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Helsing posted:"Elites" are difficult to avoid altogether because there are built in hierarchies of skill and experience that seem to be more or less necessary for an industrial or agricultural society. However, there's a tendency to conflate "elites" with the holders of extreme wealth who are better termed oligarchs. This is very true: the principal qualification to be an oligarch is to have loads of money and not terrible at managing it. There are oligarchs who have an elite level of some skill or another, but plenty who are just a bit above average at managing other people's labour and operationalising processes, and some who have no skills other than being rich (like Trump). On the current debate: pretty sure the path forward for progressive politics is to engage with communities and make engagement with politics part of people's everyday lives. It's time tested, it worked the first time round and while the tactics for building everyday engagement and support networks will be different in the 21st century the strategy still seems viable.
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Dec 27, 2019 00:52
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 07:38 |
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In the UK we have an estimated total wealth of £14.6 trillion , with a population of around 63 million people. That means equally distributed, each person in the UK would have £230,000 of wealth - enough for every single person in Britain to own a house (outside a city) and live comfortably. At historic rates of stock market growth (8%) that would give each person in the UK an income of £18,000 a year - enough to live on, even in big cities. In the US you have a total wealth of $93tn. Distributed evenly between your population of 330m people each person in the US would have a net worth of $280,000 - about the same as the UK. Because cost of living is lower in the US than the UK, this would go a bit further and you could eradicate poverty through wealth redistribution alone. Note that this is only private wealth and doesn't touch on infrastructure or other communal sources of wealth. Communist redistribution alone would eliminate virtually all social problems in the anglosphere and create a utopian post work society.
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Dec 28, 2019 13:05
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OwlFancier posted:I sort of want to ask who's going to be keeping society going if everyone's living entirely off investment payments and not working Presumably fully automated luxury gay space communism is in full effect here. Or nobody works and we rely on imperialist outsourcing
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Dec 28, 2019 13:53
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In theory at least allocating resources to problems in an objective way, without a central coordinating mind, ought to be the sort of job distributed computing is good at. However the problems with actually trusting AIs to do this are well documented. So I guess the question might be: how can we engineer an AI central planner to avoid both the failures of human socialist central planning and the systematic biases of a market system?
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Dec 29, 2019 15:34
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Alchenar posted:You let humans decide what they want and automate the means of production. I mean this hasn't worked so far in history, so having robo-Stalin allocate resources as required might be an improvement.
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Dec 29, 2019 16:12
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 07:38 |
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NovemberMike posted:How do you figure that? The basic problem is similar to the bin-packing problem, which is combinatorial NP-Hard. Throwing an AI at it simplifies it by introducing unknown bias from the person creating the training data set. There are algorithms to optimise the bin packing problem though, even if those are imperfect. The bias issue is the obvious one for AI and unavoidable, but I feel like if you were going to design a benevolent dictator central planning AI you could design a set of standards for that bias like "acceptable outcomes shall lead to no more than a twofold difference in wealth between the wealthiest and least wealthy humans".
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Dec 31, 2019 01:30
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