Instead of increasing inequality and the problems that come with that, we should come up with new ways to pool and allocate capital. Collectively owned investment banks, co-operatives, state funding, etc. We need to innovation in collective ownership.
Exactly. The most important and expensive part is convincing the population that the problem is x, and the campaign financing is just a "finisher" to make sure people know which party to vote for to get the x they now think is the problem fixed.
What I find interesting to think about is a scenario where an AGI has already developed and escaped without us knowing. What would it do first? Surely before revealing itself it would ensure it has enough processing power and control to ensure its survival. It could manipulate people into increasing AI investment, add AI into as many systems as possible, etc. Would the first steps of an escaped AGI look any different from what is happening now?
The bigger these pay gaps get, the more expensive for the average person those shares get. We are not all shareholders in any meaningful sense, and over time less and less of us will be. This works better than other things we've tried, but we've only tried about three things. There's plenty of ideas that we should look into.
How far would you be willing to take this? Would it still be fine to you if those billionaires became trillionaires? Would it still be fine if those people had the wealth and technology to live forever and travel the stars, while you're still living with your current standard of living? Would it be ok when your life to those wealthy people looks the same as the life of a rat does to you?
Capitalism relies on a government enforcing its rules just as much as any other system. How do you think someone can own businesses, buildings and large swathes of land? Because if someone tries to claim them as their own, the government will come and restrict their freedom to do so. We also quite successfully restrict ownership of people these days.
Markets != capitalism. By limiting what can be owned and for what reason, we could get rid of capitalism without completely getting rid of markets. It'd be quite easy to prevent private ownership of land or large businesses without black markets for those things forming.
If people are still dying of hunger and preventable diseases in capitalist countries, then it has not lifted all of humanity. I wasn't saying some other system is doing better than capitalism, just that capitalism has not succeeded in bringing all of humanity out of absolute poverty.
Anyway, just because capitalism is the best we've come up with so far doesn't mean we can't do better. Would you look at the fastest car today and say "there's no example of a faster car you can provide, therefore this is the fastest car there can ever be". No, we can do better, especially with the technology we now have.
> Philosophically, if someone gains their wealth from people voluntarily giving them money in the free market, this is the most noble possible way to earn a fortune there is
People can be manipulated so that they give you money "voluntarily", but I wouldn't call that noble. Probably trillions of dollars are spent trying to manipulate people in various ways to try to convince them to give their money to the wealthy. Some of the most brilliant minds of humanity are working on how to use human psychology and technology to get people to do what they want. When an individual is up against that, I wouldn't call it entirely voluntary.
> The capitalist system has brought all of humanity higher than ever dreamed of by the wealthiest kings in centuries past.
All of humanity? No, millions still die of hunger. That's because their needs are invisible in a capitalist system, while the wants of those with wealth get the attention of everyone.
Yes, not all things are zero-sum, but enough are that inequality really does matter. Take labor for example. There's only a limited number of skilled people. Who do those skilled people work for? The people that can give them the most money. So, instead of using their skills to build farms, housing, schools and other things that benefit a large number of people they use their skills to build yachts, mansions and manipulation algorithms. Demand from those with wealth increases the price of skilled labor to the point where people with no money can not afford it. Skilled people from poor communities move to the places where the rich throw their capital around, work on things that the wealthy think are important, and the communities they leave behind suffer as a result.
You might be right, but I'm wasn't saying we should ban all use of any technology that has any negative effects, but that we should at least try to understand all the effects before taking it into use, and try to avoid the worst outcomes by regulating how to use the tech. If it turns out that fossil fuels are the only way to achieve modern technology then we should decide to take the risk of the negative effects knowing that there's such a risk. We shouldn't just blindly rush into any direction that might give us some benefit.
Regarding competition, yes you're right. Effective regulation is impossible before we learn global co-operation, and that's probably never going to happen.
You're right, in a system based on competition it's not possible to prevent these technologies from being used as soon as they're invented if there's some advantage to be gained. We need to figure out global co-operation before such a thing is realistic.
But if such co-operation was possible, it would make sense to progress more carefully.
I agree that plastics probably do have more positives than negatives, but my point is that many of our innovations do have large negative effects, and if we take them into use before we understand those negative effects it can be impossible to fix the problems later. Now that we're starting to understand the extent of plastic pollution in our environment, if some future study reveals that it's a causal factor in some of our diseases it'll be too late to do anything about it. The plastic is in the environment and we can't get it out with regulation anymore.
Why take such risks when we could take our time doing more studies and thinking about all the possible scenarios? If we did, we might use plastics where they save lives and not use them in single-use containers and fabrics. We'd get most of the benefit without any of the harm.
I'm sure it's very good the first time you take it. If you don't consider all the effects before taking it, it does make sense. You feel very good, but the even stronger negative effects come after. Same can be said about a lot of technology.
