thesis thursday

long socialism short capitalism

post agi capitalism = rule of a machine, socialism = rule of humans

if we squint, machines owning all capital and giving humans fixed ubi without exposure to upside of investments is basically the definition of capitalism

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I think this is the effect of capitalism. In a free market you wouldn’t have a select companies or machines owning all the capital right ?

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Why not? In a free market, the capital can end up wherever it wants to, even in the hands of a single monopoly or just machines, right?

(To be clear, free market is not identical to capitalism, sometimes people qualify free market capitalism.)

No, I just don't think such an ideal exists. They're two separate categorizations: Capitalism was defined as a criticism when capital gets exposure to upside but labour does not. Communism was defined as a post-capitalist collectivist society where the labour owns the means of production (thus gets exposure to its upside).

In terms of programming, they're not code but rather descriptions of code and implied side effects. "This code has high volumetric complexity, it has many lines of code, it's tightly coupled" that kinda stuff. They're observations about properties a society has, they're not instructive implementations themselves.

On the other hand, "free market" and "central planning" are things we can do. Of course neither extreme is practical or desirable, and we can debate what we mean by "free" (what do we do about coercion from incumbents?) and by "central" (is the Ethereum governed by a centrally planned gadget we call the consensus mechanism?).

Yes, I was thinking about the ideal free market capitalism where competition doesn’t lead to monopolies. Are you trying to argue some sort of horseshoe theory for capitalism and communism at the extremes ? I could see that with those machines / ubi parameters