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And your point is...?
From my point of view, the main problem with "making the benefits of capital accrue to everyone generally" is that... well, people who use these words as an applause light typically do something else instead. First, they take most of the benefits of capital to themselves (think: all those communist leaders with golden watches and huge dachas). Second, as a side-effect of incompetent management (where signalling political loyalty trumps technical competence), even the capital that isn't stolen is used very inefficiently.
But on a smaller scale... companies paying taxes, and those taxes being used to build roads or pay for universal healthcare... is an example of providing the benefits of capital to everyone. Just not all the capital; and besides the more-or-less neutral taxation, the use of the capital is not micromanaged by people chosen for their political loyalty. So the costs to the economy are much smaller, and arguably the social benefits are larger (some libertarians may disagree).
Assuming that the hypothetical artificial superintelligence will be (1) smarter than humans, and (2) able to scale, e.g. to increase its cognitive powers thousandfold by creating 1000 copies of itself which will not immediately start feeding Moloch by fighting against each other, it should be able to not fuck up the whole economy, and could quite likely increase the production, even without increasing the costs to environment, by simply doing things smarter and removing inefficiencies. Unlike the communist bureaucrats who (1) were not superintelligent, and sometimes even not of average intelligence, (2) optimized each for their own personal goals, and (3) routinely lied to each other and to their superiors to avoid irrational punishments, so soon the whole system used completely fake data. Not being bound by ideology, if the AI would find out that it is better to leave something to do to humans (quite unlikely IMHO, but let's assume so for the sake of the argument), it would be free to do exactly that. Unlike a hypothetical enlightened communist bureaucrat, who after making the same observation would be probably shot as a traitor and replaced by a less enlightened one.
If the choice is between giving each human a 1/7000000000 of the universe, or giving the whole universe to Elon Musk (or some other person) and letting everyone else starve (because I don't think anyone would be able to get any job in a world where the scalable superintelligence is your direct competitor), the former option seems better to me, and I think even Elon Musk wouldn't mind... especially considering that going for the former option will make people much more willing to cooperate with him.
Is it really that difficult to discern?
So do you think that if we had real communism, with selfless and competent rulers, it would work just fine?
C... (read more)