Hacker News Reader

Comment by mothsonasloth | Hacker News Reader

I am a sci-fi enthusiast like Bezos, however he seems to cherry pick the themes that he likes to apply to himself and Amazon e.g. driving mankind towards the stars and solving energy crises.

There are however plenty of dystopian concepts in science fiction which his company seem to be propelling us toward:

* Compression of labour wages by replacing/augmenting with robots.

* Building an evil mega-corp (think Tyrell, Liandri, UAC, Weyland Yutani) that has its tentacles in every market.

* Facilitating the demise of human privacy laws

* Encouraging consumerism and subsequent pollution.

I am sure there are other themes in sci-fi that could be applied to Amazon.

Looking forward to my subdermal Alexa powered chip!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrruSboN1bQ

View on HN

> * Compression of labour wages by replacing/augmenting with robots.

Eliminating work by replacing it with robots is a social good, so long as the lost income is replaced somehow. Bezos is an outspoken proponent of UBI.

UBI proponents tend to see it replacing minimum wage work but the most popular plan to date (Yang) sees it as a replacement for welfare/food stamps and other means-tested support for the poor.

How can it be both?

Ha, indeed.

It's almost like a weird form of localized entropy reduction. Driving improvements in some areas whilst externalizing damage in others.

You've described the quintessential problem with private property and capitalism.

Please don't take HN threads further into generic ideological battle. Based on long experience, such discussions become highly predictable and increasingly nasty—the two qualities we're most hoping to avoid here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I propose he stop investing in Blue Origin and fund another 100 seasons of the Expanse.

I would be very very happy about that if it happened. It filled the gap where firefly was supposed to be.

I really hope you're joking. It scares me that distracting entertainment is preferred over advancement in reality. Remembering (true or not?) that we spent more on movies about extinction level impacts than on actual detection and prevention.

That said, I enjoy watching Expanse and look forward to s4 :)

I just really like SpaceX. Blue Origin is taking their sweet time to do anything cool, making me wonder if they'll ever do anything.

> * Encouraging consumerism and subsequent pollution.

I am sorry I dont follow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com