Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
Necessities must rely on free markets because free markets are the only mechanisms productive enough to cover those necessities.
Health care, education, and housing are three markets that we have attempted to control on the basis that they’re necessary so we shouldn’t take any chances.
As a result, health care, education, and housing are ultra expensive and scarce, and major sources of stress and worth for people.
But far more fundamental than any of those, and hence capable of producing far greater suffering when lacking, is food. Food is a much more free market than health care, education, and housing, and as a result food is abundant and cheap.
The constantly-driven message that capitalism cuts people off from things is deep within our brains. And it makes sense: you imagine someone wanting to eat and not having money and they don’t eat and that’s a horrible thought. But it’s not what happens. We buy and sell food all the time, and we also give enormous amounts of food to people for free. Heck we just had an annual ritual last night based on giving people food. I flew a sign once that said “food only please” and I ate very well. Like, people saw that sign and went to buy me a $50 steak then came back to give it to me.
All I’m saying is: please just try and differentiate between the things that are mostly handled by free market, and the things that are centrally controlled, and then ask yourself what is abundant and what is scarce.
I think you’ll find that capitalism gives more away as an afterthought than other economic systems even produce in total.
Both of these things are happening because housing homeless people and feeding hungry people just aren’t profitable.
Actually, under our free market system, people eat like kings even when they have no money to buy food.
I’ve been homeless and I’ve been on food assistance. In both cases I ate plenty of food provided voluntarily by people who … just like the idea of feeding people.
No centralized system is necessary to achieve that. Capitalism is so productive that we have food coming out of our ears. I find it kind of interesting that as a capitalist nation where supposedly there’s a price tag on everything, there are copious resources freely available.
It’s not because free stuff is the central ethos of capitalism. It’s because capitalism produces so much wealth that the tiny sliver we are willing to part with for free is still beyond the total production of the non-consensual economic systems.
That might have been the point. It’s also saved me countless hours of my life being able to navigate anywhere at any time with step by step instructions on how to get there.
There was a lot of value produced for a lot of people by google maps so far
I agree with your overall sentiment while disagreeing with your facts. I don’t think humans are any less constrained in what our interests can be.
I think we have the illusion of being able to seek whatever we want to want, so to speak, but when certain values are threatened the old brain takes over.
And I’m not convinced the newer brain can operate without the older brain. It’s interesting to imagine a neocortex on its own, but the neocortex was developed in the presence of and in interconnection with the mammalian and reptilian brains, so if it were a codebase we’d say that older brains were present and invoked as libraries during the development of the newer brains, making them dependencies of the newer brain.
There might be some more abstract argument for an “off the leash” intelligence capable of creating its own values in mathematical models like neural nets, but I’m not aware of it.
TL;DR Human brain is the closest thing we know of to a thing that can create its own values, and I don’t think it can. Old brain values take priority when they are threatened and that cannot be changed in human brains. Neocortex seems more “free”, but in the codebase analogy, the neocortex has mammalian brain and reptilian brain and brain step as dependencies and hence is not demonstrated to be able to exist without them. If the brain analogy seems too biology-specific, I’m open to hearing NN or other math model arguments for existence of “off the leash” self-value-creating AI