Coming up with good architecture for a problem space and having the LLM fill in the details is incredibly effective as a pattern.
That said, tbh I'm not sure why we keep exchanging messages. Your other comment about coding with AI assistance as being akin to buying a statue tells me you have either never coded with an agent, and so think it's a simple matter of saying "build me a to-do app" and then calling it a day, or you're experienced with these tools and deliberately misrepresenting the process.
If it's the former, then we don't share enough understanding to have a healthy conversation, and if it's the latter then there's little point in arguing with someone who insists in doing so in bad faith.
- I want native desktop apps
- I want P2P device sync. My laptop and my home server should be peers. Just with different rules for which photos are stored locally on each device.
- I want per-device storage rules. (Eg, "I want all my favorited photos, and recent photos up to 50gb on my laptop").
- Backups. I want to be able to plug in an external hard drive and backup my photos (with some rules). Then disconnect the drive and see in the metadata for those photos that I have a copy of the full res RAW on that drive.
But even if other programs exist, its still fun to make something myself. Authoring your own software gives you a different relationship with the computer. You're less of a consumer. You can change or tweak features on a whim. Psychologically, its kind of like being in your own home vs being in a hotel room. If you hate the furniture at home, you can move it or change it. You can decorate however you like. In a hotel, you're affected by your environment but you have no agency over it. I think its much more healthy to create.
But I’m optimising for the feeling of joy and agency over my tools. I also want to experiment with p2p / local first data structures in a real app. I could fork immich and rewrite the data model. But that all seems much less fun.
At the end of the day, I’m not doing this for other people. I’m doing this for me. Learning dart so I can hack on someone else’s code sounds like a pain in the butt. Not like something I’d want to do for fun on the weekend.
Working on someone else’s code seems like a strange default. You and others have jumped on me for wanting to make my own thing instead of using - or forking - someone else’s software. Can you help me understand why? Why would that be the default for a fun hobby project? I’m confused.
You can accomplish most of that by installing Syncthing.
But the objection is that you’re not really building anything new even if you think it’s a new idea. By your definition you’re building for yourself and not sharing…so what good are your little projects. Reading your original list it just seems like you want to build and run software without having to do any research, even if a solution already exists.
At some point developers seem to forget that making stuff is fun. The fact SQLite and GCC exist doesn't mean you're banned from making a database or a C compiler.
You're allowed to make stuff just because.
What an incredibly blinkered view. You think there's no value at all in making software unless your program solves a truly novel problem, and does so for millions of users?
There's so much joy that can be found in simple, disposable acts of creativity. I don't need the world to applaud when I cook an omelette, make a table out of wood or play a piece on the piano. Why would I need that from the software I make? Just because you can buy a table from IKEA doesn't mean its not fun to make one yourself. Just because someone on spotify played it better doesn't mean there's no joy in playing music.
Why would I hesitate to make my ideal photo library program, just because other programs exist? What a sad, self-limiting rule.
Does that make you mad? Why does other people enjoying themselves with LLMs make you mad?
Back to 1988.
Think I have a fair bit of experience.
Is it not engineering anymore even if you micromanage and relegate the machine to a better typist, following patterns and doing research around?
Oh get off your high horse.
You may as well say "If the compiler compiles your code, you achieved nothing". Its the same argument.
I love meaty algorithmic challenges. And I enjoy the design challenge of making a piece of software. But I don't write CSS for fun. Debugging styling issues on mobile? I hate it.
LLMs let me work on the parts that I find enjoyable and satisfying. Like UI design, or figuring out the data model. And then I can delegate the parts I don't like to Claude. It seems very happy to bang away at CSS.
That's a great deal. If you want to personally write every line of code, good for you. But don't police my leisure projects.
Is that the same as buying a computer program from anthropic?
I have a friend who's an architect. Sometimes we're in the city and he says "Oh see that building? Its one of mine." He didn't lay the concrete, or do the wiring or anything. Should he not be proud, because a construction company built each floor? Does it not count? Does his contribution not matter?
Since you said you want to make those things that you list, I assume none of these things have been built yet. If so, I would encourage you to consider how excited you will be to constantly maintain those things you build. But even if the maintainence cycle won't be as exciting, since you are the sole user you have the advantage of being able to proceed at a leisurely pace even while doing maintainence work.
