Every time wealth disparity comes to the forefront in society the powers that be stamp that out real quick. I feel a lot of the left-right confrontations are just so we are pre occupied amongst ourselves. Divide and conquer and all that.
If you couldn’t tell, my post above was generated by the Assistant with a ‘get me a pessimistic rebuttal of the following comment’ prompt… it used arguments which I agree with, but when asked for an optimistic agreement it produces convincing rationales, too.
The problem here is this technology very obviously pro-wealth concentration since I can’t see a way which in the limit doesn’t make everybody need it to stay competitive.
(If you can’t tell it’s the real me, not the AI - the AI is so much better at plausible rants it isn’t even close)
The entire raison d'etre of left politics is that gross wealth disparities are a leading indicator of one class of economic actors exploiting another to the general detriment of the latter. The socialist ideal is that everyone works a bit and nobody has to work too much because the system selects for maximizing the collective good rather than hoarding and leverage. This is, of course, never attained in practice early socialist thinkers had an overly simplistic view of humanity and thought that it was just a matter of raising people with a different set of values for a generation or two.
On the other hand, the capitalistic view of humanity as creatures of pure self interest or the economic notion of people being rationalist utility maximizers are also deeply flawed.
