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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

>That sounds dystopian to me already

That's because it is

Think about any dystopian sci-fi. There's always groups that live in the dystopia and groups that don't feel the effects of it. That's the current state of the world. 1% of the population (including basically everyone on this site) live in luxury, while the rest of the 99% of the population toil under increasingly desperate and precarious living standards.

There's no avoiding it anymore, it's unambiguous, the world is a hellscape of our own doing that we could have avoided if not for wanton, rampant anti-social greed.

Think of this quote and it will be clear: "The future is here it's just unevenly distributed"

Where "future" is synonymous with "hope, life, time, joy"

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Agree with everything in your comment, except, this isn't just greed. It's also hubris coupled with technology-worship / scientism / futurism. I'm a pretty unabashedly greedy person, in my own opinion, and this social trajectory absolutely disgusts and frightens me. I can want money without wanting to pry into people's private lives beyond what they will personally tell me. I can very easily be greedy without wanting to violate those norms. I understand the point that greed helps people erode any moral sense that this is simply wrong, but I think they have to have some level of belief in technology and some sort of futurism ideology to take the next step toward, "This data can be analyzed correctly and will be highly useful for our productivity!" Just my opinion of course.

If they ever come up with a way for tech to read your mind, companies like Chase will have zero qualms about employing it. Fun thought: Gaddafi got knife-raped by a mob while Jamie Dimon roams free.

>If they ever come up with a way for tech to read your mind, companies like Chase will have zero qualms about employing it.

Might I introduce you to Neurallink?

How about WorldCoin that is based on your Iris (Iris changes are correlated with specific brain activity[1]).

[1]https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncir.2018.0002...

It sounds like all you want is money, these people are greedy for power.

> Think of this quote and it will be clear: "The future is here it's just unevenly distributed"

> Where "future" is synonymous with "hope, life, time, joy"

You have dropped the crucial last word from that quote: “The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed yet”

It's a great point because that "yet" keeps people thinking that somehow they can achieve it too if they just work hard enough for long enough.

Hmm, that’s not how I read it. “Yet” to me is saying we can make collective change to make it evenly distributed.

> There's always groups that live in the dystopia and groups that don't feel the effects of it. That's the current state of the world. 1% of the population (including basically everyone on this site) live in luxury, while the rest of the 99% of the population toil under increasingly desperate and precarious living standards.

Wait, what? I don't think everyone on HN is a billionaire tech mogul. Most of us are probably just common office worker schmucks. This is one of the main ways the actual Elite 1% works to divide us, by trying to convince the blue collar half of workers that it's those uppity white collar workers who are the problem.

Almost all of us here are in the top 1% of the world population in terms of income, not of our own national populations. Even so, those of us not in the top 1% of our national populations are in relative terms all seeing our living standards becoming more precarious, and our working conditions decline.

Global living standards have been rising sharply for the last 50 years, first in China, then South East Asia, recently India and there are signs it's going to start happening in Africa.

The idea that the newly middle-class in Asia ( including software developers working for international companies ) are increasing desperate and precarious is simply not true.

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