Was he right about technology?

Nah, he was right. You just don't see it because you're the kind of person Uncle Ted was talking about.

d-do you browse /r/collapse too?

wtf ted was only 5'1" - 5'2"?????? he a dwarf like that hobbit bilbo. kek.

more or less yes. the only technology that's good is what you can fully control, which is basically nothing in current times

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Nope, just another parasite.

You're just retarded. Thinking from an individual's point of view is your first error.

I don't think those markings are every inch dear. Otherwise his head would be between 1 and 2 inches tall. He looks 5'9" ish

The problem is the naivete of the techno-utopians. For some dumbass reason they thought (and plenty still do) that the benefits of automation will be distributed across society. What really happened (e.g. during the Industrial Revolution) and will happen again is that the capitalist class will benefit disproportionately.

Governments are adapting just fine. They're owned by the capitalist class, and do the bidding of the capitalist class. Hence the 40+ year long attack on unions, pensions, full-time work, etc.

I'm conflicted. Clearly our obsession with technology is bordering on mental illness now, and he is right that you can't put the genie back in the bottle. On the other hand, the cryptoanarchist in me says that there's no way to defeat the leviathan other than to starve/attack him with said uncontainable technology. I don't think there is anything that can be done other than to wait for the inevitable collapse and pray that humanity survives long enough to learn its lesson.

Only the "capitalist class" could make use of early IR technology because it can only be taken advantage of if you have a large industrial apparatus in the first place. Large, expensive, single-purpose goods like water wheels or automatic looms are not useful in the home. The idea that this was suppressed from the people is pure socialist delusion.

Nowadays, we have much more widely available, cheap, multi-purpose technology. Look at the computer for example. Was this suppressed by those evil capitalists that control everything on earth? No. In fact, they brought microcomputers to the home as soon as it was technologically possible. Much more profit to be made in that than renting out terminals, even with slow adoption. And now look at how many people use it as a means of production.

Only the wisest can awake to the fact that he uses technology as an escapism mean. What a man really wants is to crush his enemies.

In your knee-jerk reaction to the phrase "capitalist class" (which is a non-judgmental description of the class of people who have capital), you've managed to miss the point entirely.

Techno-utopians have always thought that automation would free them from labor, but that they would continue to benefit from the fruits of the labor that was now being done by machines. The idea was never that every single workman would have an automated loom him his home.

But, just as in the Industrial Revolution, most people will not own the tools of the new economy. Truckers will not, by and large, own self-driving trucks and be able to spend their days fishing while their truck earns a living for them. J.B. Hunt will purchase a fleet of them and leave the truckers out of a job.

And by pointing out early vs. modern industrial revolution, I hoped to point out that the effects are democratizing. It is the nature of the technology that causes this. It has enable more ways that one can create wealth with a small, cheap, multi-purpose device over time.

I don't think you grasp the possibilities here. "Buy a robot and lay in a hammock" is a gross simplification, though the basic premise is true. Dividends will start to replace labor wages, starting at the top and working down. We will see the average person increasingly invest in ownership, whether joint-stock company or mutally run co-op.

Just as this technology democratizes wealth, so does it reduce the barrier to entry for businesses. If the technology manages itself so well that giant corporate juggernauts don't suffer significant diseconomies of scale from it, then it follows that it is easier for the layman to manage as well. (And, of course, large businesses still suffer from other types of diseconomies of scale.) The amount of management and overhead costs necessary to run a business shrinks greatly at every size, which enables greater competition in the long run.

I'm still baffled people are diving head long into developing AIs when the weak shit they've got now quickly and rapidly spirals out of their control.

I understand what you were trying to do, but you failed.

You gave the example of the microcomputer and its near-ubiquity these days. There are lots of problems with your example, but here are two of the important ones.

