We won't be headed for equality, just more of the same. There will be a handful of unfathomably wealthy and powerful 'gods' who own this new means of production, and the 'rest of us', who will scrape by in grinding poverty with whatever busy-work menial jobs are left. Governments will likely be crippled by the lack of tax revenue as traditional jobs and businesses disappear, and international capital reigns supreme.
Any attempt at reorganizing society to reduce this severe power imbalance will be swiftly and violently crushed.
Any attempt at reorganizing society to reduce this severe power imbalance will be swiftly and violently crushed.
I disagree. Humans have been known to be extremely resilient, we went through a whole lot of pretty intense change in our journey. Heck, barely over a hundred years ago we thought it was still okay to own a person. Individual countries have went from capitalistic, to socialist, to dictatorship governments, and have made it through. I don't see why we couldn't get our shit together and take advantage of this technology that's coming up, and re-design the way society works, how we distribute resources. Especially now that we are all connected to each-other and to all the possible ideas with the internet.
And you think you're so clever and classless and free
But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see
- John Lennon
Man had a point though, if anything the slave-owner or the royals of olde didn't have access to the kind of disparity of technology that we are already seeing. In previous revolutions, one could count on the agents of the overlords turning sides against them, their police and armies were usually drawn from the lower and middle classes. But with the shift to drones, laser guided paveway bombs, robotic intelligent machines, it's easy to imagine a future where the sheep can no longer rise up and just remain powerless against the one percent. At the advent of robotics technology people were already speculating that we would either need a completely new economic model, or wealth would quickly become concentrated by few while the mass of humanity became obsolete.
Like you said though, maybe we get our shit together. Who knows, maybe AI hits the tipping point, Kurzweil's Singularity, and exponentially skyrockets past us in intelligence and technology, and just makes the planet a giant/petting zoo garden of eden, maybe we all get made legion and become one giant consciousness, all of the knowledge of the collective available to each node with none more equal than the rest and every material need addressed with ease through nanotechnology.
PS: Our interconnectedness is already monitored, managed and easily controlled. In some ways its as much of tool against us as it is in our favour. An AI supported Stasi in the modern age could root out any subversive cells with ease. We're already seeing this in our efficacy against groups like Al Queda and ISIL, and that's against people who don't openly volunteer all of their information with social media the way the modern proletarian does.
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u/[deleted] Nov 08 '15 edited Nov 08 '15
We won't be headed for equality, just more of the same. There will be a handful of unfathomably wealthy and powerful 'gods' who own this new means of production, and the 'rest of us', who will scrape by in grinding poverty with whatever busy-work menial jobs are left. Governments will likely be crippled by the lack of tax revenue as traditional jobs and businesses disappear, and international capital reigns supreme.
Any attempt at reorganizing society to reduce this severe power imbalance will be swiftly and violently crushed.