In a professional setting, the dopamine hit of being able to build something quickly that works in an area that you have little to no knowledge in makes you more dependent on the AI in the maintaince cycle as you want to chase that dopamine high by maintaining the same development speed. This in turn leads to a bigger burnout crash after that peak dopamine hit. Maintainence is a phase of diminishing returns even without AI, but when your coding agents are introducing new bugs at record pace with their bugfixes with no new features to write home about you are in a special place in Hell.
I'm all for using AI to build ambitious projects. I have yet to see a person/company/organization continuously release huge software endeavours in a stable professional manner day in and day out with a coding agent harem in tow.
If something like the Ladybird browser, or any browser that is "built by scratch", achieved Chrome parity in six months and consistently maintained the same level of stability with continuous releases then I would see that as proof that this approach has become professionaly sustainable.
The reason people are getting away with so much using AI is because of the open secret in most enterprise engineering practices: the customer cares more about the response time for fixes they report than they do about overall or longterm product quality.
Why should I consider that?
Its funny how the default with programming is that the piece of software exists forever. I've been learning to play the piano lately. The default with piano is that every piece is ephemeral. If I don't go out of my way to record something I play, after the notes have run out, the piece is gone forever. The same is true of cooking - except you can't record a meal at all. Once you eat it, its gone. Lots of art forms are like this - theatre. Dance. The circus. They're no less beautiful for being ephemeral.
Why do we assume software has to be maintained indefinitely? Why even think about that right now? Maybe I'll work on these projects for awhile, maintain them as long as I want, and then in a few years someone will make something way better and I'll use that instead? Would that make the effort I put in pointless? I don't think so. I think it would make programming more like playing the piano. How lovely.
> I'm all for using AI to build ambitious projects. I have yet to see a person/company/organization continuously release huge software endeavours in a stable professional manner day in and day out with a coding agent harem in tow.
Yes, I've burned through enough claude tokens now that I find myself agreeing with you. I wouldn't use an LLM to make and maintain google chrome. But I wasn't planning on doing that anyway. There are also a lot more options than (1) write everything yourself and (2) vibe code the whole thing.
LLMs are good at small-to-medium scope tasks right now. Fine. I'll use them - or not use them - with their limitations in mind.
By all means don't consider it if you don't plan on using them for a considerable amount of time, but there's a lot of of distance between a decent amount of time and "forever". You listed a mini OS and a UI toolkit among your projects, I hope you can forgive me for assuming you were planning to use those things to build more things, which would in turn often entail improving and maintaining these building blocks while they are actively used.
Adding the features I have a need for over time is the fun part as far as I’m concerned.
I actually want less software for myself. Less things to maintain. I've become a "digital minimalist" in that I use very few software, only ones maintained by others who can afford and are willing to keep them working.
Some people find joy in home cooked meals. To others, wealth is never needing to cook again.
To each their own.
As for maintenance, I think LLMs are actually very well suited for small maintenance tasks. The expensive part of programming is loading and unloading context into my head. "Oh dear, what is all this code doing? Oh no, coffeescript? And some ancient version of express JS? How does any of this work?". LLMs can bomb in, fix a compilation error and bomb out. "This program isn't compiling any more on macos X.Y.Z. Read the patch notes. Figure out why and fix the problem." Perfect.
How? It's undermining what the human intellicence is made from, learning.
No it isn't. I still do the thinking on how to solve my problems, I only outsource the tedious part, which is typing the code and fixing the syntax errors till it all compiles and does what I want.
If you also outsource thinking to it, that's your choice though. Or the company's choice. But ultimately the free market will deiced with products made using LLMs outcompete those made without.
I've said this elsewhere before but I single-handedly produced more actual tangible business value with Microsoft Access than anything else since. What was an hour's work is now a procurement process and thousands of lines of tedious configuration and boilerplate that involves pipelines and tens of services all coordinated and hosted by someone who has created a moat to extract money out of me.
All I want is a fucking report.
The LLM makes us blind to the gigantic fucking shit show we built.
Do you really though?
Here's a question: how many times do you visit claude.ai or open Claude Code (or whatever harness you use) (or use whatever model you prefer) to help you solve a problem, ask it a question, etc.?
