Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Making Sense with Sam Harris
#151 — Will We Destroy the Future?
Mar 18, 2019 · 103 min · (93.9MB)

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Nick Bostrom about the problem of existential risk. They discuss public goods, moral illusions, the asymmetry between happiness and suffering, utilitarianism, "the vulnerable world hypothesis," the history of nuclear deterrence, the possible need for "turnkey totalitarianism," whether we're living in a computer simulation, the Doomsday Argument, the implications of extraterrestrial life, and other topics.
You can support the Making Sense podcast and receive subscriber-only content at samharris.org/subscribe.

bouncingboredom wrote:

If you go back many centuries you encounter a society in which the vast chunk of people worked in agriculture and relatively fewer did skilled jobs like masonry, shipbuilding and the like, some were merchants, and then you had the landed classes. Fast forward to the present day, through the industrial revolution, and agriculture is now light years ahead in terms of productivity compared to the medieval era for example. The number of people employed in agriculture is minimal, yet the yields from farms is insanely high compared to historical standards. As the economy grows and becomes more productive it releases labour to other industries and creates additional opportunities for capital investment.

Yes, agricultural jobs dried up, so people moved into industrial roles. They dried up, so a few moved into the service industries. now those are being automated, so where do they go now? Capital investment isn't being used to improve the productivity of the existing workforce, it's being used to replace them.

Tell all that to the thousands of ex-miners and factory workers who were dumped by the wayside. You say "capital investment will save them", but it singularly didn't, as the capital was invested instead in yachts, mansions and property. automation isn't helping to improve the productivity of workers, it's being used to replace them because human employees are the biggest cost. Private investors gain the profit from reducing employment costs because they offload the costs of dealing with that (increased public spending on unemployment benefits, law enforcement, healthcare, education etc) onto the general public.

The only response to this is "well, they can get new jobs in the service industries", or in creative positions or whatever the next buzzword is. Except someone who's retraining late in life is at a disadvantage and the people who have arranged things so that this person is out of a job aren't interested in helping. And even if they do, that new career is the next thing to be reduced by technology. In the last generation it was heavy industry, , this generation is basic service jobs and the next one will be professional roles - the financial, legal and medical professions are already being affected.

Basically, the fact that we're at the level of development we have today and still let people live in any sort of squalor is an absolute failure of the system.

bouncingboredom wrote:

AndrewGPaul wrote: automation isn't helping to improve the productivity of workers, it's being used to replace them because human employees are the biggest cost. Private investors gain the profit from reducing employment costs because they offload the costs of dealing with that (increased public spending on unemployment benefits, law enforcement, healthcare, education etc) onto the general public.

I literally gave you an example of how technology and automation is helping to improve the productivity of the GW workforce, as just one example. Without meaning to be disrespectful, based on your response I'm not sure you understand what productivity means in the context of the economics of labour. You also don't seem to understand how productivity improvements in one industry help the economy as a whole, principally by a) driving down the cost of products and services, freeing more of our money to spend on new and emerging markets (compare the cost of mobile phones now to twenty years ago) and b) increased investor returns generating more capital for investment elsewhere, again often in new and emerging markets.

As to your final point about public spending, where do you think most of the money for that comes from. You say "the general public", which leads me to believe that you're probably not aware of where most of the tax revenue spent by governments comes from.

This would suggest that the majority of UK tax revenue is from taxing the public, not from business taxation:

https://www.ukpublicrevenue.co.uk/current_revenue

although I can’t find a split of indirect taxes and VAT.