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Comment by beering | Hacker News Reader

So many people have spent a lot of energy dehumanizing others on the basis of their “contribution to society”. Ideas like, if you aren’t employed, you shouldn’t have access to healthcare, etc. I can only hope that AI can force people to rethink whether their value is tied to their work output or not.

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It goes beyond that. There is inherent classism in this, because it implies that you do not question the value of wealthy people who put in relatively little actual work output due to their privileged position. Take for example the unemployed person in your example who might have literally been 100 times more productive in their career solving substantive problems than a VC who lucked out on their startup and has been cruising on a few boards for ten years.

see what you don't understand is that the owning class actually bring crucial long term strategic vision. i wonder though: we always talk of ai replacing the working class, but wouldn't it be more economical for ai to provide that long term strategic thinking? i'm sure the operating costs for ai would be way less than the operating costs of billionaires. everyone would be better off.

If there is anything worse than the tyranny of greed, it is the tyranny of a machine that's trying to optimize you 24/7.

if we optimize the billionaire class everyone's better off, like i said. of course we can go orange catholic, but my comment was premised on how we might apply ai.

The billionaire class don't want universal childcare, they don't want medicare for all, they don't want a public jobs program, they don't want a welfare state, and they sure as fuck don't want to be told no.

I'm failing to see how caring about billionaires is suppose to help everyone else. The current American society, via neoliberal economics, is already optimized to help the billionaires (hence why they extract all the wealth and why income inequality is at its highest in the US since ever).

read "optimize the billionaire class" as "trim the fat."

They mean put billionaires on a chopping block.

How do you figure that "the billionaire class" doesnt want those policies? Plenty of examples of them supporting those policies. Seems like the opposition is more to the tax hike they know is coming along side it but even then we still see billionaires supporting those policies.

If they do not want to fund it they do not support it.

The purpose of the system is what it does. Or in this case, the actions of the billionaire class and their capital are their values and morals.

But they both openly support it and fund it. It just turns out they are not a monolithic group and are split in what they want.

> Ideas like, if you aren’t employed, you shouldn’t have access to healthcare, etc.

Fucking hell, there are so many bullshit jobs. I'm doing one of them. I'm sure a homeless person having a few heartfelt conversations per day because he has the time and is open to it is giving more value to society than me right now.

AI will only make “contribution to society” even stronger criterion, and help create permanent "not needed" underclasses.

I don’t know why it would. That rethink has always been possible, yet didn’t happen.

It'll get worse. There will be even more situations where people will be forced to talk to a computer rather than a human.

Hahaha, worry not! AI will be the great equalizer, that will put even more people on the streets and create new serf class.

AI has been around in various forms for a little while now. Have you seen anything to suggest that this is even a possibility?

Weigh this against the context that people have had centuries to figure this out.

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