[eugenejen]

I think you are confused with his proposal. YC is looking for any company that can create demand that requires 1 millions workers to fulfill it.

It is not to create a huge company. It has nothing to do with eliminating jobs. It has nothing to do with provide basic living standard.

For example, if a new technology that allow us to regrow part of organs easily, but it requires living persons to carry the organs within their bodies until organs mature to be transplanted. Those people may have a job as 'organ incubator'.

[andrewtbham]

My goal would is (as an investor in Organovo) to regrow organs and it's agnostic to whether it creates, eliminates or displaces workers.

[eugenejen]

Of course you should not. But in the end, you need other people who are willing to trade something for your investment.

Your investment would be valued 0 if no one wants or needs it. And valuation is how much they are willing to pay for it.

So in the end. I think creating jobs is just a mask for 'creating demand for new things for people have no new creating wealth'. Since total aggregation of time of lives of oligarchs and their families are much limited than total populations. So it is better to create demand for consumer market.

But of course, if one day, oligarchs have technology to enable them to live forever, they will have unlimited time to live and my argument won't sustain under that condition.

[001sky]

This is a bizarre tangent. An oligarch could just enslave people through brute force or more subtle means of mental and psyhcological manipulation into working feverishly in a self-defeating system of exploitation.

Is that "creating demand" for labour? Or for the products?

Is demand for slave labour a good kind of demand?

[eugenejen]

It is a valid argument. If an oligarch desires to enslave the rest of human being for its own amusement. And the rest of human beings are willing to trade their precious time of lives with the oligarch by being enslaved.

But I feel if the oligarch overplays the enslavement, everyone can choose to commit suicide and having no pain anymore in their lives. Then the oligarch will have no one to play the game with.

So to keep the system working, the oligarch has to fulfill desires of people.

My main point is the most precious wealth for everyone is the time of their lives. And we all trade our time in lives with other people in either products or services. Progress in technologies has enabled us to enjoy growing purchase power of our time and enable us with more fulfillment of desires. But for the moment the whole economy system somewhat gets stuck and we are having problems to figure out what demand can we create to allow people to trade with. Even an oligarch has to trade wealth for desires.

[001sky]

"An oligarch desires to enslave the rest of human being for its own amusement. And the rest of human beings are willing..."

That's not how slavery works.

"I feel if the oligarch overplays the enslavement, everyone can choose to commit suicide"

Again, this is not historically aware.

=====

I will agree with you on a broader point, which I think you've left unsaid: that everything you want in life is almost always in the hands of someone else already.

For example, if you want a thing someone else has already owned it (or its component parts). If you want a friend, someone else has already been in a relationship with them (either earlier friends, or their family etc). If you want to build anything you need tools, and raw materials, and other resources that somebody else has already found, claimed, owned or handled.

And in that logical sense, "success" is nothing more than taking what (some) other people have already got.

But you've over-abstracted the point to much:

*Even an oligarch has to trade wealth for desires."

True, but this is still consistent will chattle slavery.

I may "trade my wealth" for weapons, and food, and the means to keep you chained to the cotton field. But that says nothing of the way in which the threat of violence co-erces you into doing my bidding--that type of coercive consent is an interesting but ultimately tangentially related academic rabbit hole.