it's so nice watching HN derive fundamental human rights and basic theories of marxism for themselves.
except no, that's probably not whats going to happen, unless you want to explain to me why there have been voices calling for gruesome stuff to happen to the unproductive for the past 20 years ;)
> In 2008, a software developer in San Francisco named Curtis Yarvin, writing under a pseudonym, proposed a horrific solution for people he deemed "not productive": "convert them into biodiesel, which can help power the Muni buses."
you should have read marx, owning the means of production is a fundamental requirement for communism, rendering currency obsolete. one thing that's usually left out though, is that the means of production also have to be so stupidly easy to use, that any ordinary human can make use of them.
it's just not going to be you or me who is going to be within that group of ordinary humans.
> Demonizing people creating things is petty and unbecoming for a political movement.
i think a more rational argument would claim that this isn't about demonizing people who create, it's about societal inequality. i don't think mark zuckerberg, elon musk or larry page and sergey brin got demonized for creating their products in the first 10-15 years after launch, it's what happened after, the accumulation of wealth, the extension of power, that get's any rational person believing in a free market socialist economy nervous.
> Pretending that the people leveraging that capital are somehow guilty of an original sin just by leveraging capital markets, which is really what these screeds against anyone holding controlling interests in companies they were instrumental in creating, seem to be about, leads down a terrible path.
do you think that they should still be forced to leverage their capital within democratic boundaries? because from what i've heard most founders carry significant power due to their wealth and share increasingly anti-libertarian values, to secure their wealth.
if those democratic boundaries prove to be innovation stiffling, fair, that is definitely an issue, but wouldn't it make sense to argue to then try to adjust those boundaries from within the democratic framework?
one could also make the claim that one popular strategy for securing the gains of a succesful innovation is regulatory capture - a strategy that is increasingly employed by large companies to close of markets and secure market monopolies or duopolies.
in a sense, they are stifling innovation themselves by closing a market to competitors, via instrumentalizing what they usually critize: regulation, no?
it's like you said, these can coexist, but from my perception it's as if these billionaires don't want them to coexist.
and im not thinking about regulatory drama involving diesel generators for AI datacenters or anything specific, just the mere power accumulation and general radical tendencies you find with these ultra wealthy interest groups.
per that rationale, since contributions are valued solely by the relative capital value they generate, do you think it would make sense to define the value of a person solely by the value of their contributions?
Yeah okay fair, I was about to post a knee jerk reaction, but it's well known that the US government can obtain higher quality data by just simply buying it from the public market.
By completely eliminating the need for a human workforce, therefore rendering a majority of humanity obsolete, therefore lots of social inequality, therefore lots of starvation, poverty and death.
When billionaires say "think about the trillions of people that will benefit from AI" and some notion of living in a post scarcity world, they are talking about _their_ descendants, not yours.
Honestly, even assuming a bias, I doubt it's attractiveness. What's usually cited with hiring older employees is the additional social cost, as well as time off work (because they often have families to support and are more settled).
I'm a software engineer and _I_ don't understand the aesthetic value of code. I'm interested in architecture and maintainability but I couldn't give a rats ass on how some section of code looks like, so long as it conforms to a style guide and is maintainable.
What I don't get is that there should now be focus on the actual engineering part of software development. I have arguments with people about code quality, styling, how "structured" some work is, when in reality, in an engineering discipline we should focus on whether we can improve the software by functional or non functional metrics.
Like what about performance optimization or security analysis? Shouldn't AI be the CAD of coding tools? Idk.