There’s a sticking point that no one’s been able to explain to me:
If you’re in the minority, revolution is against the democratic will of the people.
If you’re in the majority, you have the votes to actually accomplish something with reform. It’s not like we live in a monarchy, reform is possible under our system.
If reform isn’t working to bring about your goals, either your goals aren’t popular enough, or they are popular but the people lack the will and organization to vote for them.
If the people lack the will and organization to vote effectively, they certainly lack the will and organization to topple the government.
My area of expertise is managing complex systems and change implementation. I sincerely don’t understand how revolution is supposed to work where reform doesn’t. No one has been able to give me an answer that doesn’t bill down to idealistic hope. How is this revolution supposed to be implemented, and why can’t we build the foundation for revolution while simultaneously using the tools we have for reform? Wouldn’t widespread support for reform be the best possible proof of consensus?
I think (reading aint my cup of tea so I do what I can) that the idea is that the majority of the people are easily swayed
one could argue that this is the case now with the amount of capitalist and anti-leftist projections
and the idea to fix the root cause of the above is tackled by each revolution-worthy system - education, free time, access to knowledge, etc.
though youve got a very good point that if we depend on stupid people to build something better, were buiding it on/with stupid people
good discussion subject, I’ll take it to my friends
Excellent point
departs when full
I love this detail.
Thought this was about the UK reform party at first, still works
Cmon bro, just one more reform, bro. It will fix the system. Bro, i promise. Bro, bro its going to serve us all. This time realy, bro.
What is a revolution if not a lot of small reforms happening all at once?
7·15 hours agoIt is the overthrowing of the current system, and replacing of it with a different one. Not a bunch of small reforms happening all at once.
Funny, the revolution is the one not spinning…
The one not spinning endlessly in a trapped cycle, yes. That’s the point, the reform side is “moving” in place, never actually moving nor is it capable of moving. The revolution van is capable of moving.
I think they’re making a joke that one of the definitions of “revolution” is making a complete circle. In the cartoon, “reform” is making a ton of revolutions.
It’s a play on words joke
Ah, I’m stupid, got it now!
The AI haters will hate this, but I think AI is gonna provide the push that forces the fundamental changes we want. You can only replace so many people with AI and robots. The theoretical point of zero employees also means zero customers, because nobody has any money to buy anything, so making employees obsolete makes business and profits obsolete. In the real world the system will change long before that point, because it will have to. It might be from food riots and social breakdown, or political movements finally taking hold, I don’t know, but AI will make the profit system eat itself. I’m just not looking forward to the extremely difficult transition period.
I want to believe you’re right, but in a world where AI can fully replace human labor, that will likely also apply to the areas of mass surveillance and military suppression.
Imo, one of the scariest and most frustrating developments in robotics in the past 50 years is the ability to process billions of text and voice conversations, all at once, 24/7. Things really take a different tone when all of a sudden the US Government can find it feasible to listen to all of us, every time.
Yes, we’re going to have these surveillance capabilities. Anti-AI memes and boycotts won’t stop it. The rational choice is to develop authority structures the public can trust. Instead of treating the whole concept of authority as the enemy by default, we have to figure out a way to make it trustworthy. The question is how, and I don’t have that answer but I know that’s the question. I see it as kind of analogous to how providing basic income, healthcare, etc. for everybody would cut down on crimes of survival. When people aren’t desperate they don’t do desperate things. If making laws didn’t attract money and prestige, greedy people wouldn’t be part of it but public-spirited people would.
I think you’re talking about accelerationism. IMO, the main problem with unrestrained AI growth is that if AI turns out to be as good as the hype says it is, then we’ll all be dead before revolution occurs.
The trick is to judge things on their own merit and not on the hype around them.
In that case, you should know that Geoff Hinton (the guy whose lab kicked off the whole AI revolution last decade) quit Google in order to warn about the existential risk of AI. He believes there’s at least a 10% chance that it will kill us all within 30 years. Ilya Sutskever, his former student and co-founder of OpenAI, believes similarly, which is why he quit OpenAI and founded Safe Superintelligence (yes that basic html document really is their homepage) to help solve the alignment problem.
You can also find popular rationalist AI pundits like gwern, acx, yudkowsky, etc. voicing similar concerns, with a range of P(doom) from low to the laughably high.
I agree with you that AI will probably replace a lot of white-collar jobs by 2035, which is not that far away, and it will necessitate political change.
I also consider that UBI (Universal Basic Income) is probably the most natural way forward. It pays a constant amount to each person per month, based on money collected through a wealth tax. It does not have to be implemented all-at-once, but can be gradually introduced. I.e. only provide $200/(person*month) in the beginning, and then continuously scale up as needed.
The wealth tax is needed simultaneously because the money has to come from somewhere. Printing money anew is not great because it leads to steep inflation.
Exactly, and as automation gradually makes profits obsolete, the wealth tax and UBI should evolve from money into a basic right to receive goods produced by the automation. Money is really just a middleman. If we eliminate scarcity we won’t need it.
I want to believe you’re right. But everything else so far has just been a gradually applied multiplier on human labor, not a full replacement. Instead of a sudden tipping point, we’d watch each other become destitute one by one, perpetually looking out for only ourselves.
June 14th
We only do DraftKings here!
not usually on your own soil (openly), but yes you do.
Your right and that’s why June 14th is the protest day - https://www.nokings.org/
i wish you luck and all the best
Thanks, I appreciate it.
Chance the “Socialism” label on the bus to “Fascism” and the comic would still work.
Well yeah, it’s the job of the political process to figure out in which direction the bus should drive …
The hell it would. Fascism will drive with an empty bus, so to speak.
Would it really? My understanding was it only took off because so many people went along with it.
Yeah. Within the confines of this political cartoon: Fascism relies on people staying on the reform carousel. Reform only has as much power as there are people getting on the revolution bus, and fascists know this.
en empty bus disguised as a huge mean-looking paper tiger if necessary.
