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Comment by aphextron | Hacker News Reader

>Why does anyone work there? What a nightmare.

Money. Lots and lots of money.

Amazon also operates at a scale unimaginable for most of us, which I imagine is enough of an interesting problem for some people to look past everything else.

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Therein lies the problem. As the machine scales larger and larger, the cogs at the bottom have worse and worse conditions. Almost as if 'software is eating the world' is not the key to unlock Utopia, as techno-optimists would have you believe.

I think technology certainly is a key to a more 'Utopian' (desirable) society. The underlying problem is how we leverage the technology.

If technology is simply used to displace and concentrate wealth and power through private ownership without adequately sharing the benefits of growth in technology with everyone (reduced labor, more free time to pursue personal goals, etc.) then yes, it absolutely isn't helping (basically the situation we have now).

Can a Star Trek like economy ever exist? I'd love to be apart of one, but it seems unlikely given many underlying human behaviors.

It was always that way. It used to be that nobility lived the good life at the expense of the peasants. Now we have replaced nobility with educated office workers. And the system is set up that if you are part of the top x percent you will never have to see how the bottom lives. They are well hidden.

Not at this scale. Not at the scale where the nobility lives in NYC/SF/Shanghai and the peasants live in a different state or even overseas.

There are plenty of peasants in the places you mentioned. You just don’t see them. Who do you think provides all the basic services?

Correct. The point is that the peasant mass center, so to speak, is today more distant that it's ever been.

Why do you think it’s different now? The wealthy have always lived in a few places from where they could dominate the whole country.

>Almost as if 'software is eating the world' is not the key to unlock Utopia, as techno-optimists would have you believe.

I'm starting to agree with this as well.

It used to be that organizations were made up of vast bureaucracies with a thinking, breathing, human being at every level making decisions. Institutions could be imposing and callous, but there was always a "flexible" human element to things. They never had the level of completely monolithic, soulless, hyper-optimized determinism that modern technologically driven corporations have become. Google was the pioneer here, with their default customer service stance of "go away, we don't care, there's another billion where you came from". But more and more the world has become an automated meatgrinder with no room for people beyond their immediate economic utility. The machines alone determine your worth as a human being, and unsupervised, uncaring algorithms can make or break your entire life.

And how much of Amazon's money or scale comes from their existing business/labor practice? Sometimes I feel people want the cake and eat it too... When was the last time a perfectly moral company with extremely friendly labor practices grew to the success and size of Amazon?

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