(07-10-2018, 10:20 AM)David Horn Wrote:(07-04-2018, 01:22 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:(07-03-2018, 03:45 PM)David Horn Wrote: I just take you at your word. At most, I extrapolate. John just assigns beliefs at will.
John is merely extrapolating your beliefs. The difference between you and him is just that he does so correctly.
No, you can't use that dodge. I've told John on numerous occasions that I'm vehemently anti-Communist, but he still paints me as a Marxist.
He occasionally accuses me of being a Marxist-Leninist. We can learn a few things from Marx, things that he has made possible for contemplation. That includes the tools for debunking Marxist-Leninist regimes.
Few people have coherent ideas of how a post-scarcity world will look -- as in how its economics will operate. Or will we find ourselves in some nightmarish reaction that gives us feudalism with advanced technologies of repression?
With the post-scarcity world also comes the hazards of the Singularity, in which machine intelligence becomes more powerful than human capacity to think. Computers so far do drudge work such as mathematical calculation -- as in getting the first billion digits of e or pi. But artificial intelligence more cunning, ruthless, organized, and clever than ourselves? Man is 'the most terrible tiger' because of his cunning, ruthlessness, organized, and cleverness. Just imagine artificial intelligence capable of enslaving or exterminating us. That intelligence would find plenty of quislings and kapos to do the dirtiest work among us.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.