HACKER Q&A
📣 sharemywin

Is there technical alternative to socialism and capitalism?


Is there technical alternative to socialism and capitalism?


  👤 PaulHoule Accepted Answer ✓
What I remember about "socialism" is that when Lenin and company got control of the Soviet Union their main goal was to beat western capitalism at its own game.

At risk of being downvoted once again I'll point out that "capitalism" has nothing to do with markets and entrepreneuralism (these go back to the beginning of agriculture and cities) but rather "capitalism" is markets in pieces of paper that allow the massive scaling up of markets and entrepreneuralism. It dates back to these people

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Medici

whose corruption inspired

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince


👤 JRGC1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy

Technocracy is a form of government in which the decision-maker or makers are selected on the basis of their expertise in a given area of responsibility, particularly with regard to scientific or technical knowledge.


👤 hindsightbias
Up until very recently the Chinese Politburo and Standing Committee were heavily weighted with engineers and scientists.

👤 incomingpain
Capitalism is terrible but really the only 1 we know works. Socialism collapsed in 1989 and is going to be eliminated world wide in the next few decades.

Mercanitilism/Feudalism for the most part is gone today and I dont recall seeing anyone arguing to bring those back.

There are a ton of proposed systems but you don't really hear much about them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit

This will likely be where we end up. Inevitably boston dynamics or whoever build bots that do something. It's not going to be tremendously expensive or anything neither. You'll likely buy your first butlers for like $50,000. Your house will be clean and everything will be done for you. Freeing up tons of time for you to do other things. Factory workers wont be a thing. Plumbers wont be a thing. Bots replace everyone.

The economic measure will flip on itself. You wont be punished for consumption, in fact you'll see sales taxes and all those things go away rapidly. The new punishment or cost of things is in the waste. It will be a measure bots will be measured on, 'buy our butler 9001, it comes with 99% reduction on waste compared to the industry standard."

Mining? Not a problem bots do that now. Mine collapsed? Send more bots.

Sorting your recycle into 10 boxes? Nah, throw it all in 1 box and bots will sort it for you.

Need a fence built? Bots will be available to build your fence for you.

Scarcity will largely speaking be eliminated, hence why you charge based on waste. There's still a finite amount of stuff at any time, we can produce more for basically free. But it's all about the waste because you dont want someone causing unnecessary need for production.


👤 Comevius
The devil is in the details, words like socialism or capitalism long lost their meaning. The world is more complicated than that.

👤 sharemywin
to me blockchain doesn't seem to be the answer.

comparative advantage is failing because a lot of these suppliers are to fragile so the alternatives got pushed out of the market.


👤 raxxorraxor
I think the dichotomy is bland and no society has socialism or capitalism implemented strictly.

There are always goods that belong to everyone and goods that belong to individuals in any country. You could draw the line anywhere and experience tells us that if we draw it too strictly near one extreme, it basically isn't sustainable for most.


👤 kfrzcode
Why does capitalism get such a bad rap? It's quite good at what it does and every single one of us has capitalism to thank for our presence here, specifically on the internet on our devices.