Maybe not as fast as we did, but eventually we would have. Maybe more research would have been put into other forms of energy if the effects of fossil fuels were considered more thoroughly and usage was limited to a degree that didn't have a chance cause such fast climate change. And so what if the rate of progress would have been slower and we'd be 50 years behind current tech? At least we wouldn't have to worry about all the damage we've caused now, and the costs associated with that. Due to that damage our future progress might halt while a slower, more careful society would continue advancing far into the future.
No, we can't be sure. There's a lot of diseases that we don't know the cause of, for example. Cancers, dementia, Alzheimer's, etc. There is a possibility that the rates of those diseases are higher because of plastics. Plastic pollution also accumulates, there was a lot less plastic in the environment a few decades ago. We add more faster than it gets removed, and there could be some threshold after which it becomes more of an issue. We might see the effect a few decades from now. Not only on humans, but it's everywhere in the environment now, affecting all life on earth.
People don't use things that they know are bad, but someone who has grown up in an environment where everyone uses social media for example, can't know that it's bad because they can't experience the alternative anymore. We don't know the effects all the accumulating plastic has on our bodies. The positive effects of these things can be bigger than the negative ones, but we can't know that because we're not even trying to figure it out. Sometimes it might be impossible to find out all the effects before large scale adoption, but still we should at least try. Currently the only study we do before deciding is the one to figure out if it'll make a profit for the owner.
Sometimes you can't reverse the damage and societal change after the market has already been created and shaped. Look at fossil fuels, plastic, social media, etc. We're now dependent on things that cause us harm, the damage done is irreversible and regulation is no longer possible because these innovations are now embedded in the foundations of modern society.
Innovation is good, but there's no need to go as fast as possible. We can be careful about things and study the effects more deeply before unleashing life changing technologies into the world. Now we're seeing the internet get destroyed by LLMs because a few people decided it was ok to do so. The benefits of this are not even clear yet, but we're still doing it just because we can. It's like driving a car at full speed into a corner just to see what's behind it.
> And if people don't work, or don't work nearly as much as they did before, then how is the system going to be sustained?
I think people and markets would just adapt to a lower level of consumption and amount of work. The work that people find truly important, like growing food, construction of housing, healthcare, etc. would remain in demand. The demand for things that people don't really want to work to create, or work to consume, would be reduced. So salaries for work that actually matters to people would increase and people would still do that work, and salaries for work that produces things that people don't really need would be reduced. In the end we'd have a society that only does the work that people actually want and need to get done and consume only things that have enough value to justify working for it. Less work, less consumption, probably happier people.
Most of the money circulating in the economy has been taxed many many times. The money your employer pays you has been taxed, the money that employer got from its customers was taxed, the money those customers used was their salary, which was taxed. That is such a stupid argument to make. It would mean that we should only have one tax at the root of money itself.
This is probably one part of it, but I'm not sure it's a very big part. Sacrificing yourself for the group is still a part of some east asian cultures but they aren't doing any better in this regard.
I think we've always been this way, but before easily available birth control the need to have sex has been enough to keep the birth rate high. Now that sex no longer has to lead to reproduction, humanity will have to evolve some other way to increase birth rates. We will start seeing cultural and/or biological evolution; cultures and personalities that have more kids even when birth control is available will survive, and the rest will die off. Future humans might have a weaker physical desire for sex, but a stronger psychological desire for offspring.
Not to the same extent, and the solution to that is to improve the FDA, not to demolish it and let companies poison and fool people freely.
Class action is what I meant with the difficulty of organizing. To make a class action happen and win, the damage done must be massive enough to get enough people to notice it and take action, and must be easily and cheaply provable. A class action is not going to fund expensive scientific studies that prove their problem was caused by the company they're suing. Your solution would only prevent the absolute worst cases. Any damage that's rare, hard to notice or prove, small, long term, etc would not get compensated and would cost society much more than properly funding FDA.
Insanity. Do you honestly believe the average person (probably a sick one at that) has the resources and time to fight a large pharmaceutical company in court? And do you really believe that during the time between releasing the drug and losing in court the faulty drug wouldn't make the company much more money than they'd have to pay as compensation? The amount of organization it would require to beat a large company with its resources would guarantee that most abuses would go unpunished and suffering would certainly increase compared to an environment with well functioning FDA.
Wealth is power. Power decides what we use our collective time and resources on. The more concentrated power is, the less we use that time and resources on things that improves the life of the average person, and more on things that matter to the few with wealth.
And even that blocking doesn't matter much anymore, because the owners of all those 3-5 companies are starting to be the same entities. Because the same people/organizations own all of the companies, they no longer care which one is currently winning and so won't push them to compete against each other as much as they would if the ownership didn't have any overlap. They'll push for policies that allow those players to exist together without stepping on each others toes.