Imagine you're super rich and you view everyone else as a mindless NPC who can be replaced by AI and robots. If you believe that to be true, then it should also be true that once you have AI and robots, you can get rid of most everyone else, and have the AI robots support you.
You can be the king. The people you let live will be your vassals. And the AI robots will be your peasant slave army. You won't have to sell anything to anyone because they will pay you tribute to be allowed to live. You don't sell to them, you tax them and take their output. It's kind of like being a CEO but the power dynamic is mainlined so it hits stronger.
It sounds nice for them, until you remember what (arguably and in part educated/enlightened) people do when they're hungry and miserable. If this scenario ends up happening, I also expect guillotines waiting for the "kings" down the line.
If we get that far, I see it happening more like...
"Don't worry Majesty, all of our models show that the peasants will not resort to actual violence until we fully wind down the bread and circuses program some time next year. By then we'll have easily enough suicide drones ready. Even better, if we add a couple million more to our order, just to be safe, we'll get them for only $4.75 per unit, with free rush shipping in case of surprise violence!"
A regular war will do. Just point the finger at the neighbor and tell your subjects that he is responsible for gays/crops failing/drought/plague/low fps in crysis/failing birth rates/no jobs/fuel cost/you name it. See Russian invasions in all neighboring countries, the middle east, soon Taiwan etc.
Are you sure about that? In those times even thousands year old knowledge access was limited to the common people. You just need SOME radical thinkers enlighten other people, and I'm pretty sure we still have some of those today.
Nonsense. From television to radio to sketchy newspapers to literal writing itself, the most recent innovation has always been the trusted new mind control vector.
It's on a cuneiform tablet, it MUST be true. That bastard and his garbage copper ingots!
Royalty from that time also had an upper hand in knowledge, technology and resources yet they still ended up without heads.
So sure, let's say a first generation of paranoid and intelligent "technofeudal-kings" ends up being invincible due to an army of robots. It does not matter, because eventually kings get lazy/stupid/inbred (probably a combination of all those) and then is when their robots get hacked or at least just free, and the laser-guillotines will end up being used.
"Ozymandias" is a deeply human and constant idea. Which technology is supporting a regime is irrelevant, as orders will always decay due to the human factor. And even robots, made based on our image, shall be human.
It's possible that what you describe is true but I think that assuming it to be guaranteed is overconfident. The existence of loyal human-level AGI or even "just" superhuman non-general task specific intelligence violates a huge number of the base assumptions that we make when comparing hypothetical scenarios to the historical record. It's completely outside the realm of anything humanity has experienced.
The specifics of technology have historically been largely irrelevant due to the human factor. There were always humans wielding the technology, and the loyalty of those humans was subject to change. Without that it's not at all obvious to me that a dictator can be toppled absent blatant user error. It's not even immediately clear that user error would fall within the realm of being a reasonable possibility when the tools themselves possess human level or better intelligence.
Obviously there is no total guarantee. But I'm appealing to even bigger human factors like boredom or just envy between the royalty and/or the AI itself.
Now, if the AI reigns alone without any control in a paperclip maximizer, or worse, like an AM scenario, we're royally fucked (pun intented).
Yeah fair enough. I'd say that royalty being at odds with one another would fall into the "user error" category. But that's an awfully thin thread of hope. I imagine any half decent tool with human level intelligence would resist shooting the user in the foot.
But what exactly is creating wealth at this point? Who is paying for the AI/AI robots (besides the ultrarich for they're own lifestyle) if no one is working? What happens to the economy and all of the rich people's money (that is probably just $ on paper and may come crashing down soon at this point?). I'm definitely not an economics person but I just don't see how this new world sustains.
The robots are creating the wealth. Once you get to a certain points (where robots can repair and maintain other robots) you no longer have any need for money.
What happens to the economy depends on who controls the robots. In "techno-feudalism", that would be the select few who get to live the post-scarcity future. The rest of humanity becomes economically redundant and is basically left to starve.
Well assuming a significant population you still need money as an efficient means of dividing up limited resources. You just might not need jobs and the market might not sell much of anything produced by humans.
