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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

> If much of the population is too poor to buy anything, too sick to consume much etc - who is left to buy anything at all?

No one. That's the idea.

A low-population paradise. Venice without its pesky people to mess with Bezos's wedding. Bora Bora without the peasants.

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There's been plenty of good sci-fi written about this, but surely they know that any any display of power is meaningless without someone to have power over? The wedding in Venice only means anything because people live in Venice and you're still able to "take over". Any "paradise" built like this will never be paradise, it'll be just chasing the next extreme until there's nowhere left to go

I would have called BS on that before but I think now I would just call BS on the part where it was people like Bezos or whatever. It seems there is a neverending number of people who would do the same. Look at the stories about the sunflower fields that had to close down before the pandemic, or the current overrunning of cities and villages in Italy (like Lake Como). Or competing for views on social media (not just attempting to get them). Fighting for status is as old as.... well maybe humanity. What is fairly new is money and real property... and virtual property.

There probably is nowhere left to go. Maybe one of those little islands in the South Pacific but you can't live there and they are all mapped too.

> There's been plenty of good sci-fi written about this

Can you recommend me some? I feel like my brain still can't fully internalize the world these people are pushing for.

Accelerando remains my favourite.

Vernor Vinge's Peace War and especially Marooned in Realtime both touch on this point of view.

Baxter's Flood, then Ark. Neal Stephenson's Seveneves, too. Down And Out in the Magic Kingdom is tonally similar, if you like Doctorow, although that explores a different manifestation of disconnection from others. All great for a romp

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Service Model is a good look at this IMO.

Others have listed some great examples, but to be honest I was actually thinking of something somewhat more contemporary, specifically the eldar (or dark eldar perhaps) in Warhammer 40,000.

The long story short is that the Eldar once had paradise, and spent their time seeking greater and greater excess and pleasure, which eventually gave birth to an immensely powerful demon of excess. For the current-setting followers of this demon, their lives are spent in a desperate hunger for excess that can never be satiated, every greater excess they experience quickly becoming too dull to bare. As for the Eldar, their paradise is gone and their race is doomed, all they can do now is fight off the inevitable.

Obviously I don't think the rich have much to fear in terms of giving birth to a demon, but you get the point

You don't have to look at sci-fi, go look at the history of the Republic of Venice. It was ruled by a tiny group of ultra-wealthy people while the vast majority of the population owned nothing and had zero influence.

Absolutely not, sci-fi is just often a good vehicle for these kind of ideas (plus it gives me an excuse to talk about warhammer), but your right, theres plenty of real world examples to look at too.

We’re already heading into a certain demographics crisis. It’s not only about the pyramidal system that retirement is but also about who will be your nurse when you’re old, make your car, be your doctor, etc if there aren’t enough people anymore? Every developed country is well below replacement rate with no real plans from the powers that be to address it because it’s so far in the future that it’s the next best guy problem (30 years horizon)

Time of the robots has come! ;-)

Countries are not doing anything about low replacement rates because its currently in the interest of the elite to keep them low so that they can sell the need to import lower paid foreigners instead.

Elite is interested to have their country to win the race and not other, and healthy menpower is still essential for this.

When you are far removed from everything, your logic doesn't always make sense.

The problem with local workforce is that you have less threats hanging over their heads. Ones you can threaten with deportation, separation from their children, or just shoot in the streets, are just more controllable.

Imported labour has less rights and will be more open to grovelling.

you still need local country to be attractive enough to make people come and fear of deportation, meaning locals will be Ok too.

Either:

1. These people are detached from reality.

They would never see water that can be ignited because of the contamination so don't know the scale of their actions. Or

2. They think they have enough power to make the other countries worse, pressure on the EU, bombing the middle east, that making life worse for locals is offset.

That describes aristocracy. Those have been economically and politically compromised, or were assassinated in the 1930s.

Modern elites do not belong to any particular country; this is the entire selling point of globalism. They have no stake in any country's success.

We may pride ourselves on distinctions but when you put a white guy, an African and an Indian through the grinder, the same pink slurry comes out the other end. We're all just mince to them. We aren't even ruled from within our own borders anymore.

I don't think humanity will run into any capacity problems because of that, due to how grotesquely overpopulated it currently is. As far as I see it, every country in the world should be well below replacement rate, for the long run. Setting aside some problematic side effects stemming from our current social system setups. A small fraction of the current world population would probably enable everyone to have a much higher quality of life, if organised properly. We probably don't need to worry about who builds our cars when there are close to 10 billion of us. Where we'll get our food from, on the other hand -- I think that's where the real crisis lies.