Very few, if we're talking about people who use computers for production on their own behalf. Computers are, indeed, in almost every cubicle, office, and home throughout the first world, but only for a very few people are they anything but a glorified typewriter, or filing cabinet, or presentation maker, or way to send out memos. The vast majority of computer users are still selling their labor to the capitalist class for a fraction of the value it generates. In terms of the economic relations in which they participate, they're no different than an assembly line worker operating a tool. The tool is merely a computer in this case.

Your point is invalidated on the basis of this alone. But let's tackle the second problem I wanted to point out.

Again using the example of the development of the microcomputer market, you insist that it is

that will enable your vision of the future. Much of the future automation that will disrupt labor so significantly in the coming decades, however, doesn't involve devices that are small, cheap, and multi-purpose. As in my example of the truck driver, a self-driving truck is not small, not cheap, and not meaningfully multi-purpose (unless you mean that it can deliver batteries and office chairs, instead of just batteries).

Automated factories are not small, not cheap, and are often highly specialized.

You seem to anticipate my point that not all of the coming automation will be cheap, so you drag out the idea that people will be able to access partial ownership of it through joint-stock companies or coops.

How, exactly, are people who currently have no significant capital supposed to make any meaningful investment in such a joint-stock company or coop? If you say "They'll take out a loan," you have very little idea of how lending works.

You assert that the coming automation will be democratized, and give as an example the evolution of the microcomputer market. But computers are cheap and ubiquitous *now* and have not fundamentally altered the fact that most people sell their labor in order to subsist. Joint-stock companies and coops exist *now*, but most people are not able to live off of dividends.

Indeed, one of the most important differences between the computer and the coming automation is that lots and lots of humans are still required to operate all of those computers. We can still sell our labor. That's exactly the problem with the impending automation: it will be much more extensive than before and will require many fewer humans to use and maintain. Huge numbers of people currently working will no longer be able to sell their labor, at least not at a wage high enough to subsist.

Oh my God JC a bomb!

Disregard his opinions

Every doomsayer is correct because there'll always be someone willing to carry said predicament.

Where would U bomb today if u were ted and still a free man?

Kacynski was a dumb nigger that should have been euthanized.

he was right about a lot of things, and that's the tragedy

ur mom

How exactly it will "work down"?
Capital attracts more capital. Technology only favours concentration of power. There's no reason for rich and powerful to become less rich and powerful from the new technology that will grant them more power. Why would someone give to poor if he is less in need of him with each new technology advancement?

Ted is a bizarre creature. He rails against leftist or leftish, but shares their fears about the environment and technology. I think he's a brilliant guy, but completely wrong to fear tech.

Having fears concerning the environment and technology doesn't mean sharing fears. Ted's own concerns were that technology fundamentally changed people and eventually people wouldn't be able to escape technology, because it would be everywhere. Leftist environmental concerns have different motivations and different goals.

How does the average leftist even "fear" technology? If anything they welcome it, and are on the Star Trek/the Culture/Venus project "post-scarcity" meme train. The only thing they fear is being denied the dole.

Luddites feared machines. There are a growing number of leftwingers who are deathly afraid of AI and automation. Saying people wont be able to escape technology is also defeatist, which according to Ted, is a tenet of leftwing ideology.

I want Ted's nightmare to come true. Evolution is always at work, and the ones most likely to be shut out forever from the capital class are the shit-tier lefty fishmouth-breathers.

You're not any more likely to join the capitalist class than the rest of the 99%.

He was definitely right about television being an extremely dangerous influence on the public. He also bombed and killed the fuck out of a Madison Avenue president so... based, I'd say.

ceylon mask's advanced ubi no more work advance level 2400 reddit atheist neoliberalism-masked-as-various-libertarian-and-anarchist-philosophies

is that the guy who made gentoo

Almost. If it hadn't been for the greed of capitalism fucking it over, the computer would've been patented and sold at exorbitant prices.

No that was Richard Stallman. Two different people but they do look similar.

Almost. What he said applied well to smartphones, but computers have many valid uses and before smartphones they weren't nearly as bad.

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