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   scribe (scribe@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Friday, 06-Jun-2025 20:38:39 JST scribe

   Automate the rich.

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     dstu (trurl@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Friday, 06-Jun-2025 21:38:03 JST dstu

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     @scribe I honestly have been kicking around some thoughts that might someday turn into an essay about Hedonismbot from Futurama. It's a bit of a one-off joke that I didn't really appreciate when the show was airing.

     But maybe it does make sense to replace humans at the top of the wealth distribution with robots. If humans' monkey-brains are doomed to reinvent hierarchies of disparity everywhere, we might as well put Hedonismbot at the top. You can program a robot to have bounded appetites.

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     scribe (scribe@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Tuesday, 10-Jun-2025 21:52:11 JST scribe

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     • dstu

     @trurl Not seen the bot before but looks hilariously spot-on, and maybe gets at the heart of a serious question about why do we _want_ billionaires to exist? Do we subconsciously _like_ creating them, like manifesting some dream? Does that transfer into things like AI more generally too, about power-creation as a species?

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     dstu (trurl@mastodon.sdf.org)'s status on Tuesday, 10-Jun-2025 22:04:11 JST dstu

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     @scribe I'm pretty sure there have been enough fictitious and real-life villain monologues about people being sheep/longing to be oppressed/etc. that an answer to, "If they're going to put someone at the top, it might as well be me," is merited.

     Call it a social prosthetic. In a truly cybernetic culture (in the sense of a self-regulating system), we recognize a tendency to despotism and build artificial mouths at the top of the pyramid that consume more effectively than you ever could.