Think about it. Capitalism is awesome if you’re the one who started it. 30-50 years later, its fuck everyone else.
All the great tech innovations happened early on and peaked many years ago. Anything innovative now doesn’t pay, so its onto the grift and theft of data, wages, etc.
You might be interested in Kondratiev Cycle‘s. Those cycles are running 30-50 years. We are in the end phase of the IT cycle and begin of a new one. At the peak of those cycle‘s were always market dominating companies. Many of them were broken up by governments.
I assume the new is about regenerative energy and material production.
I think you don’t have a good definition of capitalism. Let us define it as a system where a small group of individuals (capitalists) control the means of production, and everyone else (workers) creates value, most of which they don’t receive… That in itself has nothing to do with corruption. It has nothing to do with stagnation.
And the examples you gave were about innovation, and innovation happens in many non-capitalist systems, too. No reason socialists can’t innovate, is there?
But what we also see is that capitalists hate capitalism. They have to compete, they could lose. So invariably they try to seize power in other ways. Therefore, one could argue (and many have argued) that capitalism leads to (or is likely to lead to) fascism.
At the same time, understand that any system can be corrupted. Some are less stable than others, but we always need to keep an eye out for the shady selfish jerks.
I’ve got my eye on quite a few shady selfish jerks. What do I do now?
I feel like all systems lead to fascism, its the ground state everything decays too and needs to be revived from. Communism decays almost immediately, capitalism takes longer, social democracies take even longer but can have their decay easily catalyzed by nearby fascist regimes.
Capitalism started in the Victorian era
as long as they think its profitable, thats why alot of research universities have to practically beg for money most of the time.
any new power structure can be good for the time it takes a generation to pass. after that people forget why they designed something a certain way and lose engagement with the political process. the only political and economic system that will ever be functional is one that is fundamentally founded on educating the populace on both their right and their responsibility to be involved in their own governance. the right to bear arms was a prototypical move to ensure people would always be able to enforce their right to self governance but without education in the importance of actually doing so it has ultimately failed to fulfill that purpose.
In the last ~10 years humanity has developed:
- electric cars
- mRNA vaccines
- cars that can (more or less drive themselves)
- convincing human language text/speech synthesis
- reusable space rockets
- precise gene editing
- prosthetics that directly connect to the nervous system
- robots that can walk across inconsistent terrain
- commercial quantum computing and quantum cryptography
- cultured meat
- biometrics
- computer vision
- virtual reality
- optical computing
- wireless charging
- stem cell treatments
- neural computer interfaces
- drones
- maglev trains
New technologies tend to have long lulls while being developed, followed by a rapid series of developments when those technologies become viable and in turn provide the base for new technologies.
Yeah, there’s always grifters and technologies that turn out to not be useful, but there’s also always tons of people working really hard to create new advances for the benefit of mankind. Capitalism is definitely flawed (understatement) but relative to say, feudalism, continues to be a very efficient way to allocate resources when used in a well managed economy.
how many have had government funding?
You’re spot on here. The list there was heavily subsidized by government funding. NIH, DARPA, NSF, NASA, etc made those be discovered and initially refined. Many are still heavily subsidized by government funding.
There’s an initial investment stage that takes risk, but after that, it’s mostly about refinement and efficiency. Capitalism tries to exploit those government funds then spread the risk followed by retreading old ideas for new dollars. Capitalism invents few things because it’s risky. It’s really good at monopolizing existing things and eventually driving the efficiency of exploitation to the umpteenth degree.
What am I, rainman? Regardless, I’m not sure what that has to do with whether “technology has peaked”
Cool, managed to create all that and yet hasnt solved hunger, medical care, homelessness, or anything or substantive value. Any system where your priorities dont lie in improving peoples lives is a flawed system.
Even worse than that, our modern, high-tech capitalist civilisation, no matter its many ‘triumphs,’ has roundly failed to address what was obvious to anyone seeing the long view-- that without addressing the mechanisms of its own unsustainability, it will still fail, as all earlier civilisations did.
So we’re headed for a collapse, faster with every passing day, while overpopulation, overconsumption, and capitalism have arguably been the primary drivers of that. And the richest people and corporations in the world, being uniquely placed to make a huge difference on that front, instead only think of the next quarter’s profits, or their personal wealth and safety.
I agree that there is an upside to capitalism,but by now it has overstayed its welcome and the downsides are starting to outweigh the upsides. To be fair though,we haven’t really got an easy alternative.
Capitalism incentivizes risk-taking, which can be productive when there are potential opportunities that are otherwise too risky to explore.
But after they’ve exploited the productive risk/reward opportunities, capitalists increasingly rely on amplifying the risks—but there’s no longer any commensurate increase in rewards, at least for society as a whole.
Ah yes that’s why North Korea was so much worse off than South Korea in the late 40s and then became so much better. Oh wait no, the capitalist south started out worse and is now better than the feudal north.
Nar its just monopolistic practice’s and patent loopholes that prevent anything ever going public domain. Fix those 2 problems and its back to being awsome
You’re writing this from device produced by that filthy capitalism
I agree with the sentiment, but I disagree that technology has “peaked”.
Technology constantly grows, and it’s moving faster now than ever. We won’t see the peak until society collapses and all the systems required to fuel that technology fall apart.
We won’t see the peak until society collapses and all the systems required to fuel that technology fall apart.
We’re currently at a point in history where scientists agree is past the tipping point for global warming, and now data centers are using obscene amounts of water to cool their AI machines.
We have unmarked “government officials”, kidnapping people off the street. Fascism is on the rise world wide.
How is this moment in time not the exact definition of what you’re describing?
I won’t argue with any of that, but I will point out that we’ve thought the end of the world was right around the corner hundreds of times in the past few thousand years, and we just keep going, so, I’m not going to make any assumptions about the end of the world, because 100% of those predictions have been proven false.
There will be more new technology next year, and if we avoid an apocalypse, there will be even more advances five, ten and fifty years from now.
I’m not saying it doesn’t suck, I’m just saying that claiming that technology peaked with the steam engine, when we live in a world where we can send messages across the globe in less than a second is just incorrect.
Meanwhile China is innovating tech.
Yeah but China isn’tthe world, the USA is the world. Haven’tyou seen the movies?!
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I agree probably with medical tech its improving. But is that helping a regular person? Or is it for billionaires who want to live forever ?
Tech for the average has definitely peaked, around 10 years ago id say. Everything now is ad ridden spyware. Cars suck and are ad ridden spyware. Everything is built cheaper and lower quality and unable to be repaired (on purpose), like appliances. Its not profitable to build a good fridge.
Theres almost nothing you cant do on a computer from 2010 that you need to do now, except playing the newest games. And the newest consoles now all require monthly subscriptions to games you dont even own. Just examples.
In normal countries, yes regular people do get better medical care when the tech improves. The world isn’t just America.
