> Factorio pretty much founded the factory video game genre.
I’m pretty sure Zachtronics predates Factorio. SpaceChem 2011, Factorio 2020. I like Factorio more… but SpaceChem is the more demanding puzzle and the better game.
SpaceChem is in some sense a factory game, but it's not really the same genre as Factorio. It's a puzzle game whereas Factorio is more about automation and logistics.
My dream game would be something like this: SpaceChem at the micro level, Factorio at the medium level, and StarCraft at the macro level. Your proficiency at each level would affect the levels above and below it.
Probably an impossible game to make, but I can dream.
Worse, it was just almost all horses. There are a few in Central Park pulling tourists and that’s enough for the Pollyanna’s to point to and go “See! We’ll be fine!”
Horses where the plaything of the rich. Farmers were using oxen not horses for the most part. However the modern plow (invented in the mid 1830s - John Deere being the best known inventor, but others were inventing them about the same time) needed the faster speed of a horse to work well, but if the previous farming technology worked for you then oxen (or donkeys ... - there are several other work animals used in different areas for farming) were better.
There are likely more horses today than there were in 1900 - but now they are play things for the upper middle class living in the exurbs (commuting via car to their city job). Sure there are a few Amish (and other similar groups) making a living with a horse, but most of them are toys for the wealthy.
Do you have a citation for the horse number? My research [0] shows we have a 1/5 out peak number in ~1900 and our population has 5x since then. This means per capita horses in the country is down 96%, while absolute count is down 80%. Both are huge numbers.
Good call! They have info on general population which shows about double the number of horses I originally thought (at least in 2016), and declining at a good clip of 10%+/decade)
. So drop is still large but just a bit smaller.
The general point is before cars horses were used a lot, entire industries were based around them and our now gone. The toy factor does not compensate because of cost and inconvenience of owning a horse.
> the % of jobs not doable by AI and robotics approaches 0 over time.
Horse are an analogy. When they were more economically useful, there were about 5x the number of them. Now they are basically pets and we get comments like this suggesting the work they do is virtually meaningless.
> Are you a preschool teacher? Are you a doctor, a therapist, an artist?
We've already automated the artists. Doctors are currently a strong area of focus. In a world where AI replaces human thought, education becomes only for hobbyists. That leaves therapist.
I suppose we're going to need a lot of therapists.
LLMs have much better cognitive empathy than most humans have limbic+cognitive empathy - the therapists will also be automated - friction like licensing bodies will slow it down but not stop it.
It's not just the Scrooges in power. Previous attempts to actually make a better world often made a worse one, and not just because of capitalist opposition.
If you mean attempts like centralized communism - absolutely - and the failure mode should have been obvious from human nature: centralizing great power incentivizes corruption.
We don't fully know the failure modes of every alternative yet, but that doesn't mean powerful central governments + capitalism is the best alternative.
Interestingly, the Amish shape their lives around this sort of thing. With any technology, they ask themselves, "Does this make us dependent?" If the answer is yes, they refuse it.
They are more and more adopting modern technology. And where they haven't directly they have found ways to use it and be just as dependent while appearing to not. Go visit one and you discover they want to borrow your phone to buy things from Amazon...
This is the Chinese century, and even if China charts a somewhat different course than Western capitalism, it still believes that human beings should spend most of their days in some employment, even if it is just makework. A population with mostly leisure time is viewed as very threatening to social stability. I can see that model being exported to the rest of the world far more than I can imagine your utopia.
The Chinese social safety net, for individuals not covered by unemployment insurance, is strongly centered around public sector jobs (公益性岗位) that, if you see them in practice, are often plainly makework: the essence of the work has been mechanized/automated, but human beings will still be directed to be somewhere all day and look busy. There is no paying those people a dole while they stay home like in sone other countries.
Many of these jobs are things that improve quality of life for everyone else, too, like street beautification programmes. They do this alongside coming up with robotic means to also sweep streets, but yes, they find ways to hire people to just "make this place look nicer".
Is it really that crazy though? Or is it an acknowledgement that the people in power would think like Peter Thiel and if given the choice between ending capitalism or ending humanity, would pick ending humanity?
Not necessarily! In "Saturn's Children" by Stross, humanity managed to wipe itself out, but post-humans (evolved from former, ahem, entertainment androids) are doing just fine across the Solar System. There's a plot point where one of them discovers that some corporation back on Earth inherited full property rights to her body due to an old pre-human-extinction EULA, and she'll be recycled for parts if she ever sets foot in their jurisdiction (I'm paraphrasing from memory).
All the rich people become bankrupt or otherwise loose their political capital, new politicians are elected in that owe more to workers and thus enact anti-capitalist policy to win over the loyalty of workers.
That or, as rich people loose more and more of their political capital, workers get empowered and use direct action (such as strikes) to demand the end of more and more capitalistic policies, until there are none left. The rich get along with it because the alternative is loose everything.
Edit: And today's industrial society is quite far from being capitalist. Feudalism is more close to reality, seeing as the one most important factor for almost everything in life is whether you own real estate or not.
