no broadly capitalist system can really produce a society that works well for anyone other than the favoured few.
It's worse than this. Capitalism only even works for the particular capitalists on a temporary basis. As the system works, the class of people owning any capital at all is narrowed, which Marx called "proletarianization" (to wit: owners of small shops are pushed out by, say, Wal-Mart, and thus forced to become wage-laborers instead). To the extent that capitalism is doing something decent for humans, this is fine; to the extent capitalism is just a big societal paper-clipper, we vitally need to stop it.
just as with the prospect of AI, I suggest that the question to ask might not be "how can we defeat this powerful hostile thing?" but "how can we stop this powerful thing being hostile and make it act for our benefit?".
I disagree slightly: AI is far more beneficial than capitalism ;-). AI is a blank optimization process, so to speak, an AIXI implementation doesn't come with an unfriendly utility function built-in, you have to add one and then unleash it yourself. With AI there at least exists the possibility of specifying Friendliness and getting it right; the "evil by default" behavior isn't some cosmic force that hates us, it's just that we only like a tiny subset of possible universes.
Not least because the actually-existing societies that seem to do best at providing a decent life for most of their people are broadly capitalist, with various mechanisms attached that try to fix raw capitalism's tendency to screw over all but the wealthiest.
I think we need to speak seriously about the varieties of social optimization processes.
I agree that social democracy has produced the best observed results for human beings, and in fact contains explicit mechanisms (ie: democratic participation in allocation of the means of production) for ensuring human-friendliness. I also wish to note that markets should be considered a mere component of capitalism, and that pro-capitalist ideologues who focus primarily on markets are, essentially, rather like mechanics who focus on getting the greatest horsepower rather than on what the engine is for. So we can assume that the category of human-friendly economic systems contains at least social democracy, and also probably cooperative-based market systems, syndicalism, possibly democratic state-socialism, commons trust-based systems, and many others.
However, there are many variables that go into a market system. What we currently have is neoliberal financialized capitalism: liberalism level = state compels labor but subsidizes capital accumulation, definition of money to be accumulated = virtual credit-money rather than industrial production, allocation of the means of production = private profit-maximizing companies, donation-funded NGOs, state agencies, and almost nothing else.
Slavoj Zizek said in 2011, "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism". David Graeber has characterized neoliberalism as an ideology which, when given the choice between making capitalism seem the only possible economic system and making capitalism a long-term viable economic system, will always choose the former. It is not enough to simply rail on behalf of "free markets" or "workers' revolutions", we need to be rationally unpacking the variables that make social optimization processes function one way or another, and determining what values for those parameters result in something we actually like.
It is not enough to scream, "Another world is possible!" Dozens of other worlds are possible, which is why it's imperative to stop pretending that this is the only or ideal world despite the fact that so many don't like living here.
It's worse than this. [...]
I think what you go on to describe is part of what I meant by "[doesn't] work[] well for anyone other than the favoured few". Indeed, the identity of the favoured few changes over time -- though typically the really favoured are quite safe for a good while.
AI is far more beneficial than capitalism.
AI, at the moment, isn't anything. (Or, rather, it's a term that's sometimes applied to a wide variety of things, mostly beneficial but nothing to do with what we both mean by AI in this context.) If and when "real...
Note: Originally posted in Discussion, edited to take comments there into account.
Yes, politics, boo hiss. In my defense, the topic of this post cuts across usual tribal affiliations (I write it as a liberal criticizing other liberals), and has a couple strong tie-ins with main LessWrong topics:
The issue is this: recently, I've seen a meme going around to the effect that companies like Walmart that have a large number of employees on government benefits are the "real welfare queens" or somesuch, and with the implied message that all companies have a moral obligation to pay their employees enough that they don't need government benefits. (I say mention Walmart because it's the most frequently mentioned villain in this meme, but others, like McDonalds, get mentioned.)
My initial awareness of this meme came from it being all over my Facebook feed, but when I went to Google to track down examples, I found it coming out of the mouths of some fairly prominent congresscritters. For example Alan Grayson:
Or Bernie Sanders:
Now here's why this is weird: consider Grayson's claim that each Walmart employee costs the taxpayers on average $1,000. In what sense is that true? If Walmart fired those employees, it wouldn't save the taxpayers money: if anything, it would increase the strain on public services. Conversely, it's unlikely that cutting benefits would force Walmart to pay higher wages: if anything, it would make people more desperate and willing to work for low wages. (Cf. this this excellent critique of the anti-Walmart meme).
Or consider Sanders' claim that it would be better to raise the minimum wage and spend less on government benefits. He emphasizes that Walmart could take a hit in profits to pay its employees more. It's unclear to what degree that's true (see again previous link), and unclear if there's a practical way for the government to force Walmart to do that, but ignore those issues, it's worth pointing out that you could also just raise taxes on rich people generally to increase benefits for low-wage workers. The idea seems to be that morally, Walmart employees should be primarily Walmart's moral responsibility, and not so much the moral responsibility of the (the more well-off segment of) the population in general.
But the idea that employing someone gives you a general responsibility for their welfare (beyond, say, not tricking them into working for less pay or under worse conditions than you initially promised) is also very odd. It suggests that if you want to be virtuous, you should avoid hiring people, so as to keep your hands clean and avoid the moral contagion that comes with employing low wage workers. Yet such a policy doesn't actually help the people who might want jobs from you. This is not to deny that, plausibly, wealthy onwers of Walmart stock have a moral responsibility to the poor. What's implausible is that non-Walmart stock owners have significantly less responsibility to the poor.
This meme also worries me because I lean towards thinking that the minimum wage isn't a terrible policy but we'd be better off replacing it with guaranteed basic income (or an otherwise more lavish welfare state). And guaranteed basic income could be a really important policy to have as more and more jobs are replaced by automation (again see gwern if that seems crazy to you). I worry that this anti-Walmart meme could lead to an odd left-wing resistance to GBI/more lavish welfare state, since the policy would be branded as a subsidy to Walmart.