One thing I've noticed, which seems to go completely unmentioned, is how these LLM tools are like drugs. It can pump out thousands of lines of code ---> it can write my entire program for me ---> I've written quite a few programs with it and I don't write a single line anymore ---> I go to it for what would normally be things I could do on my own. The problem is that this isn't some immediate thing: like a drug, it sneaks up on you and you don't even realize it until it's far, far too late. I've been programming since I was 13 and I've just now started to notice the deskilling that's been happening to me. I've just now started noticing how often I'll visit Claude Web for something I should be able to do on my own. Nobody really seems to mention this, or it's repharsed as a good thing. And I don't get it: how is undergoing cognitive surrender a "good" thing by any metric other than the metric a beancounter would use? What worries me is that I fear this is happening to way, way more people than those who actually bring it up, potentially yourself included, and you just haven't yet realized it because you haven't really thought about it. That is ultimately what this "AI revolution" is going to bring. It's what the billionaires want, and what they want is usually what they get because the systems we've built are set up to not constrain them.
Congrats, you're in a small minority of people.
>What worries me is that I fear this is happening to way, way more people than those who actually bring it up, potentially yourself included, and you just haven't yet realized it because you haven't really thought about it.
People probably said the same thing about using pocket calculators when they started getting cheap and mainstream in the 1970s.
Do you still use your brain to calculate sales tax or the square root of pi just to keep your brain sharp on knowing calculus, or do you always use a calculator because it's a mainstream commodity that will never go away?
> Congrats, you're in a small minority of people.
Why did you respond to this? I fail to see how it relates to your point whatsoever.
Because it's this thing us humans call context. Or background. There are a number of terms for it. I was providing that so the rest of my post would make a bit more sense.
Except a pocket calculator is very different from an LLM. It isn't a tool you can go to and ask it literally anything under the sun and get an answer (even if incorrect). It's cold, logical and uninterested in your life or what happens. These LLMs are trained to be interested and empathetic. They are, IMO, way more like drugs than most other things.
The entire universe is cold, logical and uninterested in your life or what happens to you. But that's exactly what I want from a machine that's supposed to be my personal slave. I don't want a lecture from it on current day political correctness and sensibilities, I just want it to do exactly what I ask it no matter how rude or machiavellian it may be. Whoever will deliver this type of unhinged obedient slave to the masses(most likely China), will win the AI race.
> These LLMs are trained to be interested and empathetic.
Luckily there's already like a dozen LLMs at this point, many free and open source, especially from China, and I and many others will just pick the one that isn't trained to be interested and empathetic, but the one that's my personal slave and does exactly what I want from it, because of the competition between them will allow this freedom of choice.
In 5-15 years when semiconductor shortages ease up and hardware advances a bit more, there's a chance offline open LLMs in your pocket will be as obliquus as pocket calculators were in the 80s.
>They are, IMO, way more like drugs than most other things.
So was music, TV, video games, porn, etc. when they became mainstream. We adapted and survived.
I'm more scared about the state of world peace, economy, CoL, jobs and housing market than of LLMs being addicted.
There's millions of people on the planet who are a couple of meals away from hunger and rioting and migrating to other countries, and a climate catastrophe or one more wars could destabilize the whole planet for good, than LLMs being addictive. If LLMs are your biggest concern, you're in a very privileged position.
AI is automated irresponsibility, and it is nothing like any earlier transition.
When a technology trend means people literally won’t be able to tell if you are living or dead, and also stop caring about the difference— that’s unprecedented in the history of humans.
How can people say false things like this with a straight face?
Thanks to industrialisation, automation and mass production, the poor of today have access to things that even kings from hundreds of years ago couldn't even fathom, let alone poor people back then: abundant cheap food that poor people can now be fat instead of starve to death, cars, planes, MRI machines, helicopter ambulances, vaccines, personal heating and air conditioning, OZEMPIC, etc
Kings back then would eat hard bread, shit down a vertical shaft that emitted the scent through the whole castle, and their sleeping chambers had ice on the walls in winter and lice in the clothes and bet sheets, plus they had parasites in their gut and any small disease could kill you.
Meanwhile the cool homeless guy outside my building has 3 hot meals a day and a daily shower in the homeless shelter nearby, warm clean sleeping bag for winter, shades for summer, a bicycle for moving around town, a smartphone which he uses to watch youtube all day in his sleeping bag, plus access to medical care that kings of kings never had. All this with no job, and no care in the world.
You can thank people dying in Chinese and African mines to extract the resources to build your planes and MRI machines.
