AI is going to force the issue of having to deal with the inequity in our economic system. And my belief is that this confrontation will be violent and many people are going to die.

The fundamental issue is wealth inequality. The ultimate forms of wealth redistribution are war and revolution. I personally believe we are already beyond the point where electoral politics can solve this issue and a violent resolution is inevitable.

The issue is that there are a handful of people who are incredibly wealthy and are only getting wealthier. The majority of the population is struggling to survive and only getting poorer.

AI and automation will be used to further displace working people to eke out a tiny percentage increase in profits, which will furhter this inequality as people can no longer afford to live. Plus those still working will have their wages suppressed.

Offshored work originally dsiplaced local workers and created a bunch of problems. AI and automation is a rising tide at this point. Many in tech considered themselves immune to such trends, being highly technical and educated professionals. Those people are in for a very rude shock and it'll happen sooner than they think.

Our politics is divided by those who want to blame marginalized groups (eg immigrants, trans people, "woke" liberals) for declining material conditions (and thus we get Brownshirts and concentration camps) and the other side who wants to defend the neoliberal status quo in the name of institutional norms.

It's about economics, material conditions and, dare I say it, the workers relationship to the means of production.

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thewebguyd 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

No war but class war.

Not sure how long it will take for a critical mass to realize that that we are in a class war, and placing the blame on anything else won't solve the problem.

IOW, I agree with you, I also think we are beyond the point where electoral politics can solve it - we have full regulatory capture by the wealthy now. When governments can force striking workers back to work, workers have zero power.

What I wonder though, is why do the wealthy allow this to persist? What's the end game here, when no one can afford to live, whose buying products and services? There'll be nothing to keep the economy going. The wealthy can end it at any time, so what is the real goal? To be the only ones left on earth?

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usefulcat 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

You write as though "the wealthy" are a unified group acting in concert. They're not; they're just like everyone else in that regard, acting in their own, mostly short to medium term best interest. Seems like a pretty ordinary tragedy of the commons type of situation.

	▲	jmyeet 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Oh I strongly disagree. If there's one thing the wealthy have is an intense class solidarity. They're fully aware of the power of class solidarity. You might see conflicts on the fringes but when the shit hits the fan, they will absolutely stick together. They're so aware of the power of class solidarity that they've designed society to ensure that there is no class solidarity among the working class. All of the hot button social issues are intentionally divisive to avoid class solidarity.

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jmyeet 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It's greed and short-term thinking, We shouldn't be surprised by this because we see companies do it all the time. How many times have you thought an employer or some company in the news is operating on a time horizon no further than the next quarterly results?

To be ultra-wealthy requires you to be a sociopath, to believe the bullshit that you deserve to be wealthy, it's because of how good you are and, more importantly, that any poverty is a personal moral failure.

You see this manifest with the popularity of transhumanism in tech circles. And transhumanism is nothing more than eugenics. Extend this further and you believe that future war and revolution when many people die is actually good because it'll separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.

On top of all that, in a world of mobile capital, the ultra-wealthy ultimately believe they can escape the consequences of all this. Switzerland, a Pacific island, space, or, you know, Mars.

The neofeudalistic future the ultra-wealthy desire will be one where they are protected from the consequences of their actions on massive private estate where a handful of people service their needs. Working people will own nothing and live in worker housing. If a few billion of them have to die, so be it.

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simianwords 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

These are common simple Marxist points you are bringing up.

Your point hinges on: declining material conditions.

It is completely false - the conditions are pretty great for everyone. People have good wages relatively but sure inequality is increasing.

Since your main point is incorrect I don’t think your other points follow.

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jmyeet 2 days ago | parent [-]

There are many ways to attack this assertion. For example:

1. The stagnation or decline in real wages in the developed world in recent decades;

2. Increasing homelessness as a consequence of the housing affordability crisis;

3. How global poverty has increased in the last century under capitalism. This surprises some because defenders claim the opposite. China is singlehandedly responsible to massive decrease in extreme poverty in the 20th century.

Maybe you're looking through the lens of tech. After all, we all have Internet-connected supercomputers in our pockets. While that's true, we're also working 3 jobs to pay for a 1 bedroom apartment where once a single job meant you had a house and enough to eat.

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simianwords 2 days ago | parent [-]

Your first and last points are egregiously incorrect. A simple google search will tell you this.

