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When I read @readyplayerone (https://amzn.to/2PcJBaf ), it felt like just nostalgic geeky young adult delightful fun. I didn't think a lot about the setting. Yet as it has sunk in over the years, I've concluded that the near-future dystopic elements may prove prescient.
.@readyplayerone features real-world poverty which people escape via a fakely epic gamified virtual world whose best content is all copied from a more culturally rich past era. This is already manifesting in employment trends among young men:http://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2016/article/video-killed-radio-star …
Being a fictional story, the dropout lifestyle is unfortunately glorified - expertise in the fakely epic dropout virtual world is transformed, via a tournament for control of the VR world, into real-world riches and power.
I think the reality will be more like the instability of UBI+VR in @KarlKGallagher's Torchship world (https://amzn.to/2BeM8O9 ) or the webfic RA (https://qntm.org/ra ). Having a growing fraction of society spending their time unproductively in a fake world is not stable.
Such a society is - and this is speaking entirely from an analytic standpoint, no moral judgement- an abomination to Moloch (http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ …). The abomination is even worse with UBI, and x100 in a democracy where UBI recipients can vote.
This is not a commentary on justice or morality or any aspect of what "should" be. It is simply an observation about the world as it is, namely that it ruthlessly culls systems of the form "people can vote themselves welfare to play video games instead of working".
While ppl like @slatestarcodex somehow both understand Moloch and believe in UBI, I feel very strongly that basic game theory dynamics make "UBI + Universal Vote" clearly untenable. SocSec/Medicare already threaten to bankrupt the world's richest country through these dynamics.
Not that accurate long-term analysis has much to do with democratic policy - I'm not writing to influence legacy states. Rather, to explain to remainers and potential exiters why we must & will exit from the states whose decaying orbits will inevitably result in fiery death.
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