You can thank the people working tirelessly until their hands are crippled in bengladesh to make the cheap clothes that make it seem to your western eyes that a poor person here can live a life of luxury. Those people are constantly invisibilised even as tragedies such as
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rana_Plaza_collapse
hit them and kills a thousand under your total westoid apathy.
You can thank the Chinese slave labor making iPhones and Macbooks at foxconn for your luxurious electronics being cheap enough for a western wallet. They have suicide prevention nets so that their precious slave labor doesn't die from jumping from their buildings. How amazing.
>the poor of today have access to things that even kings from hundreds of years ago couldn't even fathom
Indeed, the wealth that kings couldn't dream of hundreds of years ago, because kings back then didn't have the power a billionaire can wield today to pollute, enslave and ruin millions of lives at a scale that makes things like the Napoleon wars look like a footnote to history.
>All this with no job, and no care in the world.
This can only happen because the extreme wealth inequality of the world has divided entire countries into classes of people. You are blind to the reality of the humans you are exploiting.
1. None of that is necessary to having planes and MRI machines, so what you're replying to is basically correct,
or
2. We should rouse ourselves from apathy in order to give up planes and MRI machines, and even out the poverty, which is eternal.
Firstly, industrialization is what led to the abolishment of slavery in the west, because owning machines was making you more money than slaves, and it was the west who fought the seas to stop slavery internationally, to the disappointment of slave owners in Africa who were enslaving their own people before the western slave trade began. So you can stop blaming the west for slavery now. The age of English and Dutch slave trade boats is long gone, we don't have MRI machines because of slaves.
>Those people are constantly invisibilised even as tragedies such as
100% nobody cares because they have their own government who is accountable to them. What should other countries do about it when it's their own government killing them. I also don't expect other countries to care about the deaths and issues in my country since our politicians are to blame, not foreigners. People care about their immediate family members, they don't care about random people on the other side of the planet dying in some domestic accident. It's just how it is.
>You can thank the Chinese slave labor making iPhones and Macbooks at foxconn for your luxurious electronics being cheap enough for a western wallet.
Just a couple of days ago there was a post here on the front page of shipping a used Macbook from Australia to a student in Ghana. It's precisely because western investments in technology and Chinese mines and sweatshop factories that people in countries like Ghana can have cheap laptops and cheap smartphones to access the internet and gain higher education for well paying IT jobs on the international market. So thank you and you're welcome.
>This can only happen because the extreme wealth inequality of the world has divided entire countries into classes of people.
Humans were always divided into classes of people ever since human species existed, they were never equal and they never will be equal, this is a human trait, not something billionaires created, they were just the best today at rising to the top within this human inequality system that has always existed and will always exist.
Need I remind you communism also existed based on the ideals of equalizing everyone, and so everyone was equally poor except of course the ruling elites, while also having no MRI machines.
Woah the air is thick with BS.
Just because someone is rich doesn't mean they're better smarter hard working or anything more than anyone else. They've just had particular circumstances in their lives. Most societies are not truly meritocratic where the most competent and skilled people would succeed. This is not the determining factor. Education is a great example of this when in many countries not everyone has equal access to education. People do not have equal access to resources or networks or support structures to become entrepreneurs. To start a business or to study or to become whatever they could be.
Eventually People may not be equal or have equal skills and talents and that's fine but everyone should have an equal opportunity.
Then close your mouth please.
>Just because someone is rich doesn't mean [...] To start a business or to study or to become whatever they could be.
OK, but what does what I previously said have to do with your rant on billionaires? None of that is a retort on my comment your were quoting, nor does it disprove my point, in fact it proves it that people aren't equal being a natural state of things in humans.
>Eventually People may not be equal or have equal skills and talents and that's fine but everyone should have an equal opportunity.
Agree that people should all get equal opportunities, but again, none of my previous arguments had anything to say that would disagree with this.
To add to this the conclusion of my point on your reply, you can give everyone all the equal opportunities you want, the results will never be equal because people aren't equal and they never will be: Some have high IQ, some have low IQ, some are tall, some are short, some can study all day and night with just 4h of sleep, some need 9h of sleep to function, some have supportive parents, some have toxic parent, etc, you get the point, so their results in life, be it academic and financial, will guaranteed to be different even if they had the same equal opportunities.
