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Comment by BosunoB | Hacker News Reader

Democracy is what allows regular people to have negotiating power vs the rich, and the majority of these battles are actually won through legislation, not union negotiation.

I understand that regular people have lost faith in democracy, and that they think rich people control the world and make every major decision, but that just doesn't ring true to me. Democracy is more or less giving us what we vote for, we just vote for dumb things. Ultimately, I have faith that if political and economic circumstances change enough, we might actually vote for the right things.

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> Democracy is more or less giving us what we vote for, we just vote for dumb things.

Education and media are controlled by the rich, and those heavily influence how people vote.

    Because democracy basically means, government, by the people, of the people, for the people. But the people are...

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFgcqB8-AxE

> Democracy is more or less giving us what we vote for, we just vote for dumb things.

Sorry, when did I vote in favor of the Citizens United, McCutcheon, or Buckley outcomes, all of which are tied to our current predicament of money in politics? And how is my voice, through my vote, able to change and possibly overrule those decisions? Until that happens, even the ballot box won't give me negotiating power versus the wealthy.

That's not a hard question to answer.

The five Supreme Court Justices who voted in favor of Citizens United and McCutcheon were all appointed by Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Had either of those two not won the presidency, Citizens United and McCutcheon would have lost their cases against the FEC.

People can still vote for representatives who want to pass legislation to undo those cases through congress. There's nothing that's stopping people from voting in representatives who are in favor of this (yet).

When the mine closes, democracy does not save the town. It still becomes a ghost town. Democracy cannot work upstream against fundamental market forces.

Every industry is being pitched as becoming a ghost town. Democracy will not save us. We will all die in the future and not be replaced. This is the end of our line in this century. I hope you are proud of how far we’ve come because this is the end for us. There will be no economic justification for humanity quite soon and we will likely be slaughtered to eliminate latent variability.

That's not a very good analogy. When the mine closes, democracy doesn't save the town, because the town only has control over the economic activity inside of it.

AI or no AI, the US will still have control over the economic activity inside of it. America is not pitched to be a ghost town, but instead a vastly productive and wealthy economy driven by AI. A ghost town cannot redistribute wealth it does not have, but America will still have all of the wealth.

America has the wealth severely unequally distributed. And worse by the day in that.

Democracy is also doomed by sufficiently capable AI. When the "meta" military unit was a knight in shining armor, most societies were under feudalism, ie rule by knights. When guns became cheap enough that whoever had the most guys would win a civil war, we got democracy: rule by whoever has the most guys. When whoever has the most robots will win a civil war, what kind of government do you expect?

AI is helping to finish off the job of destroying democracy that the rich started. We are doomed.

We're not doomed. We're just between revolutions.

It's impossible to predict when they happen, or their outcomes. The world may be worse at least for a while after them. Or they fail in general.

But they happen and then all the people who were crowing about the inevitability of some existing order and now it embodies natural law and what not look really f*ckin stupid in retrospect.

People believed in the divine right of kings with the same full earnestness of people on this forum who have think AI is just the outcropping of some transcendent mathematical telos.

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