I fear for a future where the technocrats win out and we end up in an "Altered Carbon" scenario. We are on the precipice of AI and robotics equalizing the playing field for everyone, but only if the power is held by the people and not the few at the top with the most resources.
Not sure how to steer the ship in that direction, but I do have a few ideas...
It would be something if there were national level LLM tools, owned and operated as commons.
I think your views on this will radically differ if you earn 200k a year versus 2k a year.
An engineer making 200k a year has more in common with someone making 2k a year, than they do with the Elon Musk's of the world.
This delusion is rampant in professional spheres like medicine and tech.
No they don't. Only someone making 200k could say that.
Meanwhile Elon Musk's net worth can swing 200+ million in a single day. He could buy up an entire neighborhood in those same zip codes you'd hardly be able to break into.
So how are you "closer" to Elon Musk exactly?
Although must we deal in "worth" at all at that point? If two people have conflicting visions, it shouldn't be the one who is "worth" more that gets their way, it should be the one whose vision is most appealing to the rest of us.
Wants are infinite, and resources limited. Economics is the objective methods to order a system to achieve subjective ends.
For better or worse, money is a medium of exchange and signal of what people are willing to allocate for their needs. Unless you create economic markets, information markets, and political systems that are built to handle the forces being harnessed by society, you have failure states.
In other words, taxes need to bleed of wealth, to ensure that it cannot create advantage in other fields (media, politics), breaking the even playing field in those other economies.
On a side note, I’m not sure why HN is often hostile to economic arguments. Economics is a well-established science.
As technologists, we understand the the need for a new major version here and there. A breaking change where the new thing is not compatible with the old. Economics as we know it smells overdue.
The particular bit that doesn't seem to be fitting the bill anymore is "value". Back when more economic activity was undeniably a good thing... Back when the majority of our resources were spent fending off hunger, or exposure to the elements, or illness, we had enough of a common enemy that we could get by with a single untyped primitive notion of value. However much we disagreed, we still agreed enough for that to work.
But now we're able to handle the basics well enough that we spend the majority of our resources fending off each other. A single fungible notion of value feels awkward. When I accept a dollar from somebody I'm not sure whether I've helped or harmed myself by doing so because its just as likely that they made that dollar by degrading the water I drink or some other activity that's worth way more than a dollar for me to prevent. We lack shared values but still share a notion of value, and it's not working out.
So perhaps instead of "thinking outside the economy" I should've said "Update the economy to account for more". Whatever words you prefer for it, drastic change is on our doorstep.
I like markets, and would laugh if anyone went ahead and tried to make a purely capitalistic economy. Fair, well regulated economies, work.
There is not a single fair, well regulated economy in the world. Private interests of those with large amounts of capital skew the markets to their favor.
How fair and well regulated is not a binary option of it is or it isn’t and we can continuously try to make things better.
Who is "we" here? Because the current system is ran by people who have a vested interest in keeping things the same.
Also, I disagree on my comment being a fallacy. I'd almost argue the comment I replied to is a fallacy because it's comparing a theoretical well regulated market to the reality of what we actually have.
It's clear to me that such a thing could never truly work because it would require near omnipotence by whomever the regulating body is in order to prevent actors gaming the market.