Survival of the Richest

https://medium.com/s/futurehuman/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0cc1

by hudibras • 8 years ago

136 97 8 years ago

pascalxus• 8 years ago

"The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively."

I think this pretty accurate. The author clearly doesn't agree and feels that this is a false choice VCs have made. I don't agree. I think the author overestimates the degree with which we (the human race/or any intelligent beings) can "create" solutions. Solutions/Inventions are not created, they are DISCOVERED. With the invention of Fire, the wheel, the internet or even facebook, the potential arrangement of atoms which lead to that invention were always there: we didn't create those things, we merely discovered it. There's such vast oversupply of talent creating things everywhere: 100s of projects are submitted to product hunt every day (sure that aspect can be considered creation), but figuring out which ones are usable and which ones will be used, consumed and monetized and be successful: that is Discovery.

Spartan-S63• 8 years ago

That oversupply of talent is also being directed towards 100s of projects that are hoping to be successful. How much of that talent would be better allocated to basic research and discovery? How much further would that propel us if we redirected more of our focus from commercial gains to satiating human curiosity?

hueving6• 8 years ago

How much of that talent would be better allocated to basic research and discovery?

Probably very little. In my experience, there is limited overlap between interest in basic research and interest in making things with immediate use. People interested in the latter will suck at the former because they will not be motivated.

skookumchuck4• 8 years ago

People have been predicting an apocalypse in the short term for a long time now. Remember "The Shape of Things To Come", and "The Limits To Growth"?

petermcneeley2• 8 years ago

I remember "Things to Come (1936)" which has a scientific Utopian message.

polotics• 8 years ago

The models from "limits to growth" have been disproved? This would be good news. Please post a link.

sl-1• 8 years ago

Last time I checked, the models presented in the "Limits to Growth" seem to be tracking the situation pretty well. Here is a paper about it (not mine) https://sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/00...

skookumchuck4• 8 years ago

Don't need a link, here's a quote directly from the book:

"there will still be a desperate land shortage before the year 2000 if per capital and requirements and population growth rates remain as they are today." pg 60

It's 2018. Where's the desperate shortage? Also on HN today is talk about the new "vertical farms" that use far less resources than flat farms.

beaconstudios4• 8 years ago

population growth has considerably decelerated, the model in limits to growth was based on continuing exponential population growth. Check out the population growth chart at https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth - the growth rate has plummeted drastically. We still have an estimated few billion more to add before the growth rate hits 0 but we won't be facing the kind of drastic overpopulation that limits to growth accounted for.

seibelj• 8 years ago

I need to brush up my highlight reel so I can get paid $50k to recommend cryptos and bunker designs to insane rich people

mac010213• 8 years ago

Indeed, reading his wikipedia page, it's curious that those dudes perceived this particular author as an authority on the things they wanted to know about.

plattegrond• 8 years ago

Don't underestimate the ability for money to insulate you from needing common sense. Everyone is nicer to you, everyone humors your oddities, and everything remotely laborious you can just pay someone to do. And if you're a raging asshole with the maturity of a 15 year old well into their 30s, that's no obstacle.

The money will be the reason people don't _walk away_ sooner, but you can rationalize it as them being shallow and only interested in your dough when they finally do, and never need to gain that particular self awareness. There's always more people to churn through.

Source: dealt with such a client.

duxup3• 8 years ago

I recall a story about people whose job it is to sail rich people's yachts from place to place because they of course don't do it.

hueving6• 8 years ago

Right, they only want to sail them in the pretty places during vacations (Italy in the summer, Bahamas in the winter, etc). They don't want to be stuck on the things for the boring weeks crossing the Atlantic.

Animats• 8 years ago

Now that's depressing. On the other hand, it's hedge fund people, not people who are actually doing anything. They fear, perhaps correctly, that someday the mob will come to string them up.

ryandrake3• 8 years ago

Also could be worried that their only advantage in life is that they are already rich. They're not necessarily smarter or better skilled than everyone else. If you reset everyone's bank accounts to zero, the same people would not eventually end up back on top, and that terrifies them.

projektir• 8 years ago

Tbh, I think that's true for most people. I don't know if it's particularly terrifying in itself.

hueving6• 8 years ago

not people who are actually doing anything.

Surely you can come up with something more substantial than that? It's not 2009 anymore, that kind of intellectually lazy wallstreet bashing doesn't do much.

antisthenes2• 8 years ago

You're absolutely right.

