Comment by germinalphrase | Hacker News Reader

Comment by germinalphrase | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I was about to comment the same thing. It's simply much harder to create from whole cloth positive visions for the future where dystopias can be immediately be extrapolated from existing trends (and our long human history of abuse, horror, and destruction).

Edit: If anyone would like an example, I'll offer Huxley's "The Island" as a utopian counterpoint to his "Brave New World". In addition to exploring the qualities he believe make up a 'utopia', a significant thematic concern is the need for channeling our innate destructive impulses* because utopia - should it exist - can only be maintained, not manufactured, through the active preservation/conservation of our natural world, our positive human values, etc.

*for example, there is an innate human impulse to subjugate others. Huxley suggested that we should channel, rather than suppress, this impulse into a productive activity that satisfies the desire without causing harm: rock climbing (which must have been much more of a niche activity in 1962).

If you read Brave New World and think of the lower "classes" as instead being automation and AI (really, most of the jobs done by Epsilons and Deltas in the book were automated decades ago, and the Gamma / Beta jobs are rapidly moving towards AI replacement as well) it's not a bad system, nor is it a dystopia.

easier to imagine the end of world than the end of capitalism...

Help us out here. What would the end of capitalism look like? All of the attempts at ending capitalism so far have collapsed into disaster, so people are understandably hesitant now to start grand social experiments which historically speaking are likely to end in famine and genocide.

Capitalism works because it models the world without saying much about it. Just as I can pile sticks and mud to form a house, removing entropy and then giving that in exchange for a sack of grain.

It models the physics there, but adds an indirection, value stored as currency.

Money doesn't have any morality or inherent motivation. Capitalism is what happens when humans project theirs onto it, on average, with a good amount of autonomy enabled by that currency.

If people were not, on average, greedy survivalists, then the value store would produce an economy that operates much differently.

That's why capitalism persists, because we're all just advanced monkeys gathering as many rocks, sticks and mud as we can in a big pile, because it is built-in to our genetics to stockpile resource when we can.

Everything else is just advanced mechanisms of this.

The end of capitalism is the end of humanity, because while we exist, we will want to stockpile resources through increasingly elaborate means in an attempt to stave off the entropy of death.

I think your question might be his point.

We can easily imagine the destruction of all existence because we have mental models for what that destruction might look like; however, imagining the end of capitalism requires us to invent entirely new ideas that exceed the salience of capitalism itself (which is… obviously hard much harder).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com