Jesus Christ, this is toxic as fuck. You are not a bad person for enjoying life. You are not a bad person for being happy or seeking happiness. Excessive consumerism isn’t great but you are still not a bad person for owning things. You are definitely not a bad person for trying to improve your life or the life of people around you.
I have no idea why they decided to attack renewable energy, it’s undeniably better than the fossil fuel systems it’s to replace. They say they’re against alternative energy immediately after complaining that a third of the world has no electricity. This doesn’t even make sense! They don’t want you to make electricity available to people, they just want you to feel bad about it.
Inequality sucks, but you are still allowed to enjoy things.
What does make you a bad person is actively seeking to make other people’s lives worse. For instance, making a comic with the sole intention of shitting on people just living their lives.
I have no idea why they decided to attack renewable energy
Huh? The comic is complaining nerds are wasting adulthood on speedrunning and drawing comics instead of doing research that improves the world (like renewable energy).
It doesn’t read that way to me, but either way my point still stands. There is absolutely nothing wrong with doing something you like, and calling that “wasting adulthood” is incredibly fucked up.
The last line is literally telling people they are terrible for enjoying themselves. There is no excuse for that.
I’m wasting adulthood on university degrees and doing research
Speedrun guys, research is not worth how much it destroys your life.
All these mental gymnastics to avoid saying capitalism and consumerism is the problem. The “nerds” buying hardware aren’t the issue when Intel and Nvidia have literally been confirmed to gimp chip releases when they have a grip on the market.
Pictures for Sad Children was a great webcomic. Thank you for posting these.
It’s a weird conclusion to take that the people working towards or excited about a world where AI robots have automated all labour and resources and services are free and near unlimited for everyone would want to limit that to only white people, or people who are rich now - since being ‘rich’ in a world with unlimited resources isn’t really a concept.
I can only talk with certainty about myself, but I would hazard a guess that the majority of people excited about a post scarcity world are not part of the bourgeoisie, and see it as a way to solve the social injustice issues we see now but are powerless to do anything significant about, not to further exacerbate wealth inequality - there would be no motive to hoard resources in a world without scarcity, when you can have most of what you ever dreamed of and so can everyone else, including the people living in what were formerly third world countries.
It’s a dream of a paradise, not a dystopia, and it’s a dream people are actually working towards, to try and make the world better. What is the comic writer doing to make the world better? Donating a fraction of the money that current charities need? Tearing down other people’s attempts at solutions? Complaining online about how other people aren’t doing anything about the starving children in Africa?
Not to say there aren’t legitimate fears of AI, such as a misaligned ASI being created that turns into a paperclip maximiser and destroys everything we care about. But that’s a very different argument than what the comic writer is making.
Increasing wealth has only ever been observed to fuel greater inequality.
I don’t see any evidence that the value that increasing automation is bringing will be distributed more evenly.
We produce enough food for everyone and still let people starve - equal access to AI is even harder to justify than equal access to food.
I’m not so sure about that. When we compare medieval wealth inequality to now, it was worse back then. Ew, a link to Reddit, but it’s got good info.
Not saying we don’t need to fix things… we need to destroy even the concept of billionaires. While things are bad, and trending worse, they’re not yet “literally eat the rich” bad.
I’m not sure that link does have good info.
That’s a 0 point comment on ask historians, from 11 years ago, with no sources listed, no details and little explanation. The follow-up comments have a little more info but only from 1870, and even then it’s only talking about land not wealth. Also the only source linked is a NY Review of Books article that 404s.
I think it’s fairly safe to assume that wealth inequality was lower before industrialization. That really supercharges the power of capital, encouraging and rewarding larger and larger accumulations of capital. Before that it’s also much harder to get reliable data.
Aristotle in the politics mentions a plan to cap wealth inequality at 1:5. Once you have more than 5 times the poorest citizen, your wealth is redistributed. He thinks it too radical, but could you imagine anyone talking about capping CEO pay at 5 times the janitor? That’s unthinkable to us.
You would just have to let an superintelligent (aligned) AI robot loose and prompt it to produce enough food for everyone. It wouldn’t even be any maintaining effort, once the robot had been created. If it doesn’t have any negative consequences to the creators to have positive consequences for everyone else, and there are any empathetic people on the board of creators, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be programmed to benefit everyone.
As long as it doesn’t generate any negative externalities, sure. That’s a huge alignment problem though.
We don’t live in a limitless world. And adding robots will not change the limits. It just changes who does the work.
That’s why I said near unlimited. Creating a Dyson swarm will give us near unlimited energy for anything we want to reasonable do. Robots can give us near unlimited food by working tirelessly on farms on O’Neill cylinders. The same cylinders can give us near unlimited space to live, while preserving the natural world on Earth.
Some people won’t get their most outlandish fantasies, but the vast majority of people will get the vast majority of what they want, and everyone will get unlimited free time to be creative or socialise. Mandatory jobs, the great thief of time, will have been slain, assuming you believe the robots are not conscious. It would be a vast improvement on what we have now, for everyone.
So, mythical heaven? Religion made of machines. Spirituality from a piece of tech you hope to one day fix everything because of faith. Something that let’s you ignore now and possible futures so you can have a singular one to believe in.
You do understand the comic. You are just are angry it called your god fiction.
I made it to the first black bar… Am I having a stroke? It doesn’t make sense to me