Stephen Hawking: robots could give us all material abundance, unless rich people hoard all the wealth

Anarchist communism.

(“Be realistic. Demand the impossible.” – Herbert Marcuse.)

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Stick to the maths Stephen, your warnings about killer AI and humanity-destroying aliens are a bit sixth-formish, as is this pronouncement. Being very clever in one subject does not give one great intelligence in all areas automatically.

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Not really, because they don’t value the same things that I do. How people define wealth depends upon their individual goals and values, if indeed they have any.

I think Stephen is just trying to get all his thoughts on things out there while he’s still upright. Guy does not look like he’s got a long future ahead sorry to say.

That’s what they said in 1963.
The guy’s clearly a very clever astrophysicist and mathematician, and a great inspiration, but he’s way-off on other things too.

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That leftmost street urchin in the pic looks properly surprised at the sudden appearance of an anomalously colour-toned, grinning, floating future astrophycisist’s head in his otherwise Dickensian reality…

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What’s the point of material abundance if nobody is suffering?!

How would you know to be happy?

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I’m not sure this would feasible. I think communism* failed because it required people that is willing to live the underlaying philosophy. Mankind at large is not good and egoistic actions (as contrast to the social behaviour needed for the common good) can bring down the system really fast.

Socialism and communism does not work because humans are arseholes. There, I said it.

*) not the actually existing kind but the platonic ideal

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There, I fixed it for you.

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It’s perfectly okay with me if you want to advocate material abundance for all the world’s 7.3 billion people. I think that’s a very worthy goal.

But if you want that, you also need to be in favor of generating all the electricity needed to provide that abundance, and all the transport of raw materials and finished goods from where they are mined/grown/made to where the recipients live. Are you??

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It’s hard to say for certain, as it was during wartime, but in the Spanish civil war anarcho-syndicalism did seem to be working well right up until the Stalinists forcefully claimed control of the voluntary collectives.

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Any -ism, really, whether philosophic, political, or religious. The weak link, every time, is the fact that humans are involved.

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But the CNT as main player for anarcho-syndicalism in Spain was never responsible for governing a nation state (both governing and state used loosely as the don’t have the same meaning in an anarchistic society) and the founding principle was refusal (both of the republic with it’s partly liberal government and late in the civil war Franco’s nationalists).

Too much Direct Action, not enough peaceful living as a society: Spain is not a good starting point for a what-if.

How is he wrong here? He’s saying that we could have a more egalitarian society with the advance of AI. But we won’t if the people at the top hoard the wealth. We are living in a society where we have people who are doing just that. It’s not a huge cognitive leap that they’ll keep doing that if we let them.

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And what we’re doing now doesn’t work. And the systems set up under the soviets was hardly anarchistic communism. Stalinism and the American system are not the only two ways to build a mass society. We can maybe come up with something else that doesn’t lead to either one of those.

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I wholeheartly agree. But I have no clue how to change (and what). I can list many points that are imho not working in the current system*, but would they be constructive changes? I don’t know.

*) my subjective POV (the socialisation in a rich developed country make me part of the global 1%), so my input is not even universal valid

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Yah. IMO the whole enterprise of ideological affiliation suffers from the No True Scotsman problem. There are no real adherents because for every individual, their particular idea of what constitutes true affiliation differs from those of everyone else.
No one is responsible for the behaviour of any of the other adherents because ‘they don’t represent x-ideology properly’ and the institution is not responsible for even hard-line adherents behaviour because, ultimately, they are all individuals.

The deeper problem, I think, is that no-one even really wants to be associated with the ideological principles of an entity unless it in some way bestows upon them some positive value. It’s a one way street from nowhere to nobody.

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The problem here is that robots will give us lots of leisure time. Lots of unpaid leisure time. The wealth will of course be amassed by those who own the robots, and hence the means of production. The produced goods are not going to be distributed freely unless there is recoup of the cost of production plus profit for a price.
T’was ever thus.

Agreed, and this is precisely what Hawkings is saying, that those who own the means of production will indeed continue to hoard wealth… Unless we figure out a way to not have that happen.

So, what’s your objection to what Hawking is saying?

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Define happiness.

But really, why would you want to be happy? Can’t you settle for contentment?