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Comment by kibwen | Hacker News Reader

Careful. A large segment of consumers could vanish overnight and the system would continue chugging along. Horses also used to be "consumers", with entire industries dedicated to filling their needs, but when horses ceased to be economically relevant, the economy did not collapse, instead it turned all those horses into glue and business continued as usual. We're already seeing economic trends whereby most economic activity is concentrating among the wealthiest; like horses of old, the masses of the poor are becoming economically irrelevant. And if you're in the horse's position, do you really trust the ruling crop of oligarchs to have enough magnanimity and/or common humanity not to send you to the glue factory?

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Horses can't revolt.

In the era of governments with ubiquitous electronic mass surveillance, complete control over all communication channels, and autonomous suicide drones, humans can't revolt either.

And yet, they continue to do it. States always had the upper hand since the invention of the standing army. The thing with capitalism is, as Engels noted, the military is the proletariat in uniform. Any successful revolt needs to have partial support from the military.

In other words, people don't revolt, warlords revolt. Warlords in control of weapons which are decreasingly reliant on humans and increasingly reliant on remote and autonomous technologies. A drone swarm is not "the proletariat in uniform".

Your argument doesn't really make a lot of sense. Warlords, factions, rebels, or whatever you'd like to call them, they are people, and sometimes they succeed in toppling a form of government and implanting a different one. A drone swarm doesn't control itself. There are no fully autonomous weapons that can continuously implement higher-level strategies to achieve a certain goal. Of course a drone swarm is not part of the proletariat, the same way a rifle is not part of the proletariat. A drone swarm is a tool in the hands of humans that belong to or are in service of a certain social class.

> Of course a drone swarm is not part of the proletariat, the same way a rifle is not part of the proletariat. A drone swarm is a tool in the hands of humans that belong to or are in service of a certain social class.

Every rifle takes one person to wield it; one more person that might decide to turn that rifle against the ruling class. A drone swarm is worth ten, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand people with rifles, capable of being controlled by one person issuing high-level kill orders. The tyrants of the future won't need to risk arming "the proletariat".

What? How many people is a tank worth, or an helicopter, or a fighter jet. You keep insisting that a hypothetical thousand-drone swarm can’t be used against a tyrant in case of a civil war and that the tyrant himself will operate the weapons directly. They won’t. They will need workers and soldiers and a chain of command that is convertible to a cause.

Horses was not the last customer. People were. So unless AI starts to buy things from the business, people won't share the fate of horses ... oh, wait....

Whether or not something is the last customer is irrelevant for the purposes of this discussion. Horses had an economic role, and the economy catered to them in turn. Once they became economically irrelevant, the money that horses wielded--yes, indirectly, through their owners--vanished. And yet the economy did not collapse, rather it readjusted to the new reality, which just so happened to be a reality in which horses had no part other than as pets. There exists a future where the same fate awaits the majority of humans, where the slow march of irrelevance eventually marginalizes any company that makes products that the poor are capable of affording, and when those companies shrink and then vanish, the economy will march on without a hitch while the peasants starve outside the gates. And yes, at least a few can look forward to being pets.

I think by drawing this parallel you are simplifying too much.

There are still horses. Probably more than would breed naturally in the wild. There's less horses now than there used to be because they were bread specifically for their economic utility. Humans are not bread for their economic utility. The amount of humans there are is pretty natural, given the available technology and infrastructure. There's no reason to think there would be less if they contributed less to economic output if the output doesn't decrease.

If you want to compare people to some other animal why not choose dogs or cats? They have no massive economic utility now, event though they had some in the past, yet they still thrive, even better, just because infrastructure and total economical output allows it. Their is even a part of economy dedicated specifically to their needs.

I think being pets of this civilization is something humans might realistically aspire to. I'd say it's immensely better role than being its workhorses.

If you squint hard enough, luckiest of us are already living the lives of pets of the civilization, where they don't have to work at all and the machines made out of money, legal documents, devices and other people take care of their every need, within limits imposed by the machine. None of those people envies the fate of workhorses.

Do you think they define their humanity through the utility of the work they (don't) do?

If you truly believe that being pets is something humans ought to aspire to, there's no point in continuing this conversation.

If you are the one that pities the fate of the pets of the civilization, aka the rich, probably there's no point.

You seem to think that the pertinent property of being a "pet" is living a life of comfort. The pertinent property of a pet is that they are owned, and they live and die at the whim of their master. Do you think that what makes slavery deplorable is merely the labor aspect?

> The pertinent property of a pet is that they are owned, and they live and die at the whim of their master.

Tell me that this is not what the civilization we are part of does to everybody. We live and die at the whims of bureaucratic machines. People in Ukraine die just because machine of war decided that they ought to.

> Do you think that what makes slavery deplorable is merely the labor aspect?

Isn't that what differentiates slave from a prisoner? Of course there are other deplorable aspects like the health harming intensity of the labor, brutality serving the purpose of forcing the labor. But slave without the labor is at most a prisoner. Or you could say that slaves are prisoners with mandatory jobs.

Human relation to freedom and captivity is a nuanced one. Banishment was one of the worst possible punishments because it often meant death. People don't do well when they are free from infrastructure. And if you want to use the infrastructure you don't have full freedom because there are rules the societal machine requires you to obey.

AI doesn't change anything in this setup. It just makes the machines smarter. And hopefully more well off and having more space for the luxury of morality.

Pets are not slaves, nor prisoners. They often can go out and return and if they can't it's mostly for their protection because they are not adapted to the freedom of being unhoused.

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