Society doesn't owe me over $500k/year for writing some instructions in a cryptic specification language. It's cool that I've been getting that, but I consider that luck and circumstance. When robots take my job I'll go find something else to do. I'm not going to blame evil rich people or some other boogieman.
No it doesn't. But as a human being, you and everybody still deserves a decent living. And our current system clearly does not provide that for a lot of people.
How come is anyone "entitled" to a decent living? I don't think this holds evolutionary, nor from historical perspective. It is commendable for a person to want to think that everyone deserves it, but I don't see it follow from anything or manifest in general in a fair way. There are plenty of examples that people are very likely going to be deprived of even whatever they deserved by means of struggling to get it.
Sure it does. Our species is social, meaning we form societies for evolutionary success. Both of us being members of that society, it is in my interest to see your child survive. It is a tragedy to think your child may not survive because human greed prevents them from accessing resources we have in abundance.
The opposite perspective is anti-social in a literal way: the greedy cannot use all of the resources, can't eat all of the food; they want control so you can't have it without their permission. You are entitled to eat, seeing as we have more than enough to feed you. That others think you are not is disagreeable, to put it mildly.
Sorry, but history saw so little (as a fraction) of people that were actually getting fair living that others guaranteed for them. Even when it is about living in decent conditions provided by the community if you want.
Even in a tribe, there’s a lotta suffering and very little remorse for it.
We may say we chase a society that would see everyone understand the principle of ‘your child should also get a decent life’, but what we see now, across nearly all societies is really the opposite. And it phrases like this - we don’t care if your children live or die for as long as our children get better chances.
> Sorry, but history saw so little (as a fraction) of people that were actually getting fair living that others guaranteed for them.
This statement is rather plainly not true. It describes child rearing and claims it does not happen in one breath.
There is a concept of "fairness", which I don't want to discount, but there's not much of a history of people being bottom feeders who do nothing to help those around them. Sure, there's a lot of sentiment to that effect but it is somehow something I fail to observe to this day. It is in the eye of the beholder and I worry for the souls of the beholders who judge so harshly.
This idea that someone is not deserving of food because they have not earned it a sad, anti-social thing to believe, perpetuated by psychological attacks from those who have more than they could ever need. You and your children deserve to eat and disagreement with that statement says more about the one disagreeing than it does any other, regardless of the judgement inherent to the nature of the disagreement (really, because of it, I suppose).
Yeah once payback goes below subsistence[1] - even when it gets near it- things get unstable and extremely dangerous. Ancient people understood this very quickly and built up institutions to keep the baseline above subsistence for urban civilizations.
It's been so long since we've seen actual bread riots I fear we forgot how nasty those are.
I think the notion is that with new automated systems of violence and control, some of them built onto the people themselves, our "future civilization" can dial back the worker's compensation to below subsistence. There was a big zillionaire conference where they talked about slave collars, for example, or humanoid AI workers. I'm always a little distressed when the masters of industry fall back on science fiction in order to build a machine that needs to function in the, well, in the present.
It was a private 2017 desert retreat where five wealthy tech and hedge-fund investors flew out media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, ostensibly for a speaking engagement.
Rushkoff wrote it up first as a Guardian essay and later expanded it into his 2022 book Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires.
The problem's super duper obvious if you studied history, but it is also pretty obvious if you can think about second order effects. In collapse the wealthy obviously need security forces to hold on to their stuff, but in a collapse your stuff will - presto changeo - become the security force's stuff. Essentially the singular founding story of all European royal families. Barbarian general took the house, banged the wife, now he's king. Or King-Sound. Kai- Zar
At the end of the day all these little lords and lordettes figured out the time honored lesson that to be actually safe you want to make friends with the locals. And that's part of being new king types as well. But "making people like you" isn't a popular notion with the Revenge of the Nerds types who love this "Lord of the Bunker" kind of thing.
I've seen zoo chimpanzees make a mockery out of this sort of device in VERY short order, and I would dread to impose it on a Delta Force psychopath who also has more higher degrees than I do. Because he's going to know who it was who did it and have all sorts of ideas about what he's doing about that. So the basic premise is also idiotic.
Sorry, I was a little more snide than I usually am on HN, it's been a long day.
There will always be scarcity and inequality. The point is to minimize/mitigate their effects. Can't you make the same argument for justice? Why does everyone deserve justice? Isn't that just entitlement? What is the historical or evolutionary basis for justice?
