 | This user lives in New Zealand. |
 | This user lives in Auckland, New Zealand. |
Hello, I am Will.torkington. Yes, I am edit things and shitpost.
I will appear on Facebook. My GitHub name is @dubpirate (proof). My Twitter handle is @OoohThatsGood, although I do not recommend you look at it.
I live in New Zealand – the greatest country on earth – where I studied Computer Science, and now work for myself.
Currently looking for a job in the intersection between the environmental sector and computer science.
My goal is to get my own Wikipedia page deleted because I'm not relevant enough, just like my dad.
Special interests
editI enjoy mathematics, dressing alright, playing mandolin, and somehow now cars. I bought a piece of shit 1980 Mitsubishi Mirage which I'm enjoying beating up and learning about how it works. Combustion engines are hopefully an endangered species so I'm having my fun while I can.
General Musings
editI want to figure out how I can raise my future child to be a prodigy, somewhat like Norbert Wiener or William James Sidis. There appears to be a delicate balance between enough teaching time, giving them social experiences, and minimising psychological damage that I'm still trying to figure out. Teaching time, because I assume I will also have to work as I raise my child; best case scenario is that I'm a stay at home father or filthy fucking rich. Social experiences, because going to public school even part time is an important part of a growing child's life. Minimising psychological damage because poor old Norbert and Will didn't turn out so well in the head. I don't let that stop me, I'm sure there's a way. Leave your suggestions on my talk page, wont you.
Did you know there was a child prodigy in the 2000's called Sufiah Yusof, who was 'exposed' as a prostitute by a British tabloid? Her story is tragic – not because she was a prostitute, but because the papers couldn't stop being such assholes about it. If you look into it further, you'll see that because of her prodigy status her personal life dramas before that were played out publicly. I mean, just ask her. She's on Twitter nowadays, and all she does is shit talk the Daily Mail and all the rest for being scummy publications with low editorial standards.
I guess the moral of that story is not to show off your prodigal child like a dancing monkey, or to reference the Daily Mail.
(That was written at time unknown. Well it was known but I can't be bothered looking it up.)
...
Well, a lot has changed since I wrote that. I don't think I want kids. I am terrified by climate change. Those things aren't related.
Sometimes I lose hours or days fantasizing about communism. I'm not sure what the medium of exchange would be. The answer is simpler for market socialists, who I'm pretty chill with. But to eliminate class, to make sure that everyone can access all that we as humans can produce. I just wonder what it would look like.
I imagine cities' downtowns being completely converted into public spaces. Without shops and stores, what would line the streets? There would still be cafes, I hope. But what about something like shoe shops? Instead, I imagine entire city blocks dedicated to Generalized Fabricators - giant machines that take assembly instructions and create desired goods. Then, there would be a huge social media platform for sharing designs that people have created. If you liked someone's design for a pair of shoes, you could have it built by a General Fabricator right away and pick them up. If you wanted to make changes to the design, there would be no copyright stopping you.
I would like to think that because 'homekeeper' and 'breadwinner' responsibilities become more and more automated, parents will take up a bigger part in raising their children. While in my crazy "I want to raise a child prodigy" phase as seen above, I gained a real interest in Bloom's 2 sigma problem, and how one-on-one teaching is so important.
Things like CAPTCHA would be some of the most important work people would do. I reckon most pieces of automation would involve some element of deep learning, which creates a gigantic demand for training data. It might sound like there would be Severance-like 'Macrodata Refinement' offices, but it could be as simple as anyone with a laptop is able to label images or sounds properly. Imagine even an app where you can take a photo of something - a stain on your carpet, for example - then label it and upload it to a training data database, where are robo-housekeeper AI can then learn from it.
There are just a few questions I can't seem to answer about what it would look like.
"How would you prevent corruption?" Democracy, I imagine. It seems like most people are corrupt today because of money rather than power. In the united states, nz, australia, the UK, it seems quite rare that heads of state are corrupt just for the love of power.
"Would they do 'shit jobs'?" This part I just wave my hands and say 'robots'. I believe today we could automate a lot of dogshit work. Think of it this way, without capitalism, there wont be marketing, or sales, or banks, or investment companies. Amazing programmers are currently tied up in these industries developing ways for the rich to get richer, when they could be doing things that matter, and make everyone's life easier. When the incentive becomes how do we make the economy as a whole more efficient (by adding automation to free up labour force, and thus have more surplus) rather than make money, our brightest minds would be focused at things like how robots can collect and sort garbage, rather than a crypto-currency or bullshit like that. Eventually we would automate things like mining, street cleaning, every aspect of homekeeping (dishwashing, laundry, garbage, vacuuming, etc).
"Why would people work?" This is a big problem, and related to the next one. I'm not too familiar with what the more educated communist thinkers have come up with, but the problem seems to be: what can we use to incentivize people to do work that is boring and lame? Without money, the remaining incentives to work are fame and enjoyment. I'm sure with 7 billion people we might find a few people who enjoy doing boring shit, but probably not to keep everything running. Your average general practitioner is not doing it for fame or self-fulfillment, however, without them where would we be? Could we teach a robot to teach medicine? Maybe. Then, there are some jobs that people would INSIST that another human would do, and not a robot, such as airplane pilots, yet I don't know how many people would choose to do such, all things being equal. It seems like tipping the scales however much for any reason would reintroduce some notion of class, the elimination of which is one of the tenants of communism I'm most insistent on. But without it, it is hard to fathom how a society could direct human labour without government coercion.
"How do you solve the socialist calculation problem?" Yeah great question. I guess robots again. Some combination of robots and democracy. See previous Q/A.
Alright, well I have work to do and I'm out of steam for what to write here. If you want to edit this, please use British English spelling. If you want to argue with me about it, or even better just chat to me about it, please message me on Twitter.
See you later, cyber-space cowboy.
Will.torkington (talk) 09:22, 5 December 2022 (UTC)