Sfdebris.net

clearspira wrote: ↑Tue May 16, 2023 12:29 pm

hammerofglass wrote: ↑Tue May 16, 2023 9:23 am You end up with the same problem that always happens; once you have specialists whoever specializes in violence siezes power almost immediately. It's an inherent flaw in human nature and I've yet to see an anarchist or communist proposal that really addresses it.

Artificial Intelligence is the only way any of these more idealistic non-capitalist ideas will ever happen. Take the decision making out of the hands of humans. Once again, its how The Culture series by Iain M Banks does it. (yeah I know, I go on about the series a lot, but it really is that good.)

The Minds in the Culture don't appear to be any fundamentally different to us. Sure, they've got access to far more power but at heart their behaviour isn't really all that different. They're involved in several conflicts in the series. In one they respond with what's described IIRC as "a Culture terror weapon" (think it was in Look to Windward, which is inconveniently the one I can't find right now).

This is a different discussion, but y'know, there have been so many people bleating about the dangers of AI in the news recently. But I say... why is the coming AI controlled world something to be automatically feared? What is it about the world that we humans have created that is so great? This world of inequality, war, abuse, murder and torture? AI doesn't have to be our end when it could be our beginning.

If you want to be belittled, if you want to treat your fellow human beings with such contempt as to try to marginalise them like that, if you want to turn us all in to useless lumps of flesh, incapable of and prevented from trying to do anything on our own, then by all means embrace that. Personally I'd much rather take my chances without it. I'm bloody cynical myself but not even I'm cynical enough to believe we'd be better off without ourselves, sacrificing living for existing, and that's what you're describing.

AI has nothing to offer worth having, at least outside very narrow, specialised areas. It should not be part of day to day life.

If we're doing fictional AIs my personal favorite version (which I honestly think is most likely) is Schlock Mercenary. Built AIs and uploaded organics might think faster than meat brains but they're still ultimately just people.

I've viewed the transition of England to Capitalism as parallel to the origins of the U.S. The Bougise class first forming at the same time the early Colonies were founded. 1773 was both the Boston Tea Part and the Enclosure Act. Then in 1776 Adam's Smith Wealth of Nations the the Bougsise's Declaration of Independence.

Thomas Paine was the most Progressive Founding Father but even never further Left then Social Democracy. Thomas Spence criticized his Agrarian Justice from The Left.

I agree with that in principle but you're a century or so late. Enclosure was a big motivation for Cromwell's followers in the Civil War and for the specific Puritan faction that landed in Plymouth, and Jamestown was colonized by an early corporation.

Yeah that fits in with my idea, it was a process.

Madner Kami wrote: ↑Fri May 12, 2023 3:08 pm

BridgeConsoleMasher wrote: ↑Fri May 12, 2023 2:47 pm A lot of people react to lack of public provision viscerally as if it’s synonymous with immediate danger.

Sorry, what?

There’s also a bit of “old west” Romanticism with regard to living in simpler times without middle class burdens and lower class traps. That’s basically it. A lot of it depends on your circumstance, now or then, but much more back then.

No lower class traps in Feudalism? There's no middle class in Feudalism. You're either a landed knight or a landless peasent in bound servitude to a landed knight, aka a factual slave. It literally needed half of Europe to die from the Black Death, before peasents were in a position to put economic pressure and, by consequence, societal pressure on the landed aristocracy.

Yeah that goes without saying. Surely enough though, if all of that was handled consistently as it does today with liberalized financial markets and the burden of middle class accounting requisites, I’m sure it would have a profoundly negative impact on the already morbid experience.

It shows how malleable the very concept of Feudalism is that someone in this thread argued it ended about 1300 but I recently watched a YT video arguing it didn't start till after 1300.

youtu.be/H03H73tdh6s
I do disagree with much of the thesis of that video, I left a comment.

The Emphasis on Enclosures of the Commons is for thing a purely English thing, the Continent never had the Commons in that way to begin with. Whether an Enclosure is helping create Capitalism or enforce Feudalism depend son who it's being Enclosed for, they were usually being Enclosure by and for ethe Feudal Aristocracy till the 1700s.

I always like to bring up feudalism as a point against the eternalness of capitalism as a concept.

Capitalism is actually a fairly new concept.

It requires, fundamentally, money to be the guiding part of the ruling class and society versus food or land.

MithrandirOlorin wrote: ↑Sun May 21, 2023 5:23 am It shows how malleable the very concept of Feudalism is that someone in this thread argued it ended about 1300

I can't recall anyone here doing that.

MithrandirOlorin wrote: ↑Sun May 21, 2023 5:23 ambut I recently watched a YT video arguing it didn't start till after 1300.

If that arguement was made, then the person in question is an idiot.

Madner Kami wrote: ↑Sun May 21, 2023 6:10 pm

MithrandirOlorin wrote: ↑Sun May 21, 2023 5:23 am It shows how malleable the very concept of Feudalism is that someone in this thread argued it ended about 1300

I can't recall anyone here doing that.

MithrandirOlorin wrote: ↑Sun May 21, 2023 5:23 ambut I recently watched a YT video arguing it didn't start till after 1300.

If that arguement was made, then the person in question is an idiot.

TGLS did
viewtopic.php?f=22&t=7352&p=127939&hilit=1300#p127939

I actually think the rise of Paper Money is the key factor in what Defined the Capitalist Era as opposed to prior Eras.