Re fascist and nazis : There is indeed an effort to brand them "left-wing", since they're mostly universally hated, and thus show that the "Left" deserves to be hated too. And besides, they called themselves "National Socialists", so, you know, there.
I'm just going to point out that fascists and nazis are not hated because of their ideas about their economy. They were extremely nationalistic, tradionalists(they seeked to "restore" some mythical heroic past), war-loving, anti-internationalists, extremely racist and antisemitic. This lead to WW2 and the Holocaust, which is exactly why they are hated. None of those elements is something the "Left" has. Nobody would hate the nazis(and thus nobody would consider a comparison with them an insult) if their key characteristic was simply some socialist-like state interventionism in the national economy and otherwise they were internationalists(or at least not so extremely nationalistic and racist), not antisemitic and not, you know, responsible for WW2 and the Holocaust.
In any case, both the "Left vs Right" and "Authoritarian vs Libertarian" diagrams are really incomplete and mostly useless, as far as I'm concerned. Show me your actual ideas. For example, in the "political diagram" test that positions you in this 2D axis, is there a question "do you believe there are superior and inferior races or nations, and do you believe you are part of the superior ones"? Where do you fall in the "Left vs Right" or "Authoritarian vs L:ibertarian" axes if you answer "yes" or "no"?
Automation and the Future of Economics/Jobs (Spin Off of the AI thread)
44 minutes ago, mikeman said:Re fascist and nazis : There is indeed an effort to brand them "left-wing", since they're mostly universally hated, and thus show that the "Left" deserves to be hated too. And besides, they called themselves "National Socialists", so, you know, there.
If you had to stick them somewhere in the left-right scale, I'd call them left-wing because their political structure bears much more in common with practical socialism (i.e. Soviets) than it does anything resembling capitalism. It's also the logical extreme of "big government", which isn't exactly a right-wing ideology. However, that's for the modern left and right, at least within the United States. It's important to remember that the Republicans prior to The New Deal era were collectivists in a sense. Now they're somewhat individualist, but the left was the individualist side of the coin once upon a time. Blame the Bull Moose people, the "neoliberals" of the early 20th century.
Personally though, I think trying to shoehorn everything into left/right is a poor decision. Modern parties are much more syncretic these days. Even the whole 2-axis model has pretty significant limitations.
14 hours ago, Luckless said:1. Hindsight on how things rather clearly Don't work, so we can be pretty sure that a dictator ruling by force of arms is 'probably a very bad idea' as compared to a carefully planned democratic transition.
While that might be true, humanitys track record when it comes to preventing making the same mistake twice (or for the 100th time) is pretty bad. So I am not optimistic about things just because it failed before and we now know what NOT to do.
The problem with every centralized system is inefficiency and tendency to be abused. While the first might now be avoidable thanks to technology, the same technology is making the second problem an even bigger one.
While you had about a thousand underlings with a human brain needing to look away for a tyrant to get into power (which, as we have seen, was easy enough)... when most of those positions are getting automated, all that is needed is insider knowhow of the automated systems, a group of hackers, or some inside job, and only a few humans have to look away.
Sure, this is all pessimism... still lets not pretend that the risk isn't there. Maybe we do find a way this time to prevent Stalin or Mao from happening. But certainly no with blind optimism.
47 minutes ago, mikeman said:Re fascist and nazis : There is indeed an effort to brand them "left-wing", since they're mostly universally hated, and thus show that the "Left" deserves to be hated too. And besides, they called themselves "National Socialists", so, you know, there.
I'm just going to point out that fascists and nazis are not hated because of their ideas about their economy. They were extremely nationalistic, tradionalists(they seeked to "restore" some mythical heroic past), war-loving, anti-internationalists, extremely racist and antisemitic. This lead to WW2 and the Holocaust, which is exactly why they are hated. None of those elements is something the "Left" has.
Well, its simply showing that the "left-right" spectrum is seriously lacking, and maybe not even a two dimensional chart like the one @deltaKshatriya was showing is really capturing where people not following party lines, or the political parties themselves fall on.
Most of the founding ideas of the national socialist were certainly rightwing. Their economic system clearly was not. Thus, while the name might have been chosen for obsfucation, it is actually not that far from the truth. The nazis WERE nationalists AND socialists at the same time.... autoritorians, xenophobes and militaristic technocrates at the same time.
