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Comment by streamofdigits | Hacker News Reader

How can it be that the most predatory elements of society have been given so much leeway?

This is not an intrinsic pattern of our species / societies or we would have devoured ourselves literally or figuratively long time ago.

Obviously restoring forces that would push this evil genie back in its bottle exist but are somehow dormant, neutralized or otherwise missing-in-action.

This fight and push-back should not be a thing for "activists". It affects every single person. We are all "gig workers".

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This is my personal opinion.

We have been devouring each other for ages now. Entire cultures have vanished, destroyed by more powerful members of the same species. The entire history of our species has been on violent conflict where a stronger group removes a weaker group, only to be removed later by another group that emerges stronger. Previously it was racial, clan-based violence. Now it's economic servitude where a perpetually unfortunate lower class keeps on greasing the wheels of industry with sweat and blood. The rich stay rich, the poor stay poor.

We are not benevolent or kind creatures. We are programmed to survive. As long as the poor live, they will rarely question the rationality behind the inequality that keeps them poor.

No, you overlook the mutual aid factor. We are non-benevolent AND benevolent, unkind AND kind creatures. Hence the inability ever to settle on one explanation. Either direction you go, you're in error unless you account for both.

It becomes an existential crisis when humanity designs bots and AI and then behaves like humanity must COMPETE with the AI in order to survive, when we absolutely can't. We can't lift better than a forklift, run faster than a Veyron, we can't think better than Big Data. For the time being we're still able to dream better. For now.

Android dreams won't speak to us.

But there's no reason we can't pass on our capacity for mutual aid to the AI, as well as the competitiveness. And there's no reason the AI can't have heart and soul. When it fails it's because WE try to construct it in a false image of what we think we are.

This is probably too pessimistic. If it was true we would not be writing this right now, we'd be still in some semi-wild state, ripping each others hearts out as battle trophy to dedicate to some imaginary god. If predatory behavior really had the upper hand it would not allow the kind of social structures that solved difficulty technology problems and allowed mass health, mass education etc.

But destructive, rapacious, behavior feels just one step away even now that we are supposedly "civilized" and we have excruciating records of our bloody history.

If we don't find a way to bottle this instinct up we will not see many more decades.

Time is running out because the system is not time-invariant: we had explosive population and technology growth. The same regressive traits that might have "only" annihilated isolated cultures in the past will bring our collective demise.

Is it too pessimistic? Human history is filled with empires dominating their weaker neighbors, culling many of them (though not all), for the INgroup's self interest (it's also useful to keep subordinates around to do the menial labor). Even the less ruthless of these "imperialistic" entities such as the United States have a outstanding record. The native Americans can pay witness.

Not to mention what we do to animals. I read during just Superbowl Sunday 500 million chickens are slaughtered for the delight of eating chicken wings in the living room. If animals are nonconscious entities that don't suffer akin to robots then no harm no foul, but that is quintessential mass-scale devouring of another.

> The rich stay rich, the poor stay poor.

this has been false since at least the industrial revolution.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy?tab=chart

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-gdp-over-the-last-t...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extre...

Because lacking ethical prohibitions always gives one an advantage. People who lack ethics can always choose to act ethically when it confers a social advantage, or to act otherwise when that's more advantageous. Ethical people are by definition often forced to act at a disadvantage.

The only advantage that individual ethical behavior gives is through supporting the health of the group, thereby supporting members who depend on the group. People who aren't loyal to a group can shop around, play one against the other, etc. Even better, if you automate the interactions between people, there's no need or benefit for ethical behavior. Profit comes from pleasing the algorithm rather than any sort of loyalty.

Edit: The algorithm that capitalism uses is maximizing value against cost. All ethical complaints about it are asking people to accept less value/more cost. Capitalism insists that if everyone maximizes value against cost personally, that sends a control signal to the collective that will maximize the greater good. This is the ethic that we're automating.

> How can it be that the most predatory elements of society have been given so much leeway?

Partially because we as collective societies let them, by not voting out or actively voting in those who campaigned on neo-liberal platforms, many decades ago.

Partially because not many (and those who did were mostly on the hard-left side, which was and still is vilified) saw the "boiling frog" effect at play... stuff like the end of the Fairness Doctrine that gave way to today's mass media and its problems with propaganda, the Citizens United decision that paved the way for utterly absurd amounts of money in political campaigning, gerrymandering and other forms of voter manipulation, the building/consolidation of media empires like Sinclair [1], or the total lack of any regulation for social media and the blindness of everyone regarding Russian and Chinese propaganda on these platforms.

Now, the water is boiling: support for democracy - not just in the US but worldwide - has been eroding, as have democratic freedoms and lessons-learned from WW2 (such as, especially in Europe, the rights of those fleeing from war, destruction and hunger, or the need for international cooperation). Countries in the European Union (Poland, Hungary) begin to qualify as quasi-dictatorships, the UK dropped out in an epic clusterfuck, the US suffered from a (thankfully incompetent) putsch attempt, and as the COVID crisis has shown people don't even trust vaccinations any more. Meanwhile, the rich have gone ever more rich (sometimes to utterly absurd degrees).

How do we get back to civilization? I have no idea if it is / will be possible without some kind of global "reset" event... we Germans caused the last one, this time the cause will likely be either somewhere in Asia (invasion of Taiwan) or Russia (which is moving enough troops to the Ukrainian border to run an actual blitzkrieg style invasion [2]).

[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/anchors-reciting-sin...

[2] https://www.euronews.com/2021/11/24/russia-s-military-build-...

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