That's a very loose definition of feudalism. However if you take in account nepotism and bribery, which are more and more widespread around the world, maybe we get close to that exchange of land for loyalty that was the basis of feudalism.
> HN: A site full of bold futurists where it's easier to imagine the end of the humanity than the end of capitalism.
That's an underrated comment! Totally agree. So so much of discussion on this topic sort of assumes business as usual (both literally and figuratively) and that AI quickly diffuses through the economy, sucking up all economically useful activity, with humans falling by the wayside as inevitable collateral damage.
There's a failure of imagination taking place here that there's no other outcome. Capitalism is an evolved solution to how human community works, but is not inevitable.
Massive changes in technology pretty much always involve wars and a reshuffling of power. This doesn't have much to do with capitalism at all. It's more of a question of how are those that currently have power going to adjust. In the case of technology we quite often see this end up with a concentration of power.
How to maintain stability in a world filled with greedy people in power that don't want to give up a single penny is a good question to ask at this point.
If you're not economically useful, what pressure would you be able to bring against the government and it's drone-based police force if it does things you don't like? General strikes don't work in a world with no human labor needed.
Iran recently shot thousands to tens of thousands of its own people when they protested. If a sociopath were in power, what would stop them?
You may, but if you read the link, you’ll find it consistent with the second law of thermodynamics despite being clever about it. The demonstration of consistency requires a modern understanding of information theory, but it’s been long realized it’s likely not a real “out.”
This is true and I don’t know why it’s downvoted. IBM was notoriously obsessed with lock-in, they just bungled it with the IBM PC because they needed to move fast because they didn’t want it to slip away from them. So, they used off the shelf components that anyone else could buy.
The lenient contract with Microsoft and the unexpected to them ruling on reverse engineering the BIOS sealed their fate.
But no company wants to compete in a commodity, they all want to be monopolies. All the Unix vendors tried to be common enough to be a selling point but idiosyncratic enough to lock in their clients.
Apple isn’t nefarious… they are the default.
Now, if we want to support their ambitions with our wallets is another question
That's not true, well the second part is not true. it's not the default, it's a choice they made, there is no default.
They could have opted for maximum interoperability and openess.
Sk Hynix does not work with only sk hynix motherboards(I don't know if they even make motherboards), Intel cpus do not only work with Intel NICs. AMD GPUs do not only work with AMD CPUs. Nvidia GPUs do not require an imaginary Nvidia OS.
Hell windows is happy to work with whatever hardware you throw at it, but Macs nowadays have soldered ram and storage. And you can't install MacOS on any hardware you might like.
Getting files in or out of an iPhone without a Mac was a nightmare just a few years ago and I am confident it still is.
The default the GP is probably referencing is the early days all hardware vendors produced their own OS. Apple maintained the status quo as MS changed the status quo. The innovation MS really developed was the software license for OS's.
Nefarious and default aren't incompatible properties. If companies (especially large, public ones) were benevolent by default, a lot of laws and institutions would not be needed anymore.
It's downvoted because it reads as though IBM made a mistake the commenter thinks they should've never made, as opposed to a mistake from IBMs perspective given their business strategy at the time.
That is, it appears to tacitly agree with, and chide IBM for failing to defended, closed, walled-garden ecosystems.
That's certainly not what it seems they meant. It's just how one might initially read it and downvote.
It was certainly a mistake to base the original IBM PC hardware design in easily obtained electronics, and hope the BIOS copyright would be enough to hold out clones, unlike previous IBM hardware.
But it's not their mistake at all there is nothing they could do, companies went out there and reversed engineered BIOS. They couldn't possibly stop them.
I see the same thing in Russia. It seems like there is no such thing as a civilian target because getting your opponents citizens to uprise and while yours to support you is the key strategy now.
Except i think the American heart and minds campaign in Vietnam was lip service to a campaign that was measured by body count, and dead non combatants can’t litigate their combat status, so McNamara was befuddled the USA was “winning” and losing every square inch where there were not American soldiers in force. That there was no equivalent to insurgent Viet Cong embedded in North Vietnam says everything.
Not if you’re in a different domain, then it cannot be claimed to confuse customers.
So if it’s a network router or a woodworking router, then you’re good.
I can sells of red socks, and white socks, without getting sued by Chicago or Boston.
If it’s in the same space… you might want to contact a lawyer. I believe Firefox had conflicts with earlier names like Phoenix and FireBird and they weren’t even browsers.
How are you still blaming this on “the government”? Is your thesis that the business world would be delivering high quality products and experiences if only those damned bureaucrats would get out of the way? What possible evidence do you have left for that hypothesis at this point?
EDIT: this was a misread on my part, retracted, carry on.
He isn't blaming the software problem on the government. He is saying that if we apply this reasoning to everything in our lives, then we have a race to the bottom in other facets, of which one is government.
He is saying "if we apply (or are applying) the same business mentality to government, we will get literally the worst government we are willing to tolerate based on money"
It's not blaming. It's an explanation for probably why things can go wrong.
I’m pretty sure Zachtronics predates Factorio. SpaceChem 2011, Factorio 2020. I like Factorio more… but SpaceChem is the more demanding puzzle and the better game.