Maybe some on the right try to use that to smear the left, or make up for the fact that thanks to the soviet communists being on the winning side in the 2nd world war, they never got branded just as badly as the germans. Doesn't matter. Lets just state that the crude, dysfunctional mix of ideas that founded nazi germany also borrowed from the left side of the spectrum.
Now, many of the things you list there are not inherently bad, if you take of the leftwing glasses for a minute:
- nationalistic -> nothing bad about, as long as people are not totally xenophobic because of that, or use it to justify war
- traditionalists -> nothing bad about that. As the chinese said: "Someone who doesn't respect the old will also not keep the new for long"...
- anti-internationalists -> if you are quite left, I can see how you view this as bad. But, to be honest, there are many good reasons to be anti-globalist, which would be the 21st century term for it. Globalism hasn't exactly been kind to most people in the lower "classes" of western society, nor has it helped everyone in the third world countries.
Don't conflate nationalists, traditionalists, conservatives, or anti-globalists with racists and antisemites.
a) many on the left are pretty racist too today... they just claim its not racism because of "muh privilege"...
b) AFAIK the jews also didn't fare well under communist rule. Just as did many of the ethnic minorities in the soviet countries, as far as I know.
Lets be real here: until Nazi germany went completly bonkers and thought they could take the whole of Russia within weeks, Stalins Soviet empire did the exact same thing the german whermacht did: conquering as many countries in eastern europe as they could. There was even a pact between Stalin and Hitler, dividing europe between germany and soviet russia.
Even before that, Russia had invaded Finnland.
If germany wouldn't have started the war, the soviets would have. They wanted to "internationalize" their empire, no matter what. Only Stalins great purge would probably have delayed that.
So really, WW2 is a very bad case to show some ideological superiority... unless you want to make the point that both sides of the spectrum are bad when they get too extreme.
I think the important thing I want to point out is this: there are bad actors on both sides... and most people probably are genuinly good people, when you can overlook their ideology (and are not in the group they hate on at the moment, when we near the far end of the spectrum).
2 hours ago, Oberon_Command said:One doesn't have to be "brainwashed" to point out that the US is one of the only developed Western nations (if not the only, I'm not aware of any others) that don't have universal healthcare, or that higher education costs are an order of magnitude higher than in other countries which is resulting in young professionals being student debt servitude for a good chunk of their life, or that it has an infant mortality rate (6.5 per 1000!) noticeably above other nations (with Iceland doing the best at 2.1 per 1000).
All good points. I wonder why some US Folks are still clinging to paying way more for education, when a degree is becoming pretty much the expected norm in the professional world, and way more when they inevitably get ill, just to save on taxes (which probably will only matter that much for the rich)...
Is it because the wages are so low? Or is it simply "muh freedom" being rated higher than anything else by some folks in the US?
About the infant mortality rate... is teenage motherhood still such a big thing in the US? And AFAIK that could also be linked to the amount of cases of overweight in the US..
I guess one of the biggest issues is that the US politics, on the left and the right, is just dominated by the rich. No matter if Democrat or rebuplican, it seems it costs a ton of money to get anywhere in politics, so by the time a president is elected he probably had to beg a ton of billionaires for money.
Isn't that seen as a big problem in the US? Shouldn't politics try to reduce the amount of money it costs to become POTUS for example, by limiting what a candidate can spend during their campaign?
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As for the US standing alone... no problem. "Go ahead, punks... Make our day!" Like many today, you probably believe that "we better not attack Iran, they'll sink are navy!". If that is the case, the the US military is about 1,000,000 times more capable than you believe it too be.
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You are obsessed with war and spydom, dude. In this case, "standing alone" would mean banning the invention and use of advanced autonomous machines that, if used wisely, could take off the burden of human labourers without resulting in mass poverty - freeing up time for more creative activities, and distributing the wealth created by the machines to the population according to its needs. What are you going to do, bomb Canada and Europe if they implement UBI correctly, establish a 20-hour work week, their population starts living lives much better than yours, have zero working accidents and their sewages are cleaned by robots? You're being ridiculous here.
7 minutes ago, Gian-Reto said:Isn't that seen as a big problem in the US? Shouldn't politics try to reduce the amount of money it costs to become POTUS for example, by limiting what a candidate can spend during their campaign?
It is. In fact, it's a huge problem that's hotly debated practically every election cycle.