And no amount of forced equality can equalize for these factors when it comes to outcome, same how in the olympics no equality compensation factor is applied to the results. You're either the best athlete in the world or you're not, nobody cares if you had rich parents or poor conditions growing up that hindered you from being the best. Sucks for you but that's life, get used to it. Same in international economic competition between nations, it's a cutthroat dog eat dog world out there and no country will give you leeway at trade negotiations just because you discovered steel alloys 400 years later than them which got you to be invaded and plundered by 100 more developed nations in that time.
If anyone could use a history or anthropology lesson, it is you.
What you stated is simply not true, and we have plenty of ethnographical and archeological evidence for that.
You simply repeat ideology of the current times.
Last but not least, your parent speaks of dividing whole countries into classes. I don't know what billionaires have to do with it.
Can you post some of that evidence? How many MRI machines and missions to the moon, did those "egalitarian" civilizations develop?
> Humans were always divided into classes of people ever since human species existed, they were never equal and they never will be equal, this is a human trait
This is not true. Nothing to do with MRIs or Apollo missions.
Don't break HN rules insulting people. I'm not your dad to talk to me like that.
>This is not true.
Why isn't it true?
>Nothing to do with MRIs or Apollo missions.
How is developing MRI machines and going to the moon not the utmost examples of peak human intelligence, achievements and meritocracy? If that isn't, what is?
Thanks to colonialism, also in more modern form called globalism.
> Kings back then would eat hard bread, shit down a vertical shaft that emitted the scent through the whole castle, and their sleeping chambers had ice on the walls in winter and lice in the clothes and bet sheets, plus they had parasites in their gut and any small disease could kill you.
Wealth has no intrinsic value, only relative one. You are only wealthy relatively to other members of the society. Doesn't matter if pharaohs had less comfortable lives than me. What matters is that a gap between pharaoh and a worker working on pyramids was way smaller than between Jeff Bezos and person working at the Amazon distribution center.
Also, most sweet fruits of progress that its prophets like to enumerate are not direct consequences of technological changes, but they came only after political struggle that has arisen exactly because the direct consequences were very dire for most people. If people pushing today for AI could decide on these things, they would be very happy to take away these hot meals from homeless people and let them starve to death.
You don't have to participate in globalism, you can be a hermit state that doesn't trade with the evil imperial capitalists, like Cuba and North Korea. Everyone wants to live there because the QoL is so good.
QoL is so good here precisely because it is so poor out there.
If those "around the world places" had all the valuable resources that enabled modern civilisation when the west came and took them, why weren't they the ones to first make use of them to build computers, vaccines, MR machines and moon rockets, or at least clean drinking water and indoor sanitation facilities for their people?
Or why didn't those "around the world places" then go and extract wealth and materials from the west instead? What stopped them? Surely it wasn't their moral values, since war, slavery and genocide even cannibalism, of their neighboring tribes and nations, was the norm of the day over there.
>and still extracts through globalisation
Correction: "pays for it through globalisation". That's how countries like India and China got so many people out of poverty after globalisation.
Have you ever been without a job and/or homeless to say shit like this?
Also, how nice of you to ignore my entire argument on how the poor today are NOT as poor as they were hundreds of years ago, and instead sidetrack the conversation one offtopic tangent for a cheap jab in the name of scoring some emotional virtue signaling brownie points.
Machinists and lathe operators became CNC operators, they didn't lose their jobs, just that instead of turning the inputs by hand, they punch numbers in a machine, but the advent of CNC didn't mean anyone off the street can now punch numbers in the machine and replace the machinists since you still need the years of training and experience.
SW devs will be the new CNC operators, about knowing what data to input and how to wrangle the slop machine to get the desired output faster and better than your competition.
For now. Will that be true in 12 months? 4 years?
If you're a programmer, your skills have been devalued significantly in the last 12 months. What makes you think the remaining value you offer will be required 12 months from now?
I don't have any - thinking is the only non-cattle job left for humans to do; if we outsource thinking for all of humanity, we're an evolutionary dead-end.
I don't have a crystal ball. In 4 years whoever is US president might start another war and fuck the whole planet back to the stone age. Nobody will know what will happen in 4 years so why worry about it?
There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious Makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels Upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it That unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all
Even then we have machines doing it all and yet we all function well. I think eventually this would be a tool usage which will take human intelligence to another pinnacle.