If someone doesn't assign "respect for authority" intrinsic value (though it may have utility in furthering other values), isn't that ...just the way it is?
No. Generally people are confused about morality, and such statements are optimized for signalling rather than correctness with respect to their actual preferences.
For example, I could say that I am a perfectly altruistic utilitarian. This is an advantageous thing to claim in some circles, but it is also false. I claim that the same pattern applies to non-authoritarianism, having been there myself.
So when I say "all of it is valuable" I am rejecting the pattern "Some people value X, but they are confused and X is not real morality, I only value Y and Z" which is a common position to take wrt the authority and purity axes on haidt, because that is supposedly a difference between liberals and conservatives, hence ripe for in-group signalling.
If some people value X, consider the proposition that it is actually valuable. Sometimes it isn't, and they're just weird, but that's rare, IMO.
The question is intended to be answered with realistic limitations in mind. Given our current society (or maybe given our society within 50 years, assuming none of that "FOOM" stuff happens) is there a way to bring about a safe, stable authoritarian society which is better than our own? There's no point to a political stance unless it has consequences for what actions one can take in the short term.
You are asking me to do an extremely large computational project (designing not only a good human society, but a plausible path to it), based on assumptions I don't think are realistic. I don't have time for that. Some people do though:
Moldbug has written plenty about how such a society could function and come about (the reaction)
Yvain has also recently laid out his semi-plausible authoritarian human society (raikoth) (eugenics, absolute rule by computer, omnipresent surveillance, etc)
I expect moreright will have some interesting discussion of this as well.
You are asking me to do an extremely large computational project (designing not only a good human society, but a plausible path to it), based on assumptions I don't think are realistic. I don't have time for that. Some people do though:
Oh, I didn't mean that I want you to outline a manifesto or plan or anything.
Do they also believe that an elite group should have large amounts of power over the majority?
was my original question. What I meant was more that if you identify as "authoritarian", it implicitly means that you think that it is a g...
Kevin Drum has an article in Mother Jones about AI and Moore's Law:
Although he only mentions consumer goods, Drum presumably means that scarcity will end for services and consumer goods. If scarcity only ended for consumer goods, people would still have to work (most jobs are currently in the services economy).
Drum explains that our linear-thinking brains don't intuitively grasp exponential systems like Moore's law.
He also includes this nice animated .gif which illustrates the principle very clearly.
Drum continues by talking about possible economic ramifications.
Drum says the share of (US) national income going to workers was stable until about a decade ago. I think the graph he links to shows the worker's share has been declining since approximately the late 1960s/early 1970s. This is about the time US immigration levels started increasing (which raises returns to capital and lowers native worker wages).
The rest of Drum's piece isn't terribly interesting, but it is good to see mainstream pundits talking about these topics.