Because too many HN folk see that word and recoil as they're only casually "familiar" with human attempts at it during the era of scarcity as told by mass media, with no understanding as to the reality of why said systems failed or succeeded.

In a post-scarcity society (which we're technically in now, if we took this seriously), Communism is a more appropriate model of governance than Capitalism. It would ensure a more equitable distribution of resources, incentivize stronger environmental policies to minimize waste, and drive technological innovation towards preservation (of truly scarce resources - rare elements, for instance) over extraction.

The problem is that humans desire power for themselves and the humiliation of others, which results in every method of governance becoming corrupted over time, especially if it doesn't see regular change to address its weaknesses (as we see now with neoliberal societies resisting populism on both extremes of the political scale). Combined with centuries of nationstates lumbering onwards and fighting for their own survival in an increasingly nebulous and ever-shifting digital landscape, and no wonder things are a tinderbox.

All that being said, Communism is an (maybe not the, but an) appropriate choice for a post-scarcity, post-AGI society. It's something we need to discuss in earnest now, and start dismantling Capitalism where feasible to lay the foundation for what comes next. As others (myself included) have pointed out repeatedly, this is likely the last warning we'll get before AGI arrives. It's highly unlikely LLMs and current technology will give rise to AGI, but it's almost a certainty that we'll see actual glimmers of AGI within the next fifty years - and once that genie is out of the bottle, we'll be "locked in" to whatever society we've created for ourselves, until and unless we leave our planet behind and can experiment with our own alternatives at scale.

Good craftsmen know when they've reached the limits of their current tooling. We need to recognize that Capitalism is the wrong tool for an AGI era if we value our humanity.

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Ray20 8 hours ago | parent [-]

>In a post-scarcity society

Human needs unlimited. There can't be any "post-scarcity society".

The transition point to a post-scarcity society is in the eyes of the beholder, and moves away from them at the same speed with which they approach it.

From the perspective of the hundreds of millions of people working for 10 cents an hour, any American, even the poorest of them, whose only available job is a minimum wage of $8 an hour, has long since passed that point of post-scarcity society.

But try convincing minimum wage American that he's beyond that point and that he needs to give up $6 out of $8 because "there are no scarcity after $2 per hour". Then you will know the real opinion of people about "more equitable distribution of resources, incentivize stronger environmental policies to minimize waste, and drive technological innovation towards preservation"

	▲	stego-tech 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If I'm understanding your broken sentences correctly, you're seemingly trying to parrot the same "insatiable appetite of humanity" that all proponents of Capitalism like to trot out as some sort of defense of the (otherwise) indefensible; same with your misleading comparison of income and cost of living across national boundaries. The fundamental needs of humanity aren't infinite: a safe home, nutritious food, healthcare, and education are the sum total of human needs. Everything else is superfluous to survival, albeit not self-fulfillment or personal enrichment. We're post-scarcity in the sense that, on a planetary scale, we have enough food, shelter, healthcare, and education for every single inhabitant on Earth, but Capitalism incentivizes the misuse of these surplus resources to create value for existing stakeholders. This is where I flatly reject any notion of Capitalism being viable, suitable, or acceptable in a post-AGI society, and rail against it in the present day. Its incentives no longer align with human needs or challenges, and in fact harm humanity as a whole by promoting zero-sum wealth extraction rather than a reconciling of the gap between human needs and Capital desires. As much pro-Capitalism content as I consume in an effort to better my perspective, the reality is that it is rapidly outliving its usefulness as a tool like a shambling zombie, wholly divested from human survival and soldiering onward solely as a means to prop up the existing power structures in existence.