We should have a healthy fear for all of these things, I think.

There is historical precedent for this. The Industrial Revolution led to the rise of communism and labor organization and revolts around the world.

I think the risk that this will be challenged through a totalitarian impulse is very high. And I think we are sleepwalking towards these problems.

I don't suspect we will see these crises in the less than 5 year time horizon, though.

The risk of that happening is certainly not zero.

Fear. But also a senses of identity and community.

I think information technology and AI really is different than the steam engine, in terms of its cultural and social purchase.

I am sympathetic to the arguments that these things will not necessarily cause mass-unemployment, and will instead push us up the productivity curve. But that's not my core worry. My core worry is how these things interact with human nature in a fundamental way.

There's already evidence that social media has increased political polarization and radicalization on two ends of the spectrum. Nobody predicted the incentives would play out that way. In fact, there was quite a bit of optimism in the late oughts that these technologies would be emancipatory, lead to higher-brow conversations, and create a universal truth layer.

The fact we are even here, trying to redesign these interactions from the ground up, is testament to that.

I'm not sure past technological epochs can be held up on an apples-to-apples basis, here.

I wouldn't use the term "socialist", since that involves implications for economic production modes. But I think the vast majority of people have some degree of innate collectivist impulse. I think libertarians and anarchists are incorrect in believing the default human impulse is more closer to egoism.

The mere existence of populist movements, and their tendency to rise, both in democratic and non-democratic contexts, would appear to represent a significant empirical challenge to any assumption to the contrary.

Frank Herbert's Dune does feature a form of luddism as part of its lore! In it, they have banned artificial intelligence. Forgot about that.

Probably a minority fit into that category today. Most misunderstand it. Many misunderstand it for good reasons. Even though the FTX collapse has nothing to do with bitcoin, it's easy for me to empathize with why people who don't have much time in the day to go deep into understanding everything, might see bitcoin as merely tulips.

I see some people in these parts getting mad at such people and/or dismissing them as idiots. We probably shouldn't do that.

There are seeds of it, yes.

No. I think Bitcoin can and will be successful. But it's not going to shape the world into an anarcho-capitalist utopia like many think, where society has brushed off all non-voluntary power structures. That's a political fairy tale.

Yeah. I mean, I hope I'm wrong. Who doesn't want to live in utopia? I want that for my kids and myself. But all the knowledge of accumulated on human nature and human group dynamics points me towards believing there's quite a bit of trouble ahead, socially and politically.

It's one of the reasons thoroughly unconvinced by books like the Sovereign Individual and more recently, Balaji's Network State.

These frameworks for future society are built atop axioms and assumptions of the human condition that I do not believe map onto reality.

I'm pretty concerned it could turn into a form of authoritarian and be a deeply illiberal and undemocratic movement.

The human brain evolved over millions of years to adapt to an environment is no longer lives in. The idea it's simply going to acquiesce into techno-utopia, short of genetic engineering or some kind of invasive external manipulation is not something I'd place bets on.

Yes. But my point is, they will form a broad political power base.

Will read. I don't think the luddism will come from the elites. I think it will form in populist movements.

*next

I think we are going to see the rise of neoluddism in our politics in the nest 5-10 years.

From what I can tell, the Eastern EU countries are having none of that shit right about now.