Nature does not exhibit anything as entitlement to justice. The whole concept of divine intervention (that we would like to exist more often than we like to admit) rarely manifests as measurable and consequential principle in how evolution operates. And it operates on brutal training cycles with lotta loss…
So, yes, in order to have a society one perhaps and most likely needs to define how rights are guaranteed. But it does not mean anyone is entitled to it by definition. Otherwise millions of dying children throughout modern history, and now also, would see the perpetrators get a ‘fair’ treatment. But they don’t.
Perhaps only as second order effects that are hard to understand and are not entitlement.
So nature doesn't exhibit justice, but a society likely needs to implement it, yes? But you don't want to say who gets to receive those rights? Some might say that those millions of dying children is an injustice that we should try and prevent. In particular, the people whose lives are the most affected might want to have a word with you.
I'm not really sure how your reasoning here is in line with your previous post.
So? We produce enough food for 10 billion people every year, there's only 8 billion of us and a billion are hungry. Those seem like legible KPIs for shareholders (i.e. humanity) to pursue, no? And while World GDP is up, it's come at the expensive of the systems we depend on.
I want my son to live on a livable planet, and not under the constant threat of destitution. And I want that for all children, not just mine.
Depends on who & what you ask. Aggregates hide important nuance. For who? At what cost to who? Do the people who bare the cost have a say? Would they agree that it's worth it? What's their life worth?
That's fairly well understood. If people get wind that the CEO isn't necessary they'd be out on their ear in short order. I don't think I've ever met anyone who'd shed a tear for the CEO losing their job. Except CEOs.
In the Netherlands, it's the name for anyone between junior and senior, in software. From my perspective it's more something used by recruiters and employers to tell people they don't get a senior engineer's compensation.
No, they weren't. They told me an awkward neologism for someone who isn't senior and isn't junior, and that means that neither they nor the original message tell me mid-level what.
At least in English, this appears to be slang that only recently leaked out of its original context. I've never heard the term before and whatever they used to look it up probably had no results.
No, but it owes you around 100K with a great work-life balance and job security because you spent years and years studying and honing your skills for it.
I'm no where near that TC and think this way too. This field of work is generally new in history. The whole woe is me what will we ever do attitude is so weak and frankly annoying.
Most of modern society is new in history; what is that supposed to say? If you are making the point that it's unproven and fragile, that would be a good point and actually one that supports "woe is me" because all of it could disappear overnight considering the fragility.
In my lifetime I have watched SPARC SUN Servers being thrown in the trash, spaghetti coded javascript and php run fortune 500s, the linux kernel adding containers, and everyone now being required to know how to code for CI so they can rerun tests, linters, and rebuild their app on every commit and publish it to an S3 bucket with specific IAM permissions tied to some SSO IAM provider.
At no point in any of that was anyone coddled or told that they will get to keep their job forever. Learn new skills. That's the game.
It's not even unique to tech. Doctors have to do this too.
There's so much work in the industry right now around LLM implementation that folks not looking into that are sleeping on good jobs.
Learning a new language or tech has always been such a minor hurdle. The whole point of the current wave of AI is that there is nowhere to retreat to if your means of income depends solely on intellectual work. Learn a trade or train to be a vet, sure, that'll last a while longer.
Doctors have to undergo minor professional development refreshers — not replace their entire education. There is a reason we educate early in life; it's hard to retrain the old (and expensive or even approaching impossible).
This comment gives me a chuckle. In my lifetime alone I've seen oncology completely transform before my eyes. New tools. New techniques. New drugs. I've also watched doctors in my family study this stuff in their off time in order to get certain positions.
"minor professional development refreshers" lol
Also known as (unpaid) hard work during the weekend.
Obviously fields like oncology and genetics are going to have major disruptions. What sort of event would trigger someone needing to redo their entire 7+ years of medical schooling?
That's obviously false. What's the point of society if that's true? Do you think there should be no government roads, no government health care (if you're in the US, you may think this, but only because you're indoctrinated), no legal system (or enforcement thereof) to protect you from criminals, no legally enforceable human rights whatsoever? Etc., etc.?
Once they actually understand what they're saying, no sane person believes that society doesn't owe them anything.
Correct. But don't you want something from the future? What do you imagine it to look like? How far is it from what you hope it might? What are you willing to do to bring them closer together?
No, there's a difference between doing well for yourself and exploiting the labor of others to capture stupendous amounts of excess capital, then reinvesting part of that to make even more.