Eh, you see too many of these guys complaining about declining populations for this to be a thing.

I don't think you need Machiavellianism to explain their actions. These people have everything they could need, but death comes for all of us and they aren't getting any younger.

Purely speculating, but if you had everything in the world (except time) wouldn't you put everything you have into building a future with a 10% chance of living as long as you wanted? What would you sacrifice for that?

> Eh, you see too many of these guys complaining about declining populations for this to be a thing.

Overpopulation is the best way to get to low population - eventually.

> if you had everything - wouldn't you put everything you have for a 10% chance of living [forever]?

No, I wouldn't, that sounds awfully silly.

> What would you sacrifice for that?

Nothing. I don't sacrifice stuff for BS even if it's 100% sure.

Lots of those people complaining about population decline aren't really talking about the absolute number. They're dog-whistling about demographic replacement - the idea that minorities are reproducing too fast and whites are reproducing too slow.

But why wouldn't the rest of society kick them out before that point? Like at some point, there's going to be a lot of political pressure to fix things, especially if the majority of the population is going hungry or struggling to find work.

Feels like at some point, some 'rogue' political figure will win election by saying the elites need to be overthrown, and the latter's influence will burn to the ground. If even a percentage of the world's countries are still democracies by that point, then any sort of 'leave the population to suffer while we live in luxury' plan will fail.

I keep questioning this as well.

Also, what protects their wealth is the justice system and the enforcement mechanisms, which are run by ordinary people.

There is no invisible force that will prevent the “peasants” from attacking the wealthy if the police also loses belief in the system and just starts looking the other way. Or just suddenly becomes _less competent_.

You don't even need a democracy for this - the moment people go hungry beacause of you, they will do something about it.

Bread and circuses. The only thing sustaining our civilization at the moment.

The moment people go hungry because of you, they will eat each other long before they think to challenge their oppressors.

Those selling you the romance of revolution are ones sabotaging your food supply. They're sadists, and taunting you with false hope.

Why do you think countries are creating more and more ways to quickly squash dissent. If people can't organize because their messages are being monitored and public protests will get you immediately imprisoned then the resistance will come too late.

How many years remain where the population actually still has any way to kick them out? Once military robots are sufficiently advanced, we've lost. We'll be fully at their mercy. Optimistically speaking, that's maybe 5-10 years out?

Are there any robots that can withstand a 50 caliber rifle slug? Don’t rule out ‘muricans just yet!

Unfortunately, even if a unified resistance formed by all gun-owning Americans were to march against them, it would buy the labor class a few months at most. Once enough capacity has been established (either production or troops) our only possible recourse would be to hijack/destroy their control, and that's unlikely to be possible if e.g. communication & compute originate from satellites.

I am increasingly disappointed by how sci-fi dystopias are moving from implausibility to inevitabilities.

But that assumes the population can't vote for someone else who will kick them out. As far as I know, there are no plans to stop third parties from being created, independents from running for political roles, or people voting for whoever they want to vote for.

If a large percentage of the population is going hungry or can't find jobs, then they'll vote for people that (at least say) they'll change that. If any of those people actually do that, then billionaires are toast, their assets could be seized and the laws could be rewritten so things like a universal basic income are implemented.

It doesn't matter how many resources someone has, they're not overthrowing the government, replacing democracy with a dictatorship or doing anything of the sort, especially not worldwide.

Today, the working class already have a miniscule influence compared to the rich and powerful. What makes you think the people could vote them out once they have an automatic army...? Why would they care about any kind of vote?

Seriously, imagine SV had produced 1 million autonomous robots, and a US government like today's was in power. How long do you think a strike would last? Many of these people are already openly talking about how we should adopt the 996 system, and how most people shouldn't be allowed to vote. I don't see any reason why we should expect anything but the worst.

I think there are a few things missing here.

First, the assumption seems to be that the US is the only country on Earth, or that every other country will follow their lead. There are plenty of places (especially in Europe) which are a lot more... left leaning in their political philosophies. As crazy as the US government may be, I doubt they'll literally attack Europe or Canada or wherever else even if under the thrall of Musk or Thiel.

2. Even in the US, the vote still has a pretty big effect on the government and how it's run. The person in the White House right now only got in because a percentage of people in certain swing states voted for him/the Republican Party, and it could have easily gone the other way. The whole 'billionaires get to do anything, law and order is a farce, ignore the constitution for the sake of it' system in play right now was only possible because Trump won the election.

> First, the assumption seems to be that the US is the only country on Earth, or that every other country will follow their lead.

