Wealth redistribution is a choice of ethics.
What if we start to create better technologies that augment the economic usefulness of the lowest IQ people?
If you study world history you’ll quickly realize that it’s ultimately the choice of the mob with the torches and pitchforks. You’d be amazed at how disinterested they are in moral relativism or a chat about Atlas Shrugged. Personally I’d prefer a more equitable redistribution based on planning, rather than a redistribution based on plutocrats being put up against a wall.
What if we start to create better technologies that augment the economic usefulness of the lowest IQ people?
They definitely won’t be amused at the cries of “But wait, I want my tech to add economic value to you, low IQ person! sound of a gun cocking Waaait! Haven’t you even heard of a meritocra- BANG”
(If you’re going to start threatening murder as the premise of your theory of justice, you’d best make sure your side would actually be the one doing the killing.)
Yeah, that that could never go wrong and backfire horribly. How about we win a war before we decide to design, mass produce, and deploy enough robots to pacify a few hundred million people with guns. Oh, and don’t forget to make it the first hack-proof device ever, or you might find yourself on the wrong end of the robot.
Besides, I’m not threatening murder, I’m literally just describing a repeating and predictable cycle throughout history. If it makes you feel any better, I’ll be up against the wall too.
Yes indeed. The solution to the Luddite problem was basically to arrest them. Unemployed people are not a problem if they are in prison or dead.
Are mobs always morally in the right? Absolutely not. But neither the opposite is true.
Yes, but considering that there have always been orders of magnitude more poor people than rich and powerful people, your statement is effectively empty. More telling is that the rich and powerful get away with it, until they don’t. In France during the Revolution, in England during the civil war, in Russia when the czar system was torn down.
Push people far enough and they don’t break, they lash out and take their society down with them. It can be hard to predict when that will happen, but if circumstances don’t change it seems that it always does. Ghaddafi could have been forgiven for believing that after decades, he wouldn’t be hunted and killed by his own people. Hosni Mubarak clearly thought he was untouchable, as did Ben Ali in Tunisia.
I’ll say it again, I’d prefer an orderly and plannned redistribution rather than it all being burned to the ground because a handful of elites can’t finish their goddamned history education and ascribe to the “this time it will be different,” school of what could charitably be called “thought.”
What are you even talking about? The vast majority of minorities don't hold any power (especially not the power to kill the majority) precisely because there are so few of them and that's exactly the reason why they are oppressed. Rich people are an extremely special minority where this situation is reversed and they have power over the majority.
The US indeed have a large amount of land and many guns, but that land is already termed "fly-over" country, do you think most people on the coasts care if somebody runs around up in the Apalachian mountains with a gun shouting down with the rich?
If (which I do not believe) those persons will have no value at all, we will deal with them when/if they riot.
If only we had some proximal lesson from recent history to look to, as a way of explaining just how deveststing insurgencies can be in the modern world. You know, a lesson involving a bunch of mountain men with guns, fighting from their home turf. Oh well, I can’t think of anything, but if it comes up I’m sure that our record stamping them out quickly, effectively, and without catastrophic loss of life and treasure will speak for itself.
Just being "not in flyover country" isn't going to save the elites if the poor seriously rise.
The problem won't be robot shopping cart fetchers or grocery baggers, but that knowledge work, which is the last refuge of human usefulness in the workforce will get hollowed out from the lower-middle. There is no "next thing" after knowledge work.
Optimistic characterizations like "post scarcity" don't seem like they will be applicable before mass disemployment hits. Instead of having to implement redistributive policies for the 15% outside the knowledge economy, we will be faced with a bigger, more educated cohort that can't be retrained to other knowledge work faster than AI will automate those categories.
Shorter work-weeks will help. Perhaps for long enough to figure out a solution. Better start soon, though.
> More children taking MVM [multivitamin with mineral] supplements (44) than placebo (25) showed increases in nonverbal IQ scores of 15 or more points (35% compared with 21%; P<.01). The authors speculate that this result may be attributable to the fact that one in 7 schoolchildren was undernourished.[0]
The bad news is we won't do it. Implementing effective policy is the hard part.[1]
[0] https://www.mdedge.com/pulmonary-health-hub/article/64803/as...
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biolo...