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Comment by azangru | Hacker News Reader

This fills me with dread, resentment and anger. I wanted a future where I would be the master of technology, and what I am getting instead is more of the "I can't let you do this, Dave" vibe. I want to live in a community of individuals, not be subjugated to whatever happens to feed the anxieties and neuroses of society. Is there... will there be a way to resist this obscenity?

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It's interesting you say that I've recently started reading Dune, and one point that I found interesting was that the Butlerian Jihad was not a revolution where they swore of the machines who had become malicious against them but rather that some humans were using the machines to oppress other humans and that is what led to the Jihad. I find it interesting that all these technologies that are supposed to make our lives easier really just end up transferring power from one group of people to another.

So what I am saying is a Butlerian Jihad is always a solution.

> I find it interesting that all these technologies that are supposed to make our lives easier really just end up transferring power from one group of people to another.

But that's what affluent people have always been doing whenever given unrestricted freedom. That's because they are better at using technology and finances and everything else.

Bitcoin was supposed to free money from financial institutions. But that's naive -- financial institutions have way more firepower and experience at subverting markets to their will.

The same goes for anything else. The larger the company the easier time it has to influence lawmaking, judicial, executive.

Maybe what we need is an equivalent of Butlerian Jihad but against organisations that are too big to be controlled.

I don't think that Butlerian Jihad is a solution because, apart from authorial fiat in fiction, groups willing to use intelligent machines will not be ruled over by forces unwilling to use intelligent machines. It's like positing a future where a coalition of crossbow-using armies defeats armies that use rifles and then imposes a comprehensive ban on rifles.

Tell that to the Taliban.

Resisting foreign occupation is much easier than imposing a foreign occupation of one's own. The Taliban never had a chance of imposing its rule in the United States. The Butlerian Jihad of the Dune universe eliminated intelligent machines everywhere.

Either support the inevitable neo-Luddite revolution (probably will happen in next 10 years), or move out of the reach of the technological system. Both options will be very difficult.

>inevitable neo-Luddite revolution

Butlerian Jihad represent!

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.

There may have been an UFAI (UnFriendly AI) involved in the timeline there.

No, the reason you see this increasing control is because people dont' want to give a small minority the ability to fuck up the rest of society. There is nowhere go to on Earth, because the entire world is spoken for.

Hence why people will settle space. It's treated as a pie in the sky joke today, but once it's "affordable" (ie, 250K per ticket) many people will go. Long term, it'll be an essential pressure release valve, as various discontents and dissidents go there to try and build their own versions of society. And that's great, the rest of us will just sit here trading freedoms for comfort and everyone will be happy.

Surveillance will be even greater in an offworld colony. But they will, perhaps, be free to set dinner of their own rules and laws as the group sees fit.

It's not just per person ticket cost, you need to put a whole space station up there. For the kind of money it would cost it would be affordable to buy whatever freedoms you want right here on Earth.

There's already a movement to live at sea, in international waters, which makes a hell of a lot more sense -- but that movement has insufficient traction with the rich to fund itself. Living in space in the future will always be more expensive than living at sea is now.

Rich people have little reason to be dissidents (though they may want to pose themselves that way), and also it's near impossible to become rich in the first place without being highly conformist toward power, and those attitudes propagate even to heirs.

This is why the Bitcoin bubble is interesting. Large wealth transfer to non-conformists. I've seen them fund some pretty cool stuff, garbage NFTs aside.

> not be subjugated to whatever happens to feed the anxieties and neuroses of society.

That’s awfully vague. Are specters doing this to you?

Seems that some power analysis is in order.

Can anyone say the past 2 years of covid-19?

Please don't feign naivety. It is a distraction to critical thought.

I know that it wasn’t the “anxieties and neuroses of society” that controlled the COVID-related policy decisions. Only a fool would think that.

Well, the “anxieties and neuroses of society” are the only reason we're still forced to wear cloth masks in certain places, so...

No one is forced to wear a cloth mask anywhere -- a superior mask is always accepted. The inferior cloth mask is merely accepted, not required.

Here you distort a laxness in COVID mitigation to describe it as the very opposite.

God, all these ellipsis and references to vague fears is tiring.

The pandemic didn’t turn out to be a bogeyman that had no impact. Oh shucks—just a common cold after. But I guess that’s too “blue pill” of me to say.

However much of a bogeyman the pandemic turned out to be, the concern is that the state, proverbially, doesn't let a good crisis go to waste. Such was the case after 9/11; and there are signs that such is also the case now.

I agree that the aftermath of 9/11 wasn’t handled properly. You can’t react to a terror attack by becoming more afraid of terrorism—that just means that the terror attack was a success.

the past 2 years of covid-19

Even before covid, when it turned out that society wants to track my movements or to reward and punish me based on my medical history, it could easily be swayed with such words as "pedophile ", "terrorists", or "drugs". So much so that it might want to be able to monitor my private messaging (and prevent its encryption) to make sure that I am neither a pedophile, nor a terrorist; or might want to check my social media profiles at the border to make sure I haven't expressed any sympathies to a terrorist organisation. Today, it also seems to be eager to do things to fight "misinformation". I am sure more examples can be provided.

Have fun with those ghosts of yours.

The power elite sets policy. Not vague sentiments.

> Have fun with those ghosts of yours.

Thanks. Will do.

> The power elite sets policy. Not vague sentiments.

What do you mean by this? What's a power elite; doesn't it, in a democracy, rule with the approval of the society, and why would one be happy with a power elite's policy that lets it intrude into your private life anyway?

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