Hacker News Reader

Comment by stackbutterflow | Hacker News Reader

I still can't wrap my head around it.

So we're all dead, robots take care of the infrastructure and healthcare, and there's maybe 50-100 billionaires left on the planet. Then what? They drive their sports car, do bungee jumping, sip cocktails and watch ai made movies. They don't have children? The human race dies with them? Or they have children, somehow avoid the trap of inbreeding and their children in turn have children and in no time there's again a billion of "us".

We're talking about a level of control over the remaining humans, them and their friends, that require absolute totalitarianism. Of course billionaire A won't accept to live their life according to billionaire B so it'll be a mess in no time.

This thing makes no sense to me when they can already enjoy everything the world has to offer and on top of that they're for all practical purposes above the law.

View on HN

> This thing makes no sense to me when they can already enjoy everything the world has to offer and on top of that they're for all practical purposes above the law.

It doesn't have to make sense because these are not well-reasoned theories of the future. Thiel, Yarvis and Musk, from what you hear and read on their interviews, come off as drug-addled losers who hate other human beings and anything that doesn't have to do with their hyper-optimized partial view of the world.

> Then what? They drive their sports car, do bungee jumping, sip cocktails and watch ai made movies.

It's helpful to think of the world as if it were a gigantic vacation resort for about 1000 people, and the remaining 8billion of us are just the staff keeping it luxurious for them. They would be 100% fine if the resort didn't need or have any staff.

You have to put yourself in the mindset of a virus, then it makes perfect sense. The point is to consume and exhaust without thinking (introspection), not to sustain and thrive.

btw none of this will be possible because it's a dumb plan and would never work, but it's their utopia.

> they can already enjoy everything

What I love Elon Musk for is teaching me that even if you have everything in the world, you can still be an empty miserable shell of a human, unhappy, unliked, and satisfied with nothing. His example makes me far less driven to acquire more and rather just be happy with what I have. But we should be aware these people could own everything on Earth, the Moon, and Mars and it wouldn't be enough to satisfy them. They're fundamentally empty and insatiable people, it's such a shame so many aspire to be like them or join their ranks.

>btw none of this will be possible because it's a dumb plan and would never work

Ensure you realize that "not working" and them "not trying" are two totally different things. Because they absolutely will try just as many dictators have tried in the past with horrific outcomes, even though the end point was it not working out.

Yes, usually the way it turns out is "If I'm going down I'm taking the rest of you with me".

When you have everything, you want something new and different. The whole Epstein scandal is literally about this, you want to kill babies, r*pe the kids, do sacrifice rituals, etc because nothing gives you sensory satisfaction anymore. In the view of the commenters above, humanity will just be the final playtoy, let's have a little nuclear bomb in that town and film it in 4k, etc.

Nah, they were just fucked up, plenty of rich people not into that and plenty of poor people that are into pedo rings etc.

Why the Orwellian self-censorship?

I'm not even sure they care about living. They only care about the growth of capitalism. At some point it seems very likely capitalism won't need humans to continue growing, and all humans may be killed off.

There's people that actively cheer this on, Theil and other billionaires may be among them.

You are assuming they are acting out of greed, but maybe they are just doing what they've spent their whole lives doing - accelerating the growth of capitalism.

You are right and all these people replying to you are living in some kind of fantasy world.

I forget what it's called, but there's this fallacy of ordinary people, that states that we attribute superhuman abilities to people far enough from us on the social scale. In reality, rich people are far from movie villains, life is much more mundane.

It is scary for me to see how many well-educated people here on HN are so conspiracy-theory minded. In a quest to avoid these fantasized dictators, it is very well likely that we will vote for the one who promises to give us what we want, if only we give them enough power. In the end, the world's worst political systems were also the ones promising of liberating the poor and equalizing everyone.

> It is scary for me to see how many well-educated people here on HN are so conspiracy-theory minded.

The basis of so much of the era of computing I come from was basically based on a 70s Berkeley hacker mindset, which had a strong hippie crossover of that era that largely later became the basis for the Open Source movement.

I don't know how you mentally separate or understand the modern computing era without that era.

>I still can't wrap my head around it.

Mmhm

> So we're all dead, robots take care of the infrastructure and healthcare

Yep, and then there's a few hundred or few thousand kings and queens of the world that can do whatever they want! And no more dirty fucking lowlife scum to worry about (poors).

Nah, still a few million people. Million.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com