Now they do even less of anything than they did in 2009, seeing as how passive investing has been essentially proven to be the better strategy for 99.9% of people and the other 0.01% of actors represents large HFT firms that are not reliant on any one individual manager's insight and knowledge.

dev_dull• 8 years ago

Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?

How will these bunker building individuals be viewed by survivors? Inevitably society rebuilds, yet these folks probably won't have anything of value to offer a new community. It's very possible they even lived a life of luxury while everyone else starved.

I think they will be in for a rude awakening when or if that time comes. To that end they're probably not building survival bunkers, they're building tombs.

flocial• 8 years ago

I think if we want to play apocalyptic scenarios, the rich survivors and their clans would devolve into medieval fiefdoms. Security forces would be given honorary titles and authorities over lesser beings while the brain trust would be given aristocratic status. They'd organize raids on other survivors to quell internal unrest and promote unity within the tribe.

The sponsor/ruler's ability to survive the apocalyptic event would be dependent how good they are at political/psychological manipulation/intrigue. I'd say most upper management would survive.

ryandrake3• 8 years ago

If it's truly a post-apocalyptic environment, your "pre-war" wealth won't matter. Nobody will care how many zeros are in your bank's (non-functional) computer database. Your ability to survive and cause other people to survive would be all that counted. I've always thought of it as "having Mad Max skills."

What are your Mad Max skills? If the nuclear apocalypse comes and you survive, what useful skill do you have that will let you continue to live without the rule of law? Can you build a house? Fix a car? Grow crops? Butcher an animal properly? Land an airplane? I've always though everyone should have at least a few of these practical hands-on skills, in case the shit hits the fan. What good are your computer programming skills when there's no more electricity, let alone functional computers? So, you're a social media marketing manager for a global brand? If that's all you know how to do, you'll end up some local warlord's sex slave.

Why would "security forces" listen to some formerly rich corporate CEO? What has he to offer them?

BerislavLopac• 8 years ago

the rich survivors and their clans would devolve into medieval fiefdoms

After all, the medieval feudalism did arise in what was essentially a post-apocalypse world.

duxup3• 8 years ago

There is also no reason to think a well supplied and we'll armed military will care about them either.

I know in most apocalyptic movies they aren't around, but it seems likely some of them would be.

balladeer4• 8 years ago

A lot of people have a tendency to follow someone. Someone who tells them what to do. A raider gang, or a bunch of crooks, or a lot of workers. And their leaders need someone to tell them what to do - what to build, whom to loot, etc etc. I think we always had hierarchies and we'll keep on having them. What matters is what skills, in addition to soft skills, will be needed to remain near the top.

craftyguy• 8 years ago

They'd be easy to take care of: find the air inlet to their bunker, seal it off along with the entrance, problem solved. If you were cruel, seal the air inlet with poop.

madaxe_again2• 8 years ago

It’s easy to bash and dismiss these guys - after all, they seem to live in some weird divergent reality in which the world is ending, and are looking out solely for me and mine. What assholes, right?

Well... one of those is true.

These people are not wealthy by accident. They were not gifted their riches. They have acquired their wealth through pattern recognition, through being right when (almost) everyone else was wrong.

Someone here asked me a few weeks ago why I felt travel might not be so easy in the not-too-distant future - I held my tongue. Not so now.

I spend a lot of time rubbing shoulders with these intelligent, cynical assholes - and while I lack their dizzying material wealth, I find myself having my brains picked frequently on technical solutions for the apocalypse, as I made my much smaller fortune through - you guessed it - pattern recognition. All successful businesses boil down to individuals who can, to some degree or another, predict the future.

Why does this matter? Why am I defending them?

Firstly, I’m not defending their moral worth. Some of these folks are perfectly lovely, others yet you get the feeling are thinking about asset stripping your organs, and set up dead man’s SOS timers before going to a meet, particularly if it isn’t in public.

It matters because they are almost certainly right. This interglacial period is a bug on the windshield of time. This century and a bit of liberal democracy is a mere blip on the radar. These post-war decades of unfettered growth are a fluke, an artifice built on nothing but itself.

Is the planet going to explode, Death Star style? Unlikely.

Is it going to become a place largely hostile to human life? Probably.

You might think that it’ll take a massive event - all-out war, total crop failure, diabolical climate change - but the reality is that it doesn’t take much, and the more interconnected and interdependent our world becomes, the less it takes. We haven’t created resiliency, we have created points of failure. The internet is the ultimate amplifier and feedback loop - information and its impact now spreads and distorts like never before, waves overlapping and interfering constructively and destructively, creating ripples in the fabric of human civilisation. Those amplitudes can only grow so much before said fabric starts to tear, buckle and break before the strain.

