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Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

The reporter asks a rhetorical question of whether self driving cars should be stopped. Did he ask the car companies whether they should have been stopped selling a machine that helps kill tens of thousands a year and pollute the global environment?

I mean, lets get a damn perspective here: traditional non-silicon valley companies continue to make and sell things which poison and kill people and because of that, there is a greater concern about them. But he doesn't like SV because it's companies created anarchic platforms that allow unsavory people to buy and publish propaganda? Seems somewhat hypocritical for a writer of the NYT to decry freedom to publish on platforms.

And if we had a completely decentralized internet, none of these issues would go away. Rather, we'd be talking about how no one can stop the Russians using Bitcoin to pay for publish and propaganda on whatever decentralized platform has the most eyeballs.

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I responded to someone who deleted their comment, it was a valuable and good comment, so I don't know why he deleted it, but here's my response:

I think it's the wrong question he's asking. We're trying to restrain technology and productivity increases from reducing the need for human labor, rather than asking if we can create a society where human labor is not needed to survive or thrive in the first place.

Is it better to have millions toiling away on assembling lines to pay for food so their kids don't starve, or it is better to have millions of robots toiling away on assembly lines while a generation of people are freed up to pursue other things?

We should be looking at the long term trends in demographics and labor force participation and asking not "How can we gum up technological progress so people continue to do shit work", but "How can we prepare our culture and political system to transition to a world where work may be a choice, an optional pursuit, but people can live without it, or find meaning in other ways?"

And that doesn't just mean concepts like Universal Basic Income, it also means, how can people society deal with newly found idle time, without self destructing or losing motivation. These are huge challenges, but they aren't going to go away from questioning Silicon Valley.

What needs to be questioned is the entire model of the protestant work ethic style industrial society, and how a transition to a post-industrial, maybe post-capitalist society, could occur.

> What needs to be questioned is the entire model of the protestant work ethic style industrial society, and how a transition to a post-industrial, maybe post-capitalist society, could occur.

Good luck with that. I apologize for my pessimism, but try as I might, I can't envision a society where the extreme concentration of production capacity results in anything but a few oligarchs and billions of near-starving peasants.

The reason for this is that's not that far from today's world. I mean, the majority of the world's population lives in poverty, or fairly close to it. About one in nine people live in such abject poverty they don't have enough to eat (while many rich countries deal with an obesity epidemic).

Given the state of the world, you think we would able to devise a society where at least everyone has enough to eat - after all, the richest people in society would probably barely feel the impact of at least sharing enough so everyone can eat. Given that, I find it difficult to believe that the extreme concentration of wealth and power that technology allows will result in some sort of nirvana where we all get to take pottery classes and write poetry. The very richest will hoard their wealth and power like humans have throughout history.

Yes, but you're forgetting that the situation is getting better, not worse. In fact, way, way better.

> But he doesn't like SV because it's companies created anarchic platforms that allow unsavory people to buy and publish propaganda? Seems somewhat hypocritical for a writer of the NYT to decry freedom to publish on platforms.

Where in the story do you read the NYT writer decrying freedom of publication? If it's between the lines, I can't find it.

Seems to me that the concerns are about how sites like Facebook decide which posts to show me (my cousin's travel pictures, or a 'trending' news story?) and the piles of information these companies are amassing on us.

I don't think it's fair to frame this as purely a 'freedom of speech' thing on the part of SV companies. Besides, not all speech enjoys legal protections.

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