That's a false-dichotomy. Capitalism was good for artisanal workers before the industrial revolution, and then it became pretty goddamn bad for them. We're worried we're staring down the barrel of that right now - just saying 'well it was even worse before capitalism' does nothing for us.
yes it does, it says that trying to prevent technology in order to protect the interests of some special class up people at the expense of everyone else is dumb and shortsighted.
If if people actually listened to the people wailing "but what about the horse carriage business!!!" in the 20th century, it would have been a disaster.
Sure, but AI pessimism is allowed to be personal. Am I supposed to be optimistic that I feel I'm about to get shafted? Should I be less concerned that I need to provide for my family, because in the long term this is going to be a great step forward for humanity?
You are addressing something totally different to the original claim - which tried to say that capitalism is inherently exploitative on labour which is just outdated Marxism
To be frank, I thought trying to twist this into an argument about whether capitalism is inherently exploitative was a complete waste of time and I replied as such. If you'll recall what we were originally talking about here - "AI, should HN users be optimistic?"
That's a good idea and FWIW I agree that as a person who might lose their job to AI, you do deserve to feel apprehensive, even if it might lead to some good later.
i think politicians have seriously underestimated how much people don't like crime, and most people would take constant surveillance if it could actually improve feelings of safety in urban environments.
I think it's also true that many people are wildly out of touch when they think about how "safe" their local municipality is.
The Bay Area is objectively safe, for example, yet I constantly run into neighbors in affluent neighborhoods who are afraid of venturing various places, letting their kids play outside or bike to school, or just generally exploring around.
I was at a BayFC match last weekend, for example, and ran into the family of an acquaintance from my elementary daughter's school. They have an 8th grader and are trying to get an intra-district transfer approved for high school so she doesn't have to go to the neighborhood school where a student brought a ghost gun on campus 3 years ago (he was arrested and successfully prosecuted, and no one was hurt)... and instead go to the local school where a handful of kids arranged their bodies in a swastika pattern on the football field (and photographed it!) several months ago. My point isn't that either of these crimes is acceptable, but that people tend to be irrational and ignorant of statistical analysis. Both of these are good schools with better than average student outcomes, but families consistently bring their own prejudices into analysis and it creates mild chaos & havoc across the system overall.
> The Bay Area is objectively safe, for example, yet I constantly run into neighbors in affluent neighborhoods who are afraid of venturing various places, letting their kids play outside or bike to school, or just generally exploring around.
A lot risks associated with "venturing various places" (which specific places?) and generally exploring around are not well-tracked in official crime statistics, precisely because the people who are affected by these crimes don't expect the police or criminal justice system to do much about them.
Arranging your bodies in a swastika pattern on the football field and photographing it isn't a crime in the US (nor should it be). It's reasonable to be more concerned about the school where a student brought a gun to campus. Although really both of these things sound like isolated incidents that don't say much one way or the other about what things would generally be like at either school for that incoming student.
The US media has completely fooled the public into thinking their town is a violent hellhole, and that a trip to the grocery store is endangering their lives. Fact is, violent crime has been plummeting for decades, and unless you live in one of a handful of very small hotspots, Americans live in one of the safest times in the country's history. Yet, people's perception of crime as a problem has been going up and up.
> The US media has completely fooled the public into thinking their town is a violent hellhole, and that a trip to the grocery store is endangering their lives.
I used to live in both Seattle and Portland.
I took my family to Portland last year and wanted to show them the Ground Kontrol Arcade.
Before I even parked the rental car, some vagrant on a BMX bike threatened to murder us.
you think people in those cities didn't wish they were as safe as Tokyo? maybe i was a little too focused on America specifically, we are just by far the worst.
but also imagine thinking the richest city on the entire planet should just be fine with 3x the homicide rate of other comparable cities and 20-30x worse than Beijing or Tokyo. I mean its just embarrassing that you think your comment is defensible.
We've completely resigned ourselves to living in the most dangerous developed country by a long shot for no good reason.
Enforcing public safety effectively is one of the most pro-democracy things you can do. Otherwise people use democracy to elect public safety authoritarians like the wildly popular Bukele and Duterte.
Yeah, I'm all for public safety in theory but seems like these days that's just a dog whistle for "go hard on whatever sort of petty deviance I don't like" and so I'm unwilling to support things like that in the default case. It's all just so tiresome.
I read OP differently. I thought they said "we should invest in non-dystopian public safety[1] to avoid dystopian populist creating a 1984 version of public safety".
[1]: I imagine this includes things like mental heath help, housing, and other related social safety nets.
It's been both normalized and suppressed. I'm old enough to remember not being to able to point out SF crime problems without being called a fascist. It's denial, it's perverse. Noah smith claims that our(USA) "solution" to it, besides just ignoring it, was basically giving up on cities and moving to suburbs.
It is antithetical to capitalism as well. The whole basis of capitalism is property rights, and it generally encourages the public doing things themselves instead as private individuals instead of relying upon a bureaucrat or public agency to do everything unless there is a major reason not to.
And here they are telling you that you cannot use your own property to help alleviate issues in your community. That sounds more like an exaggeration of Communist attempts at division of labor and to 'organize' a civilization.
What you're wrestling with is the difference between what capitalists tell you capitalism is in order to make you support capitalism, and what capitalism actually is. "Do as I say, not as I do" kinda thing.
> Giving away food to homeless is a crime in many places. Bad capitalism.
How is this due to capitalism?
I mean, I can maybe see how you can tie it to NIMBYism, and from there to capitalism through the desire to maintain or increase property values. But that's a stretch, and only one mechanism
There are many drivers for this type of regulation, some more well-meaning than others. Most of them would not go away simply because we ceased private ownership of the means of production
I don't care about the definition in some 300 year old scroll.
The majority alive say this is capitalism, then this is capitalism. Appealing to the authority of the dead is no different to me than appealing to Jesus and God.
no i cant. chatgpt is a mobile app/website, not a model or agentic harness. if you are confusing these things then sadly you have no idea whats going on.
He is absolutely a fraud. He has been lying about many things for more than a decade to boost his stock. He has more in common with Trevor Milton than anyone else.
An atheist might call Franklin Graham or Jerry Falwell a fraud, but the people who fill the stadiums and pews keep coming back, year after year, decade after decade, generation after generation. They are obviously getting something positive out of the experience.
Same with Musk and the stock market. At some point, victim-blaming may be the only rational explanation left. His followers are rubes falling for a fraud, yes, but it can hardly be considered involuntary or exploitative at this point. The rubes have become rich simply by sticking together under Musk's benevolent gaze, dominating financial discourse in the broader market. It will continue to work for them, right up until it doesn't.
No but I have now. It’s hard to tell from that few seconds but it doesn’t look like it’s really putting the developer in the driving seat, just providing a minimal escape hatch for manual edits.
can you imagine two years in the future and still believe this will be true? You are just dragging your feet. You will give in sooner or later, and i would suggest sooner.
It's true but it's also not real growth. It will look good the first time you do it. It also relies on there being no negative growth induced by AI not meeting the same quality of output that thousands of workers were once doing.
If it is truly because of AI, then it's still a losing strategy long term in my opinion.
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