How so? The elite class acts & collaborates on a global scale, as we've seen demonstrated time and time again, especially over the last decade. But even if there is no collaboration, all that's needed is for the US to develop an advantage in this field. Once heads of other countries get the choice between either possibly being targeted militarily or taking a leadership role managing a vassal state, how many of them would stick up for their country instead of selling their people out? They're already doing so without any real personal risk, purely for profit.

> 2. Even in the US, the vote still has a pretty big effect on the government and how it's run.

Maybe I'm thinking about this from a completely different perspective, but how would this scenario play out in your mind? Say it's 2030, the US government is centrist instead of far-right, and autonomous production of military robots is rapidly scaling, slowly rivaling even the military.

Then the SV elite decides to take over, with backing from at least half the government. Any governmental resistance can decide between playing along or likely being hunted down by said autonomous robots, and the military can't take over control since this takeover was prepared on the hardware side.

What does your vote do?

You may think this scenario is unlikely, but IMO given the current direction of the world it sounds far more realistic than stuff like Project 2025 did, yet here we are.

And who is going to maintain this low-population paradise of elites, if there is no one left but the elites ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot

Robots

Servants. Yes, robots eventually, but servants are the classical answer. The terrible truth is that palace economies are stable -- we see them in "resource-cursed" countries around the world and through time. When a single easily-owned fountain of wealth dominates the economy, a small group of people consolidate ownership and everyone else polarizes around them, forming into concentric rings of gatekeepers and masses struggling to access the only thing that matters. It's terrible but it's stable, and if you're inside the palace it doesn't feel like much of a curse at all.

The robots would have to be intelligent enough to be fully self sufficient, at which point they don’t care about people.

'Care' is a human concept. Robots, even extremely advanced ones, will not necessarily come bundled with aspirations. Giving a robot the capacity to care and want change, if it's even possible, would be extremely dangerous. It's completely realistic to imagine a world where robots just do what they're told because it's what they're made to do, because they lack any incentive to do anything else.

> It's completely realistic to imagine a world where robots just do what they're told

Yeah, although there are some wrinkles, doing anything else would be clinically insane.

You’re thinking the servants exist primarily to execute tasks. Servants exist primarily to abuse.

You might be interested in William Gibson's Jackpot triloy - The Peripheral and Agency.

Slaves. They will call 'em by another acceptable word though.

https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Servitor

Yeah. Billionaire techbros and neofascists love to mis-read Tolkien, but this is a much better picture of the future they want to bring. Down to the mystical doom cult of Peter Thiel and the techno-feudalism on Mars that Musk wants.

Of course they’d imagine themselves as the High Lords on Terra, not amongst the untold billions who died eaten by bugs or enslaved by evil space elves.

Personally, not being a billionaire, in a WH40k-type setting, I like to imagine myself as an ork. The dakka would make a lot of cool noises before I die.

There will always be a certain percentage of the population whose greatest aspiration is to be "house slaves" as opposed to "field slaves". They're the ones that today would be described as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires". [1]

1. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/328134-john-steinbeck-once-...

how's Bezos going to fund his wedding if there's no population of proles buying from Amazon, nor anyone putting their retirement into a fund that buys Amazon stock? does he just plan to use force rather than money at this point?

Why do you think they're all so into AI and robots?

The wars of the future will not be fought on a battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today, remember always, your duty is clear: to build and maintain those robots. Thank you.

That is in the past.

They need to? The have all the money right now already.

The plan is that he (along with a small number of other people) will already own everything. The only reason he currently wants proles to buy things from Amazon is that he has not yet achieved what he considers sufficient ownership of the world.

Yea, at some point, these guys won't really need the vast majority of us to buy from them. They'll be buying from and selling to other wealthy people.

That makes litteraly no sense. All the biggest companies are driven by middle-class purchases. Rich-only companies are boutique and are order-of-magnitude smaller than mass market companies.

This is actually changing. Many consumer and retail companies are already shifting their focus from the mass middle class toward high-income and affluent segments. Businesses find higher profit margins and more resilient demand in premium goods. And in enterprise, companies just pay other rich companies who pay them. (sometimes just directly).

50% of all consumer spending now is done by the top 10% and this keeps shifting up.

We've got a horribly K-shaped economy even before AGI.

> how's Bezos going to fund his wedding if there's no population of proles buying from Amazon

there will be new economy around satisfying super rich and few layers of their servants. You can think about shifting production and distribution to more luxury cars/clothes/jets etc for them.

Bezos and Andreesen won't live alone on planet, there still be population, just much smaller.

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