If ai benefitted everyone and not just the billionaires we would be viewing it differently.

That's a truism. But it ignores The Iron Law of Oligarchy, Pareto Principle, and dozens more that remind us that power tends towards centralization. It's currently fashionable to call out the billionaires, but if you removed them, they'd just be replaced by corrupt government officials, or something else.

That's not to say we should just throw up our hands and accept every social injustice. But IMHO we shouldn't go around simplistically implying that all social ills will be solved by neutering the billionaire class.

▲

singpolyma3 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

More importantly we shouldn't deny the rest of humanity benefits on the basis that the majority of the benefit accrues to the powerful. We should strive to change the distribution pattern, not remove the benefit.

▲

theseanz 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

“But IMHO we shouldn't go around simplistically implying that all social ills will be solved by neutering the billionaire class.”

You’re right. Instead of implying, we should be taking active steps to do it.

	▲	Rury 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Right, giving up is actually how these things end up becoming principles/laws. Power centralizes because people become complacent and ignorant on matters of power, so there ends up being a power vacuum, to which others seize the opportunity. But absolute power centralization almost never occurs, due to the delegation that is necessary to wield that power in practice, and so these two forces end up balancing each other. As such, the equilibrium point (or point of maximum entropy) ends up being some type of oligarchy. But anyone can take steps to address this and adjust this equilibrium point, but it takes active work.

▲

pydry 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>we shouldn't go around simplistically implying that all social ills will be solved by neutering the billionaire class.

Not to put too fine a point on it but this was basically how the Japanese post war economic miracle was achieved.

In this case it was America which ordered the Japanese oligarchy to be stripped of its wealth.

We've had decades of propaganda telling us that this is the worst thing we could do for economic growth though so it's natural to doubt.

▲

ndsipa_pomu 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The problem with billionaires is that they are able to hoard so much money by exploiting others. We would be much better off if billionaires weren't given so much advantage by Capitalism as those resources would be much more useful if distributed.

The biggest problem we currently have with billionaires is that they are now so rich that the world becomes like a game to them and some of them are deliberately pushing us to a dystopia where non-billionaires become functional slaves (c.f. Amazon workers).

▲

throwaway613746 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]