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Comment by swat535 | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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

Robots

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-...

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

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

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