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Comment by Apreche | Hacker News Reader

It’s amazing to use technology to save humans from toil. The question is, who owns the robot? Who benefits from the labor it produces?

The techno utopia we imagine is a world where nobody has to work. All our needs are taken care of and we live a life of leisure. But as long as there is ownership of the automated systems, those owners will hoard all the wealth generated by that automation.

Labor expenditures and taxes are the only times the wealthy have to share their wealth with the rest of us. If they succeed in disintermediating labor, and governments fail to tax them, the oligarchs will live a life of unlimited luxury while the rest of us die in poverty.

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>All our needs are taken care of

>while the rest of us die in poverty.

These can't be simultaneously true. If all of our needs are taken care of, that is the same thing as unlimited luxury. Someone hoarding wealth is not that important when everyone has everything they want. Society is already being helped by all of the needs they are fulfilling. We don't need to also take their wealth too.

> These can't be simultaneously true.

Nobody said that they can.

>The techno utopia we imagine is a world where nobody has to work. All our needs are taken care of and we live a life of leisure.

All our needs are taken care of in an imagined techno utopia.

> But as long as there is ownership of the automated systems, those owners will hoard all the wealth generated by that automation.

That utopia can not come if there is private ownership of those automated systems.

>That utopia can not come if there is private ownership of those automated systems.

Who controls an automated system and whether enough automated systems exists to fulfill everyone's needs are separate things. You could have one person providing for the entire needs of the world by scaling themselves using AI.

> Who controls an automated system and whether enough automated systems exists to fulfill everyone's needs are separate things.

Again, nobody said that they were. You are arguing with yourself.

> You could have one person providing for the entire needs of the world by scaling themselves using AI.

Sure, and if one person owned all the automated system he could blackmail others, choose not to use those automated systems to fulfill the needs of some... it is beyond me that in the world we are currently living in somebody doesn't see it.

Either that or the people in poverty will get angry at the disparity and burn everything to the ground.

Yikes, that's not the utopia I imagine at all. A world where nobody has to work sounds horrific.

> A world where nobody has to work sounds horrific.

Why?

Because then the only way to obtain power and status is to wage war.

I believe that is the plan.

Viva La revolution

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