[Frost1x]

The trend has been more openness in this sort of behavior. After all, the public hasn’t seemed to respond to it with much negativity other than people occasionally complaining about these sorts of behaviors online. The highest level complaint seems to be public protest, which don’t seem to garner enough momentum to push change.

If there’s no repercussions, why not be transparent? Scary indeed, as it’s quite telling of the direction we’re headed in, IMHO.

[beloch]

If you're a billionaire today, you might be forgiven for thinking the current state of extreme wealth inequality is completely normal. You will obviously want to lock in a system that has benefited you and ensure that nothing ever changes.

Historically speaking though, wealth inequality in developed nations is reaching a point at which, as often as not, revolutions happen. Sometimes they're bloody. Sometimes not. There are two approaches to avoid a revolution:

1. Back off from controlling government and let reform happen gradually. Your wealth will be lessened, but you'll probably remain one of the richest people alive.

2. Lock everything in with a totalitarian panopticon state that you control. AI surveillance offers a huge advantage over surveillance networks used by past totalitarian regimes. e.g. East Germany's Stasi showed the limitations of surveillance in an age where humans had to do it themselves. With AI to do it, you can avoid employing a large portion of the population to watch the rest, and you can keep the power of that surveillance network concentrated in just a few hands, preferably yours.

It's clear which approach is being attempted in the U.S.. I'd just point out that #2 is inherently high-risk. If you lock in wealth inequality at today's levels (or make them worse) and then use repressive means to prevent any form of push-back, the state becomes brittle. If it breaks, the result could be a bloodbath. Approach #1 is much safer. Yet, here we are.

[ozim]

You forgot about 3. Brave new world.

Mass of people that will not revolt and storm the castles because they will have computer games, recreational drugs and not so bad life.

That will not care about voting so 1. would not happen and 2. would not end up in French style revolution as they wouldn’t mind state control.

[ben_w]

Brave New World is not a historical example, it is a fictional one.

And if AI is what the developers hope it to be, the fictional reference points would expand to anything from Manna to The Culture to I Have No Mouth.

[bryanrasmussen]

>Approach #1 is much safer. Yet, here we are.

I do not believe Approach #1 has ever been attempted without quite a bit of blood leading up to its attempt, and I think it has only been attempted a few times even so, approach #2 - oppression, with resulting bloodiness - seems to be the norm.

[bhjfjkfgj]

I believe making corporations actually pay high taxes is an example of this. IIRC that did occur in the 50's and 60's in America.....

[sireat]

One could argue that Solon the Lawgiver did #1 2600 years ago - abolishing debt slavery, supposedly abolishing most debts, freeing some public lands, coming up with council of Four Hundred.

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

Of course Oligarchs still took power afterwards from time to time - The Eupatridae (Aristocratic Families), then tyranny by Peisistratos.

[ozim]

1989 Poland government change from Communist regime to Democratic government.

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2009/12/09/1989-poland-was-fi...

[bryanrasmussen]

Regime change when an occupying power leaves is a different scenario from changing underlying power structure of society where the controlling powers are in the society.

One reason for that is that when an occupying power leaves regime change must happen.

[ozim]

After soviets left there was high risk of basically civil war.

That happened for example in Romania in 1989, somehow it did not happen in Poland.

[Fluorescence]

I don't think the Romanian Revolution counts as a civil war. Over the space of a week or so, it was: protests/riots, violent crackdown leading to military defection/coup.

Look at Syria for how a similar pattern of events did lead to civil war. Ceaușescu just didn't represent a section of the country with an interest in fighting for his regime. The risk of instability when an authoritarian passes is if they have been holding together a country with significant ethnic/sectarian/political divisions like Yugoslavia.

[ashoeafoot]

if you are a billionaire today, you are painfully aware that the wealth you have us on a timer, as human society burns through the resource windows and then decomplexifies and falls back into a sort of survival bootloop. What you buy with surveillance is tradeoffs of stability aka time. What you do with that time is to forward all vectors to escape the loop in some futures and prevent the loop from becoming hyper destructive due to gadgets from the golden times.

