[jrflowers]

Refusing to question the notion that the overclass exists because their productivity and cultural contribution makes them a necessity so hard that I reinvent the premise of the Pixar movie Wall-E from first principles and pitch it to people as an ontology

[Morromist]

Yeah. This guy didn't read hacker news a few weeks ago when that article about the Samuri came up.

There are a lot of premises this article takes for granted besides that one too, but yeah, I get it, its fun to make up what the future is going to be like on a super-grand scale where everything is a simple absolute. People were doing the same thing 100 years ago.

[zetalyrae]

If you mean: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/samurai-city/

Doesn't this prove my point? In feudal Japanese society, wealthy merchants were lower status than poor samurai, i.e., they rich could not buy political power. "The wealthy" and "the ruling class" are not always the same group of people.

[Morromist]

I guess I was thinking of the samurai as being part of the permanant overclass. You mentioned that of old aristocracy provided officers for the military, so I thought that was analogious to the samurai. Perhaps I misread what you're trying to say.

My reading was that the Samurai were part of the overclass but were pretty useless, albiet still potentially dangerous, and just sat around devouring resources for hundreds of years, so perhaps the overclass of the future could do the same. The samuri weren't all rich, but they didn't dishonor themselves with labor, which is a similar thing and they certainly held power over the state. The end of the samuri was, perhaps, an example of the state getting what it wants despite the desires of the permanant overclass, supporting what you said, but it took a long time to get there.

I suppose you are thinking of the Samuri as an arm of the state and not "the rich".

[jrflowers]

Is your point that the AI industry would have wrecked Edo period Japan

Or that we live in a shogunate