The problem is that curtailing freedoms is seen as a big no-no, and a lot of campaign spending isn't just politicians spending money, but non-profits spending money on their behalf. Blocking that is blocking endorsement, which is an infringement of freedom of speech. That's enshrined in our constitution, making it political suicide to attack in any seriously manner (and rightly so, IMO).
It goes hand-in-hand with the controversial "businesses are effectively people" supreme court decisions. It's not always about what is pragmatic or fair, but what the constitution guarantees (or what the Supreme Court thinks the constitution guarantees).
1 hour ago, mikeman said:One thing we haven't talked about is that, today, most jobs, in the West at least, is not in sectors like farming or manufacturing, but in the service sector.
For example...suppose starbucks can replace all their barristas with robots with voice-recognition that will take your order and prepare your coffee just as good as any human... is it actually desirable for them to do it? Maybe customers simply will prefer to interact with humans in such cases? In other words, talking jobs where a key part part of the service is the human interaction itself.
Maybe we'll all just become barristas and bartenders?
It's a good question imo. I don't think that those services necessarily disappear. In my proposed system, people would probably do these sort of things more for the social aspect than anything else (it'd be a great way to meet people maybe?).
But in reality, these are the sort of things we'd probably value as more and more things get automated. It'd be tough for robots to provide genuine human interaction (well, there are proposed ideas even for that actually).
54 minutes ago, Gian-Reto said:The problem with every centralized system is inefficiency and tendency to be abused. While the first might now be avoidable thanks to technology, the same technology is making the second problem an even bigger one.
While you had about a thousand underlings with a human brain needing to look away for a tyrant to get into power (which, as we have seen, was easy enough)... when most of those positions are getting automated, all that is needed is insider knowhow of the automated systems, a group of hackers, or some inside job, and only a few humans have to look away.
Sure, this is all pessimism... still lets not pretend that the risk isn't there. Maybe we do find a way this time to prevent Stalin or Mao from happening. But certainly no with blind optimism.
Well, as I said, it is an issue, but haven't we see that capitalism has been abused by people before as well? It's something we would need to deal with, but Imo it's no different than the current problems we deal with.
And this is why I keep asking about alternatives. Do people see alternatives? @Luckless had proposed something I believe, but I wasn't sure if that was a proposal or a comment.
EDIT: @Luckless also pointed out more potential abuse of the current system.
54 minutes ago, Gian-Reto said:All good points. I wonder why some US Folks are still clinging to paying way more for education, when a degree is becoming pretty much the expected norm in the professional world, and way more when they inevitably get ill, just to save on taxes (which probably will only matter that much for the rich)...
Is it because the wages are so low? Or is it simply "muh freedom" being rated higher than anything else by some folks in the US?
About the infant mortality rate... is teenage motherhood still such a big thing in the US? And AFAIK that could also be linked to the amount of cases of overweight in the US..
I guess one of the biggest issues is that the US politics, on the left and the right, is just dominated by the rich. No matter if Democrat or rebuplican, it seems it costs a ton of money to get anywhere in politics, so by the time a president is elected he probably had to beg a ton of billionaires for money.
Isn't that seen as a big problem in the US? Shouldn't politics try to reduce the amount of money it costs to become POTUS for example, by limiting what a candidate can spend during their campaign?
@SeraphLance did a pretty good examination of this in his post. It's mainly the way our system is structured. It is absolutely a huge issue. Much of it boils down to how it's sold. Sell it as a curtailing of freedom and many will get super riled up against any need to stop the mass amounts of money in politics. To be entirely fair, there is an argument to be made that it does curtail certain amendments to bar certain individuals from pumping tons of money into a cause or something. I'd still argue that there should be a cap on donations for the sake of equality, but :shrug:
43 minutes ago, Gian-Reto said:The problem with every centralized system is inefficiency and tendency to be abused. While the first might now be avoidable thanks to technology, the same technology is making the second problem an even bigger one.
While you had about a thousand underlings with a human brain needing to look away for a tyrant to get into power (which, as we have seen, was easy enough)... when most of those positions are getting automated, all that is needed is insider knowhow of the automated systems, a group of hackers, or some inside job, and only a few humans have to look away.
Sure, this is all pessimism... still lets not pretend that the risk isn't there. Maybe we do find a way this time to prevent Stalin or Mao from happening. But certainly no with blind optimism.
But being "Open to abuse" is not remotely unique to a shared collective. Current western markets are already being abused, often fairly openly, and we no only allow people to get away with the abuse, but we'll even have our governments bail them out when things go bad "For the good of the economy".
