> On 5 Jun 2019, at 15:52, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > On Wed, Jun 5, 2019, at 15:16, John Clark wrote: >> On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 7:56 AM Lawrence Crowell >> <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> >> wrote: >> >> > Even if a completely libertarian system were established, the >> > corporations, banks and those at their top would pretty quickly go about >> > forming a government to provide a platform, a coherent set of laws etc in >> > which they could effectively conduct their commerce. Of course it would be >> > purely plutocratic, which in ways is not terribly different from what we >> > currently have, >> >> In todays world people have no choice where they get their police protection >> from, they must purchase it from the government through taxes. If the police >> worked for profit making corporations and every person could choose which >> corporation to buy police protection from please explain to me how 40 >> million Germans could murder 6 million Jews. > > Private police organizations would have every incentive to merge and form > monopolies, like corporations always try to do. Then suppose you are on the > wrong side of such a monopoly... > >> >> And Yes there would be disagreements between different police agencies >> following different laws, but I explained in my previous post how that could >> be resolved. Mostly. > > Corporations are AIs. In fact, they are AIs driven by a very simple utility > function: profit maximization. Left to their own devices, they become an > instance of Bostrom's "paperclip maximizer". We already see week versions of > this taking shape, for example: > > - Amazon warehouse workers peeing in bottles during their 12-hour shifts, so > that some more plastic crap from China that nobody really needs can be > delivered as quickly as possible, while we deplete fossil fuel reserves and > destroy our own environment; > > - Google and Facebook employ some of the brightest minds of our generation to > figure out ways to exploit loopholes in our brain, that we are not evolved to > defend again (known as supernormal stimulus), so that we collectively waste > the maximum amount of our time trapped in absurdist Skinner boxes clicking on > ads, so that we develop a strong enough desire to buy said crap from China. > Turns out that some of the most effective supernormal stimulus also lead to > Trump and Brexit, risking the destruction of institutions that took centuries > to develop. In the case of the EU, flawed as it may be, it is a miracle that > it was even possible, and it led to the longest period of peace in the entire > History of the European continent. > > Then there is the small issue of preferential attachment (aka > "rich-get-richer" or Matthew effect), inexorably leading to a world where > there is only one corporation that owns everything, and the rest of us are > its slaves. Of course, we have been there before, and at some point heads > start rolling, and back to square one we go. > > If something is to be learned from the XX century, is that there is no simple > solution, no silver bullet. There is only one answer: education and a > constant struggle for justice and freedom, always with new challenges. The > more educated people are, the more they are capable of making informed and > rational choices when they vote. Education and fundamental science are not > possible in a world where the utility function is pure profit.
I would say: education, the rule of laws and Democracy. Separation of power, as much as possible, to be vigilant about that, all the time. Liberal economy have good anti-monopoly laws, but there are well known technic to shortcut them, like the prohibition laws, which is handy technic to kill the competitors. Prohibition leads to extreme non regulated markets, but many form of coercions can do that. Freedom of expression is not free-dom of defamation, on individuals and societies of all sorts. Lies die hard. There are still some people who believe that cannabis (Hemp) is a dangerous drug justifying its interdiction, when the lies exist only since less than a century, and were very gross, denuked since day one by all independent experts, and the information is today directly available. And Cannabis is still schedule one, and illegal in most countries. But even that lie on cannabis are consequence of a much deeper lie which is that science and religion are separable, despite science can show that indeed a part of them are separable, but that is where the religion go in the direction of modesty and silence, and the listening to the other(s). Fundamentally, religion is related to the mystical experience, but institutionalised religion, even with “good intentions” transform themselves into self-empowering machinery *preventing* that experience. The reason is that such an experience free you of all argument per authority. In the theology of the machines, it seems that the genuine faith cannot fear reason nor any inquiries. It is a wall destroyer. It is what Vimalakirti called the Inconceivable Freedom. It is not a “knowledge”, it is more like a reset with a remind of our abyssal ignorance. Typically, such experience were obtained for the initiation of the adulthood, and always consists getting near Death in a way or another. But some human made money on fears, and create those fears through lies. They don’t like truth or the possible truth, of course. Truth is when the lies die. Bruno > > Telmo. > > >> >> John K Clark >> >> >> >> >> >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "Everything List" group. >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >> email to [email protected] >> <mailto:[email protected]>. >> To view this discussion on the web visit >> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv0BGixhsTH6xXVoHuL3ndsm5uLNbw49TZk1LK-VDtC%2B6A%40mail.gmail.com >> >> <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv0BGixhsTH6xXVoHuL3ndsm5uLNbw49TZk1LK-VDtC%2B6A%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>. > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/eda6d032-e49d-4876-85b7-6f1fa7bb8b60%40www.fastmail.com > > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/eda6d032-e49d-4876-85b7-6f1fa7bb8b60%40www.fastmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/5CC2BB88-9231-4587-8ED3-F12BABFB8E1B%40ulb.ac.be.
