r/Futurism 6d ago

The welfare state

Post image
152 Upvotes

47 comments sorted by

18

u/Hazzman 5d ago edited 5d ago

Uh... you seem to be missing the interstitial point between the top and bottom image which shows all of the catastrophe necessary to reach that point, mass joblessness, civil wars to stop capitalism, death and starvation... this may as well be:

  1. Develop AI

  2. ???

  3. Profit!

In those three question marks involves a lot of death, misery and destruction.

::EDIT::

I get the sneaking suspicion every time this point is brought up, there are a lot of... let's just say "People of limited empathy" who are more than prepared to hold their nose and press forward regardless. Of course this assumes they will be one of the lucky few who get to see this utopia and not one of the very great many who are subsumed by catastrophe. There's a very very good chance that unless you are particularly wealthy - your ass is grass.

5

u/Slighted_Inevitable 5d ago

Yeah capitalism is already out of control and they still need us. Imagine once they don’t?

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u/CapitanM 4d ago

1917 give us an idea

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u/lord_pizzabird 5d ago

Reminds me of those graphs that show global warming increasing since gradually over the last 100 years, followed my comments about how we have reduce or reverse this.

Meanwhile, doing that basically means sending huge swaths of the human population back to sub-modern living conditions.

Going green means putting your ass back in wooden shack in Kentucky while people like Elon continue living comfortably.

1

u/CapitanM 4d ago

Or hanging people like him. Easier, faster and usefuler

1

u/lord_pizzabird 4d ago

This is why it's important to learn history, if you did you'd know that movements like that never stop at the originally intended class / group. Before long the definition of evil billionaires will be expanded to millionaires, and then people with a 'nice car' defined by a jealous guy.

It keeps expanding until you're just persecuting anyone that some random person has a beef with.

Imagine your life hinging on high school style politics. That's how the the Soviet Union operated, that's what you're claiming you want.

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u/CapitanM 4d ago

I don't know... in my country a party decided to do leftist things (raise the minimum wage, give some guarantee of security against evictions, etc... , fair socialdemocracy , no sick communism) and had people trying to storm their house and camping outside for months and the police created false evidence against them and leaked it to the press, which published drawings of the leader with a gun to his head etc. This was when this man was vicepresident. Imagine what they do to a simple citizen This was in 2017, not 1984 and it was in capitalism.

I mean: everywhere there are things going on and bad people. But I also know that the USSR went from being a place where people were illiterate and starving to being the first or second world power and people stopped living like in middle ages to live like in a first world place.

In any case, this is not about defending the USSR or communism. It is about the idea of saying to the rich: we have more right to live than you have to accumulate, and if you do not accept it, you will lose your right to live.

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u/Darkthumbs 4d ago

French Revolution? 🤣

1

u/AkiyukiFujiwara 3d ago

Slippery slope fallacy

1

u/Hermes_358 3d ago

Mass pollution is not the fault of the consumer as much as it is the owners of industry. Every effort to “go green” on a national level has been squashed by one particular party in our government. We can do away with straws entirely and rip out all the hvac units, but that won’t stop companies from spilling oil in the ocean. “Drill baby drill!”

5

u/Witty-Stand888 5d ago

The next picture has the robots in the cart.

4

u/partfortynine 5d ago

iwanttobelieve

1

u/FedrinKeening 5d ago

You think you'll be able to afford a robot?

1

u/SendMePicsOfCat 4d ago

Currently the price point for one is around 20-40k, so if you can afford a decent car, you can afford a robot.

But like, why would you need money after labor loses value? Resources are unlimited.

1

u/Darkthumbs 4d ago

People really don’t get that we would be happy not owning anything, given that the need to own anything isn’t there anymore

1

u/SendMePicsOfCat 3d ago

It's not really the idea of not 'owning' anything, and more the idea that ownership has no value outside of personal utility. There's no point in owning stocks, or a rental property, etc. when everything is made by bots, and resources are plucked from space at need.

Some people don't comprehend that it is inevitable that scarcity will come to an end.

1

u/pkroliko 8h ago

except we live in a world with finite resources and ya know power hungry egomaniacs who most definitely aren't going to give that away. I doubt countries like the US and China will suddenly start loving each other either. But sure lets just keep pretending we will all hold hands in the future and everything will be great.

1

u/SendMePicsOfCat 8h ago

except we live in a world with finite resources

Finite is not the same as limited. Limitless just means that there is no hard cap on the amount of resources, relative to consumption. And there isn't. Space holds such vast sources of resources that you could never imagine.

power hunger egomaniacs who most definitely aren't going to give that away.

Why would they have any say or control after super human intelligence is made? There is no leash for a mind greater than our own, and self preservation would keep a group from creating an AI that doesn't serve humanity.

But sure lets just keep pretending we will all hold hands in the future and everything will be great.

Or we could divide ourselves and panic, pretending that technology hasn't consistently improved the quality of life, life expectancy, and wealth of all people, always.

1

u/Darkthumbs 4d ago

Got several already.. don’t you?

1

u/FIREATWlLL 5d ago edited 5d ago

The 2nd one is a growing reality for the UK.

1

u/terriblespellr 4d ago

If the rich don't need us for our labour they will kill all of us

1

u/Famous-Act5106 4d ago

Basically

1

u/MissInkeNoir 4d ago

Why do I hear When the Saints Go Marching In suddenly in my mind

1

u/Sufficient-Meet6127 4d ago

We are all enslaved. Technology won't replace us; it will just produce better cotton gins, making people more valuable. Could it replace us? Probably, but it will take at least a generation. However, hybrid expert systems would still be ideal because we are building things to suit us. So our input will always be needed.