Imagine if a group of hackers made their way into banking systems? What if a group got together and started calling seniors to tell them their computer is infected and needs remote access to be cleaned up, and then proceed to steal financial info?
No system will ever be free from corruption or abuse, but rather we, as a society in general, need to develop systems that limit the potential of abuse, and people's ability to get away with it. - If everyone in a nation agrees to sets of standards of living, then it becomes a bit hard to hide the fact you're abusing things if you're reaching well above those standards where your neighbours can see you.
18 hours ago, SeraphLance said:The thing I don't buy about the whole automation angle is that we've been using technology to make people's jobs obsolete for tens of thousands of years, yet somehow an overwhelming majority of us are still employed because new jobs open up in response. Why is it treated as a foregone conclusion that this will stop happening at some point?
Frankly this sounds about as silly to me as the whole "zombie apocalypse" shtick.
I highly recommend watching CGP Grey's video "Humans Need Not Apply".
He specifically addresses that issue.
In fact, I would consider this a primer for any discussion on automation.
50 minutes ago, ChaosEngine said:I highly recommend watching CGP Grey's video "Humans Need Not Apply".
He specifically addresses that issue.
Yeah, I'm still not seeing much of a case here. We like to split "blue collar" and "white collar" up as if there's some fundamental binary difference, but it's a continuum, "Smarter" technology just broadens the range of white-collarness that machines can cover. In response, human labor opens up on the white end of the spectrum as we no longer need people doing the now-obsolete jobs.
Someone earlier responded to my statement that the growth of automation will outpace the creation of jobs to develop and maintain said automation. That's semi-fallacious. It's true that technology opens technician jobs, but it's necessarily true that fewer technician jobs will open than are closed by the automation. That's the entire point. It's not just work centered around the new technology, but new work in general as we are allowed new bandwidth for labor. We should all be aware of this phenomenon given that we're arguing about job loss on a freaking game development site.
It seems to me that the fear is that automation will cover the entire blue/white spectrum to the point where there's literally no work that can't be done by an automaton. That folds back into the original discussion on the other thread about whether an AI that can totally replace a human but doesn't simultaneously have human (or human-like) needs can exist
As for CCP Grey's video, he's got a lot of specious reasoning. The "horses" shtick is a false equivalence because horses didn't invent cars; they're not the species that the economy in question is centered around.
Now the short-term consequences of automation are observable. You can't just retrain a barista into a writer, and if your job is replaced by a machine you may have difficulty re-entering the work force. However, the idea that automation will reach the point where we as a species have nothing to do? That's going to take more convincing.
Well, if we do develop a general AI able to handle creative reasoning on par with a human, and cheaply deploy robotics that are on par or better than human dexterity (Which we're nearly at now), then exactly what kind of job do you expect a human would be more suited to than a synthetic employee? (a synthetic who doesn't have rights, and was programmed to quietly do their job without demanding things like breaks, vacation, pay, etc.)
Game development is already seeing a reduction in labour for end result - It can be hard to see on the face when you look at team sizes remaining fairly high overall, but don't forget how much more content and detail those teams are producing now as compared to ten years ago. Middleware reuse and flexibility of boxable systems freed up a lot of labour in game development, but we're seeing more and more tool automation allowing an individual to do more with their time, which means we need fewer people overall to finish the same product as compared to the tools and methods we were using before. The fact that the hardware allows more on screen content for a given run-time period is honestly doing a hell of a lot to keep employment levels from dropping too dramatically in the games sector as can be seen with what is being done with small teams producing simpler titles than the bleeding edge AAA games. - How large would development teams be today if early 3D graphics had proved to be 'just a fad', and the market demand had stuck with SNES level complexity while the hardware continued on as it had?
Complex motion capture setups for animation, and all the work it takes to clean the raw data up, is at risk of being replaced with goal based AI - Rather than dealing with a mo-cap setup, actors, and animators doing cleanup work, the process can start with an animator clicking around a screen and timeline generating goal-points, and the AI wireframe generator fills in the details. (Basically condensing the wisdom and experience of dozens of human animators over years of work into a neat little reusable package that a single animator can fine tune to specific needs.)
So, we as society can stick our heads in the sand and pretend that everything will be fine, or we can step up and start having a real discussion on addressing issues of how we are all going to live and be able to enjoy life.