Extreme poverty throughout the world has dramatically reduced. In Western Europe it came down from 50% to less than 1% through the 20th century.

India brought it down dramatically and is continuing to do it. A simple Wikipedia search can tell you this.

Wages has been increasing in china, India as well as USA after accounting for inflation. It’s sort of stagnant in Europe.

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keeda 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> India brought it down dramatically and is continuing to do it. A simple Wikipedia search can tell you this.

What the Wikipedia search won't tell you is that the methodologies and poverty guidelines used in making some of these claims are rather questionable. While real progress has undeniably been made, the extent is greatly exaggerated:

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/indian-governme...

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mythrwy 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Additionally we can point out the problems of inequality and governmental capture by elite interests (and they are problems) but then the jump to "government will do it better than these greedy people" is a big one and I don't see much evidence for it.

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kelseyfrog 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm genuinely glad for the people in India. But that progress doesn't reduce the feeling of inequality here in the U.S.

Dismissing people with arguments doesn't work either. It doesn’t eliminate the feeling of inequality or change people's perspective about absolute vs relative wealth.

Why? Because the promise used to justify labor - that hard work will be rewarded - was deeply believed. The contradiction becomes visible when the wealthy hold 36,000 times more wealth than the average person[1]. No one can work 36,000 times harder or longer than someone else, so the belief is no longer tenable.

That leaves us with two choices: either acknowledge that "hard work alone" was never the full story, or take real steps to fix inequality. Pointing to poverty reduction in other countries doesn’t resolve this. It simply makes people feel unheard and resentful.

Average billionaire has $7B in wealth. Median individual U.S. wealth $190,000.

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simianwords 2 days ago | parent [-]

This is not the appropriate way to respond when the poster was clearly incorrect in their main points. Dismissing people with arguments is the rational thing to do.

Your first mistake is thinking hard work matters. No it doesn't and it shouldn't. Only work that provides value should matter - you don't deserve more money just for working 10x hard but when it doesn't matter to anyone.

Your entire comment hinges on a zero sum line of thinking and I don't abide by it. Things have improved for everyone as I have said above but I also acknowledged that inequality is increasing. Inequality rising is a real issue.. it can be tackled but lets first acknowledge that prosperity has increased for pretty much everyone in the world.

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kelseyfrog 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Inequality rising is a real issue.. it can be tackled but lets first acknowledge that prosperity has increased for pretty much everyone in the world.

I literally acknowledged that prosperity has increased for people in other parts of the world.

Why don't you rewrite my comment so that it's acceptable to you and then we'll discuss that?

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simianwords 2 days ago | parent [-]

If we acknowledge that everyone is more prosperous now than before (which completely contradicts the post I was responding to) what is your point? Inequality? I think it is a problem but not so much if everyone is getting prosperous in the mean time.

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kelseyfrog 2 days ago | parent [-]

Yes, as I pointed out in my original comment, inequality is my point.

If unaddressed - ie by dismissal - it doesn't go away. It simply festers. It will fester until it ruptures. Ignoring it or minimizing it doesn't make it go away.

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simianwords 2 days ago | parent [-]

Sure and I think solving inequality must be weighed along with increasing prosperity. Both have to be considered because often increasing one means increasing other - increasing taxes too much and there are no incentives to work and prosperity reduces. We need to find the right balance between both.

I do acknowledge that inequality can have unforeseen consequences and worth talking about and tackling today but only by considering the right tradeoffs.

	▲	kelseyfrog 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I'm trying to square these: > Increasing taxes too much and there are no incentives to work and prosperity reduces. > Your first mistake is thinking hard work matters. If hard work doesn't matter, then why care what incentives are?

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keybored 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Productivity in the US has gone up steadily since WWII (“only work that provides value should matter”) but wages have stagnated since the 70’s.

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simianwords 2 days ago | parent [-]

Wages have _not_ stagnated since the 70's. Nor has it stagnated since the 2000's.

Can you provide a source to backup your claim?

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GuinansEyebrows 2 days ago | parent [-]

https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/19/heres-how-labor-dynamism-aff...

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/resources/human-righ...

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simianwords 2 days ago | parent [-]

I investigated the first link with ChatGPT. All the percentiles have increased except 10th percentile. But they do not account for after tax wages and other benefits and transfers.