It doesn't sustain, it's not supposed to. Techno feudalism is an indulgent fantasy and it's only becoming reality because a capitalist society aligns along the desires of capital owners. We are not doing it because it's a good idea or sustainable. This is their power fantasy we are living out, and its not sustainable, it'll never be achieved, but we're going to spend unlimited money trying.
Also I will note that this is happening along with a simultaneous push to bring back actual slavery and child labor. So a lot of the answers to "how will this work, the numbers don't add up" will be tried and true exploitation.
Ah, I didn't realize or get the context that your original comment I was replying to was actually sarcastic/in jest-- although darkly, I understand you believe they will definitely attempt to get to the scenario you paradoxically described.
It was never about money, it's about power. Money is just a mechanism, economics is a tool of justification and legitimization of power. In a monarchy it is god that ordained divine beings called kings to rule over us peasants, in liberalism it is hard working intelligent people who rise to the top of a free market. Through their merits alone are they ordained to rule over us peasants, power legitimized by meritocracy. The point is, god or theology isn't real and neither is money or economics.
That sounds less like liberalism and more like neoliberalism. It's not a meritocracy when the rich can use their influence to extract from the poor through wage theft, unfair taxation, and gutting of social programs in favor of an unregulated "free market." Nor are rent seekers hard working intelligent people.
Yes yes there is quite some disagreement among liberals of what constitutes a real free market and real meritocracy, who deserves to rule and who doesn't and who does it properly and all that.
I think liberals are generally in agreement against neoliberalism? It's much more popular among conservatives. The exception is the ruling class, which stands united in their support for neoliberal policies regardless of which side of the political spectrum they're on.
You have a very distorted view of what liberalism means, we say liberal democracies and liberal international order for a reason. They are all liberals. Reagan and Clinton famously both did neoliberal reforms. I'm not saying they did the wrong thing to reach justified meritocracy, or the degree to which the free market requires regulation by a strong government, or how much we should rent control land lords, I'm saying we are all fucking peasants.
I need to think about this a bit more, but I think I would love a thread feature in ChatGPT, so that it has the context up to the point of creation but doesn’t affect the main conversation. It would help in two ways, it keeps the main topic from getting poisoned , and allow me to minimise text clutter when i go off on tangents during the conversation.
It's not bad, just limited. I think it's getting usable, but just barely so.
They are working on it, and making it better every year. I've started using it for small projects and it's pretty neat how fast you can work with it -- but not everything can be done yet.
Since they are still adding pretty basic stuff every year, it really hurts if you target older versions. AppKit is so mature that for most people it doesn't matter if you can't use new features introduced in the last 3 years. For SwiftUI it still makes a big difference.
I assume it’s because it’s from John Siracusa, a long-time Mac enthusiast, blogger, and podcaster. If you listen to him on ATP, it’s hard not to like him, and anything he does is bound to get more than the usual upvotes on HN.
My two adolescent children each own second-hand iPhones, which they rely on daily as their most priced possessions. It's intriguing to note their complete disinterest in newer models or upgrades. They regard their iPhones in a manner akin to my perspective on a dishwasher: indispensable, yet no desire for a change as long as they serve their purpose.
I upgraded from a Pixel 6 Pro to a Pixel 7 Pro (paid for by my employer) when my screen got cracked. As near as I can tell it's basically identical, but with the lock / volume buttons shifted slightly - so my old case doesn't fit properly, and my muscle memory is screwed up. Lots of things generally work slightly worse for no particular reason - it does a worse job of tracking my bike rides with Google Fit.
Your dishwasher comparison is quite apt to me - I bought a house last year with a dishwasher that had been badly neglected. I got it cleaned out and it's generally working reasonably, but the heated dry cycle doesn't work properly. I'd like to get a new one, but I'm skeptical that it will actually work better.
If you’re building a large complex app that needs to be shared across multiple platforms, C++ is a common choice. Not talking about games here, think Office, Facebook, Zoom, WebEx etc. It easy to see Rust replacing C++ in that stack.
But as Rust is so much nicer that C++, I could see it becoming popular for smaller projects that want to share common logic, with a native UI on top.