A panopticon thus exists in phases. first phase (centralized) to buy time, stabilize a complex society, then to help forward a gracefull decay, finally (decentalized) to prevent the decayed and loopstuck society from further self damage and keep complexity recover vectors open.

The dream is a Afghanistan with phones that can bootstrap itself out of the failed state.

[andrekandre]

  > If you lock in wealth inequality at today's levels (or make them worse) and then use repressive means to prevent any form of push-back, the state becomes brittle.

well, not only the state, but how does capitalism survive that, who can buy anything (be a consumer) except for the essentials in that scenario, where do investments/growth go towards?

[ben_w]

It doesn't need to. We had oligarchs before capitalism.

[ThrowawayR2]

> "...trend has been toward more openness...

No offense but you're just injecting a trendy opinion without knowing anything about the man's history. Ellison was notorious even in the '90s-'00s and never made any real effort to hide it. The book "The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison" (yes, that's its actual title) came out all the way back in 2003, the title being a quip that had already been circulating for many years by that time.

[pinkmuffinere]

Honestly I think I prefer openness, although I'll admit it's hard to be precise about what's ok and what isn't. In the spirit of free speech, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." At the same time, defending somebody's right to speech does _not_ mean that individuals can't embargo / "cancel" that person -- I think this behavior is itself speech of a sort.

What would you change about the present situation? I feel that public protest is roughly all that can be allowed in response to speech (ie, speech in response to speech). Surely he shouldn't be jailed/fined/doxxed for this speech? What more should be allowed? Or is it just that the public protest isn't as strong as you'd want?

[JumpCrisscross]

Speech and thought are interlinked. Encouraging our society's most powerful to pander to social media in what they say undoubtedly affects how they think.

[pinkmuffinere]

Sure but what’s the alternative? Are you going to decide what people can say? This is all very 1984, if you haven’t read it you might find it interesting

[danielheath]

The thing that makes any given arrangement of society work (or not work) is how quickly/cheaply it removes decision-making power from people who demonstrate poor judgement.

This is a difficult task, because people with decision-making power tend use that power to alter the system to solidify their position.

Capitalism, at its finest, does this by letting people make bad decisions with their money until they haven't got any. This was an improvement on, say, holding wars until enough people decision-makers get killed off. However, a variety of long-term policy shifts have meant this no longer appears to happen - merely possessing capital is so profitable that even astonishingly poor decisions cannot reduce your wealth enough to matter.

IMO, through this statement Larry Ellison has demonstrated the kind of poor judgement which a functional society cannot tolerate in a decision-maker, and lacking an effective way to remove this from the decision-maker pool is the primary cause of societal trouble today.

[pinkmuffinere]

Are you saying that we/some govt org should seize his assets because he had a bad opinion?

Fwiw I agree with you in disliking the “eternal power“ dynamic that seems to come with being rich. I’d prefer to solve this by requiring more disclosure in lobbying efforts, restricting the kinds of donations you can make, etc. Money shouldn’t lead to political power IMO.

[danielheath]

> Are you saying that we/some govt org should seize his assets because he had a bad opinion?

I'm saying that a system in which someone with poor judgement manages to accrue his level of assets is broken somewhere.

Policy settings under which "having capital" allows you to grow your wealth while making terrible decisions are bad policy settings.

Various alternative policies exist, the most obvious of which is adjusting taxation settings such that growing your wealth requires consistently making good judgement calls.

[pinkmuffinere]

I’m not trying to be obtuse, my best guess is that I’m in favor of what you’re proposing. Can you add more details though? I’m certainly in favor of progressive taxation, which kindof matches the spirit of what you’re saying by reducing the profit margin for those who have massive amounts to “play with”. Maybe there’s a more direct method though? Maybe a wealth tax? Something else?

[danielheath]

I'm explicitly not claiming any particular proposal is right; my background is not in public policy.

I'm pointing out that across a great many economic nations, times, and economic systems, the core problem of every social system is not the obvious stuff like "how do we allocate resources" - it's "how do we remove bad decision-makers" - because those people are implementing "how we allocate resources".

There's a great many ways to solve this problem, but there's little evidence that _anything_ is currently being tried. I'd support any policy that seemed reasonably likely to improve this situation.