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59510 shows this. Bottom 20% wages after accounting for benefits and taxes have significantly increased. If you want to answer the question: are the bottom 20% materially more well off at 1960's than now - this is your answer. Hourly wages without accounting for benefits is missing a crucial element so not really indicative of reality.

Caveat: this shows the bottom quintile (20th percentile) and after looking at the data it appears to be a change of ~60% of real disposable income from 1978 to 2020. 10th percentile would be similar.

TL;DR: if you use real disposable income that accounts for taxes and benefits (what really matters) the wages have not stagnated for anyone but increased a lot - by almost 60%.

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GuinansEyebrows 2 days ago | parent [-]

you're putting in a lot of work (well, i guess you're farming out the work to a third party service) to prove a portion of your argument with a metric that ignores inflation (including whatever you want to call what's happening right now). why? why is it so important to you to try to dispel a notion that is nearly-universally shared among scholars, experts and those actually experiencing ill effects due to the rise in costs of living compared to their income?

	▲	simianwords 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		It’s not excluding inflation which means you didn’t put any effort into actual investigation. You just googled for what you wanted and posted three links without reading it. It’s very telling that instead of refuting my point you instead choose to derail the discussions into a personal attack. Were you discussing in good faith you would try to understand what I said and reply to it. It’s not universal at all that people are less prosperous now. Why don’t you do good faith research and try to answer whether the bottom earners are actually better off now than before? You will come to the same conclusion.

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kelseyfrog 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The ownership class and the labor class both suffer from a coordination problem.

The former from the coordination problem of extracting wealth but not fast enough that it solves the coordination problem for the labor class who, like you said, have strike first and revolt second as their battles of last resort.

The ownership class can voluntarily reduce wealth inequality, and they have before, but as history progresses and time marches on, so do the memories fade of what happens when they don't, pushing them closer and closer to options they don't want to admit work.

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keybored 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Whether or not you are correct about the concrete details here, it is laughable for regular people[1] to bicker about whose job will be replaced first when the people who profit from that are just sitting on their ass, ready to get labor for nothing instead of relatively little.

[1] Although I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the people who argue about this topic online are already independently wealthy

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simianwords 2 days ago | parent [-]

The people who profit from it are very much not sitting on their ass. It is easy to dismiss them as a way to reinstate your ideology but the reality is they too are working hard because it is a volatile time for them as well. They have to keep up and employ the new technology appropriately or they will lose to their competition.

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keybored 2 days ago | parent [-]

You’re right. They are working in the sense that they are competing with others to come out as the top parasites. Not to mention that working against laborers takes effort as well. But they are not working in the sense that people bicker about AI “taking jobs”; providing useful labor.

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simianwords 2 days ago | parent [-]

Competing against others to come out at the top _is_ useful labor. The best one wins usually and as a consumer you want the best products to come on top.

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keybored 2 days ago | parent [-]

Maybe this is very Vulgar Marxist but that seems a bit like crediting gangsters competing to shake down construction businesses for building bridges.

	▲	simianwords 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		That’s not the case at all. Competition is integral to the system working. We have many laws to protect the market so that competition is viable like anti trust etc. Competition is why you have good products. Can you explain to me what incentivizes Apple to make functional and impressive iPhones instead of selling us barely working phones without cameras?

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igleria 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> personally believe we are already beyond the point where electoral politics can solve this issue and a violent resolution is inevitable.

I do think more or less this too, but it could be 4 years or 40 before people get mad enough. And to be honest the tech gap between civilian violence and state sponsored violence has never been wider. OR in other words, civilians don't have reaper drones etc etc.

	▲	jmyeet 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I agree on time frames. This system can limp on for decades yet. Or fall apart in 5 years (though probably not). As for the tech gap, I disagree. The history of post-WW2 warfare is that asymmetric warfare has been profoundly successful, to the poin twhere the US hasn't won a single war (except, arguably, Grenada, if that counts, which it does not) since 1945. And that's a country that spends more on defence that something like the next 23 countries combined (IIRC). Obviously war isn't exact the same thing but it's honestly not that different to suppressing violent dissent. The difficulty (since 1945) hasn't been defeating an opposing military on the battlefield. The true cost is occupying territory after the fact. And that is basically the same thing. Ordinary people may not have reeaper drones and as we've seen in Ukraine, consumer drops are still capable of dropping a hand grenade. Suppressing an insurrection or revolt is unbelievably expensive in terms of manpower, equipment and political will. It is absolutely untenable in the long term.