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0 pointsjoshspankit3y ago0 comments

We’d have to adjust capitalism to deal with the “novel abundance” problems. Most of the drive for novel content/audiences is simply to decide which people get a cut of the revenue (and/or audience).

If we focused on quality and stopped caring about who gets paid for what I suspect that not only would we have better quality overall but we’d also push the boundaries much faster thus making things even more interesting.

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r3trohack3r3y ago

Strong disagree. Capitalism (can argue whether that's what we have or not) uses capital to respond to markets. Markets are signals of what people want.

The scarcity mindset in an the era of information abundance isn't being perpetuated by capitalism, it's being perpetuated by people making their own decisions one transaction at a time.

joshspankitOP3y ago

You make some strong logical cases so I'd like to use some of your language to try to give another perspective on my points:

Markets in our current system are (IMO) a distorted view of what people want. For example TVs: How much of the market is people who simply want a nice clean picture and how much is people who are feature-chasing based on the TV marketing? And then how much of the 'market' is actually smoke and mirrors accounting to increase the value of companies?

Some things that I think are only common because of capitalism (or "capitalism") and could therefore be phased out if we transitioned to an AI-supported system:

- "Keeping up with the Jones'"

- Needing short hits of artificial 'excitement' (such as the kind of novelty drip-fed to us by the movie industry)

- Keeping ideas secret as a form of Intellectual Property protection, and therefore the scarcity mindset that there are no good solutions and no new problems to solve (since we'd all be exposed to the latest of those if we chose)

- Capital being used for poor-quality projects (since many of these again are just about trying to grab more money for the people making them)

- People making their own decisions one transaction at a time. This is definitely underrated. Sure some people will continue to think short-term just because that's how their brains are wired, but I suspect the majority will find themselves able to breathe slowly for the first time and they will naturally unwind in to longer and longer-term thinking.

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