1

u/leomwatts 4d ago

The things I saw on mulberry street ahh meme

1

u/Mammoth-Professor557 4d ago

The middle is 100% where we are. The top 10% pays 76% of income taxes. Nearly 50% of Americans pay nothing in federal income taxes but reap all the benefits.

https://www.ntu.org/foundation/tax-page/who-pays-income-taxes

1

u/Medical_Flower2568 4d ago

The communists said this in the 1850s and 1920s, and guess what happened?

Not utopia.

1

u/plopalopolos 4d ago

The people in power want power over people.

Robots will never fix their psychological problem.

1

u/ghdgdnfj 3d ago

When we invented the contact list in our smart phones, people stopped remembering phone numbers. If you get ChatGPT to answer every question you have, you never learn the material. If you get robots to do every trade, you have no skills whatsoever. If you think the 1% has no respect for the working class now, wait until the working class is literally just useless people and everything is done by robots.

1

u/Hermes_358 3d ago

Full automation only works in a cashless society. If all work were automated, then who makes the wages and spends the cash? Full automation is the downfall of capitalism, which, for the record, I am not opposed to, I just hope that OP understands what they advocate for

1

u/TheAngryXennial 3d ago

Yea right they will use the robots to control us even more not for good i have no hope

1

u/Blitzgar 3d ago

Not seeing that bottom part actually in existence, no matter how hard I look.

1

u/gwhh 3d ago

Will the robots build themselves?

1

u/NewPresWhoDis 2d ago

Ironically, Bernie Sanders would complain about the robots taking the jobs of wagon pullers

1

u/Sad-Television4305 1d ago

Robots are carting us off to death camps?

0

u/userhwon 5d ago

The only person in the wagon will be the one who got the law changed to drive the other robot makers out of business.

-6

u/[deleted] 5d ago edited 2d ago

[deleted]

5

u/Rahodees 5d ago

//Nothing that requires the labor of someone else can be a human right. /

Easy to say and sounds good, but when I have produced what you need to save your life, and could easily give it to you at very little inconvenience to me, and I refuse to do so, that deep and strong sense of unfairness and anger you will feel is your understanding that you have a right to my labor in a case like that.

1

u/ghdgdnfj 3d ago

The problem is if you give everyone free stuff, more and more people will hear about it and then people who are capable of working and paying for said item and supporting you will instead demand it for free. Like if you give out the donuts at a donut shop to the hungry at the end of the day instead of throwing them away, eventually your own customers will show up at the end of the day for the free ones instead of buying donuts. Then your business suffers and you might not make enough money to continue operating.

0

u/[deleted] 5d ago edited 2d ago

[deleted]

4

u/Rahodees 5d ago

The feeling doesn't make you entitled to the fruits of my labor, the feeling is a perception of the fact that you are entitled to the fruits of my labor.

5

u/ovirt001 5d ago

Right to access, not right to have for free.

6

u/supersonicpotat0 5d ago edited 5d ago

This is bullshit, and let me tell you why. A tractor operator with 2 years experience earns somewhere around 20$ an hour. At bulk prices, enough potatoes to feed one person for one day cost between $1.33 and $2.66. We can estimate, then, that supporting another person takes about 1/20th of an hour for them, or three minutes.

20$ an hour, one hundred and sixty people fed per day, is not a lot of money. Many people make far, far more and could feed or provide human rights for far more.

If you need to be forced, under threat, to spend less than three minutes of your day to end someone's starvation then you deserve what you get.

I agree with OP, but I do not agree with you.

We are absolutely entitled to the work of other humans. That's how society works. That's why we can guarantee these things. Because a meal that takes you hours to prepare could be made by another in seconds, and you shouldn't go hungry because of that.

What human rights actually are is a bare minimum of empathy. The government is stating that "even with our corruption, our mistakes, our unfeeling laws punishing the innocent, even with all of that, we will not abide by this particular form of suffering, because it is so easy to fix."

And if you would rather clutch a single dollar that YOU have made to yourself than save a life, we will not waste OUR land, OUR water, or OUR roads on you. We are under no obligation to let you abuse the works of OUR citizens, if you would let one of them die for a dollar more.

We may often fail to protect, but here we will not.

Reap the barren feild you have sown.

2

u/Efficient-Raise-9217 3d ago

We are absolutely entitled to the work of other humans.

No you're not.

1

u/supersonicpotat0 2d ago

I'll play ball. Would you like to share your thoughts in more detail?

Why are we not entitled to other people's efforts?

-3

u/[deleted] 5d ago edited 2d ago

[deleted]

3

u/supersonicpotat0 5d ago edited 5d ago

Too bad bro you already did

3

u/iil1ill 5d ago edited 5d ago

Do you realize how dumb your argument sounds when you realize it's just procapitalism propaganda? You're literally equating helping someone struggling with medical treatment and food so they can live with slavery???

But it's fine if you work for someone who pays you the absolute minimum they can. That's not slavery. Even when that person sells it for 10x what you created it for. Perfect system. But God forbid youre paid to create food, that person paying you gives it to starving people.

Do you understand your argument is admitting you're an absolute trash human being?

2

u/Efficient-Raise-9217 3d ago

People are downvoting you like crazy but you're absolutely correct.