Another one from my big daily notes cleanup. Again this feels like something that has undoubtably been thought about to death in philosophy circles, and there’s probably loads of famous sheet wearing ancient greeks that have been there done that got the tshirt so to speak. But anyway perhaps it’s interesting to consider in a modern AI + crypto + the world wide web context.

• Surely eventually AI tools will be so powerful that people will use them to control societies, taking people’s entire lives and turning them into a sort of game.
• And they will get very annoyed if said person decides to become a developer because in their eyes, they will think they have to create whatever the developer wants to build before the developer tries to build it.
• And as soon as the developer decides to build in a way that the super developer didn’t anticipate they will blame the regular developer.
• And isn’t society a sort of game, so what does that tell us about how we should design our societies?

Perhaps some philo geeks can jump in to set me straight, even though my reasoning is clearly flawless.

I’m trying to catchup with things, going through notes I’ve written over the past couple of weeks.

This one feels like it was worthy of a blog post. It’s not a fully formed idea, and no doubt highlights more about my misunderstanding of political concepts than being some valuable critique. But if I’m finding some of these concepts confusing then I bet others are too, so maybe some knowledgeable politicos out there might jump in to clarify.

Btw the title references the very well known at this stage, pillar of the free software movement, that tries to explain that when we talk about free software, we mean free as in liberty not free as in free beer. Though the two concepts are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

I hope I’ve remembered that right, I don’t currently have internet access to verify I’ve well worded that. This is the sort of thing where wording actually matters quite a lot, so perhaps look it up on Wikipedia or the FSF website.

Whether the use of the not free as in beer analogy is appropriate here, I don’t entirely know, but it should give you, dear reader, an idea of where I’m coming from on this topic.

Anyway, here were the notes I jotted down:

• Conservatives should be able to be liberals too, because you can be conservative in your approach to life but also want liberty
• Maybe the opposite of conservatives is progressives
• Liberals will tend to spend more, they want more space for the individual
• Perhaps there should be an ism for the opposite of liberalism, something like slaveism, or supremacism. Perhaps the reason there isn’t such a thing is to ensure it can’t happen?
• But it still happens whether there’s a name for it or not. The downside of not having a name for it is it’s very difficult to talk about, and that’s very bad for liberals that find themselves in a dangerous slavism situation, how do you even think about something that doesn’t officially exist?