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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

I'm value-neutral in this comment thread, I'm just describing a.) how things are and b.) how the authors of this report are making assumptions about how things are. I can see plusses and minuses for both people-centric and code-centric approaches.

I get that it's pretty natural that people would consider it a bad thing for people to hand over power to computer code. It makes perfect sense if you consider yourself not as a person but as a collection of electrical impulses floating around in your brain, though. Computers are the same thing, they just transmit those electrical impulses millions of times faster.

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Computers are a tool built to improve the lives of people. It does not make sense to consider them an end in-and-of-themselves.

So is capitalism, and yet capitalism has seemingly taken over human behavior in a way that many people find is not an improvement, and yet are powerless to stop.

Complex systems often exhibit complex emergent behavior. Humans are part of that system. Humans are not the only part of that system, and it makes sense that agents interacting at speeds millions of times greater than us might eventually come to dominate the system.

> capitalism has seemingly taken over human behavior in a way that many people find is not an improvement, and yet are powerless to stop.

Lots of people banded together to rollback the degree to which capitalism dominanted life in the developed world, and were pretty successful at it over the last century.

Why are you so committed to erasing the difference between humans and computers in order to place humans below computers?

Realistically I don't have the power to put humans either above or below computers. That'll depend upon the independent choices of billions of humans and hundreds of billions of microprocessors.

I've found that having an accurate model of the world - one that can generate likely predictions - is very important for profit now and potentially for survival in the near future. Knowing that people are frequently blind to changes in the world that do not place them at the center of the universe, it's worth correcting for that bias in myself and envisioning a world where humans are not necessarily on top. What would that look like, and what's my best chance for survival in such a world, given that I am human?

Sure, but your comment doesn't reflect an accurate model of the world -- brains and computers are not the same kind of thing, and humans are more than just a brain. I know there are powerful people trying to convince us that your model is accurate, though, with the goal of getting us to allow their computers more control over our lives. I'm worried that people are buying into this view, not because they believe it's an accurate model of the world, but because they think it's inevitable that these powerful people and their computers actually will end up in control, so they'd better prepare for that future.

Everything is already under control of three companies world wide. Vanguard, Blackrock and Berkshire Hathaway own everything worth owning. Who owns them?

> Computers are the same thing

Uh, no? Computers aren't people.

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