I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that any lasting change like that will not happen in my lifetime. This is all we have ever done, it is presumably all we will ever do, failing alien invasion or a mass extinction event. And while global warming is shaping up to be the latter, I doubt the wars over water and food will suddenly turn their attention to billionaires and do something about them; it will merely slowly escalate and get worse while they gaslight the majority that everything is business as usual, until one day we wake up and all these assholes have fled into their doomsday bunkers.
I have high hopes for a superintelligent AI takeover within our lifetime.
While perhaps not likely, there’s a real chance that the AI could be a benevolent and fair ruler. And, if nothing else, being better than our current (actively malicious) rulers really isn’t a very high bar to clear.
as long as we don’t end up with something like AM or a paperclip maximizer, an AI takeover could be okay, however given our luck so far I would not hold my breath for benevolent robot overlords.
Humanity actually successfully implemented a decentralized egalitarian socialist society without dictatorships in 1936 Spain, which bore out that it’s possible for us to achieve freedom for all while also ensuring everyone is able to live a fulfilling life by providing free housing, food, transportation and healthcare.
Some very specific outside circumstances caused it to be halted prematurely (namely, an unusual amount of industrialized fascist states and the USSR ganging up against it all at once, with very limited industrial capacity of their own to effectively fight back), but they documented how their society functioned while it existed quite well, and over 3 million people participated in it.
For most, is as difficult to imagine to an end to capitalism as it was for peasants to imagine an end to the divine right of kings, yet it did happen.
History shows us that we are capable of much better, and the global crisis we now face could very well be the catalyst that let’s us end capitalism forever.
I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that any lasting change like that will not happen in my lifetime. This is all we have ever done, it is presumably all we will ever do, failing alien invasion or a mass extinction event. And while global warming is shaping up to be the latter, I doubt the wars over water and food will suddenly turn their attention to billionaires and do something about them; it will merely slowly escalate and get worse while they gaslight the majority that everything is business as usual, until one day we wake up and all these assholes have fled into their doomsday bunkers.
I have high hopes for a superintelligent AI takeover within our lifetime.
While perhaps not likely, there’s a real chance that the AI could be a benevolent and fair ruler. And, if nothing else, being better than our current (actively malicious) rulers really isn’t a very high bar to clear.
as long as we don’t end up with something like AM or a paperclip maximizer, an AI takeover could be okay, however given our luck so far I would not hold my breath for benevolent robot overlords.
Humanity actually successfully implemented a decentralized egalitarian socialist society without dictatorships in 1936 Spain, which bore out that it’s possible for us to achieve freedom for all while also ensuring everyone is able to live a fulfilling life by providing free housing, food, transportation and healthcare.
Some very specific outside circumstances caused it to be halted prematurely (namely, an unusual amount of industrialized fascist states and the USSR ganging up against it all at once, with very limited industrial capacity of their own to effectively fight back), but they documented how their society functioned while it existed quite well, and over 3 million people participated in it.
For most, is as difficult to imagine to an end to capitalism as it was for peasants to imagine an end to the divine right of kings, yet it did happen.
History shows us that we are capable of much better, and the global crisis we now face could very well be the catalyst that let’s us end capitalism forever.