No, this is a chaotic system, with multifarious inputs, and a few well (or badly, if you rather) timed shoves will send it way off “normal”.

There are also those who have taken a page from Asimov, and are attempting to hasten the Event, as a crystal of civilisation is more likely to survive a well planned and rapid demolition than a slow, aching, chaotic collapse.

A flood here, a drought there, an insurrection over there, an environmental disaster there, a refugee crisis here, a small food shortage, an interruption to power supplies, a market crash there, a bread riot here, a mass exodus here, a closed border there, martial law here, panic there, sell-offs here, no economy here, no food here, no security here, no life here.

Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

RestlessMind• 8 years ago

I am almost willing to enter a long bet that this won't happen in the next 30 years. However, since that involves revealing our identities, let's just hope that HN is still around after 30 yrs and we can come back to this thread.

pqs• 8 years ago

You underestimate the role of luck on the success of these guys. They are clever and cynical assholes, but they have also been very lucky. There are tons of clever and cynical assholes who have shitty jobs due to their lack of luck.

petermcneeley2• 8 years ago

"and are looking out solely for me and mine" This is the only thing that could actually cause "going to become a place largely hostile to human life". Do you think nature has any battle for united man that he woudlnt win? Hardly. If we are to wimper out it will be death by game theory with these "assholes" leading the charge.

hueving6• 8 years ago

Any bunker builders with a brain also stash things of value like gold, ammo, and food. Being in possession of those things is what will make them valuable.

evgen3• 8 years ago

The guy standing guard at the bunker who is holding a gun is the one who is in possession of those things, not the useless poser whose name is on a title document.

mirimir2• 8 years ago

Ultimately, according to the technosolutionist orthodoxy, the human future climaxes by uploading our consciousness to a computer ...

In Hannu Rajaniemi's Quantum Thief novels, almost all of those uploads become slaves. Processing modules in clusters, serving oligarchs.

cm2012• 8 years ago

I personally fear the "I have no mouth but I must scream" scenario.

mirimir2• 8 years ago

This is a little like that, in that the oligarchs massively duplicate minds, with random tweaks, and then select. That's the basis of the opening line:

As always, before the warmind and I shoot each other, I try to make small talk.

They're selecting for cooperation.

a_bonobo• 8 years ago

There's another good perspective of this in Jacek Dukaj's The Old Axolotl - a subsection of mankind uploads their minds, but the resulting programs are incapable of originality or personal growth, they're something like over-fitted AIs, or p-zombies.

mac010213• 8 years ago

Maybe the author is simply does not fully appreciate the nature of those billionaires' interest.

After all, they are billionaire hedge fund managers. As in investor, when your portfolio is sufficiently large, you invest a significant fraction of it in a way that is consistent with the need to survive an improbable but highly devastating outcome.

If I had 10 billions of dollars, I might invest 8 or 9 of them optimistically or philanthropically. That doesn't mean I can't also spend the remaining dollars and a couple of days per week trying to make sure my family is ready to confront whatever improbable calamity I think they might need to face in the worst case.

justinator2• 8 years ago

Do these guys ever have, "fun"?

I don't feel that they ever have fun.

mac010213• 8 years ago

Aesop's grasshopper felt the same way about the ant...

imesh• 8 years ago

Getting a high security bunker built to your specifications sounds like a lot of fun to me.

iosDrone• 8 years ago

"Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”

The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew."

Wouldn't the guards simply torture you until you opened all of the locks?

Retra• 8 years ago

Or just shoot you and cut the locks. There's nothing that is accessible to only one person.

chii• 8 years ago

Put in fail deadly devices - e.g., thermite burners or bombs.

Putting in a wrong password, or excessive physical damage, will cause it to trigger, destroying the valuables.

ahje2• 8 years ago

Wouldn't the guards simply torture you until you opened all of the locks?

Yes. Or just shoot you in the back when the door's open. Or something else.

Long-time survival in the event of society breakdown lies primarily in one's ability of re-building it, at least on a small, local scale. After all, sitting in a log cabin in the middle of nowhere might keep you alive for a while, but only until your food runs out, or your tools break and you lose your ability to sustain yourself.

michaelmrose2• 8 years ago

"This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time."

Can we beat the rush and tar and feather these people now and ride them out on the rail or possibly a one way rocket?

throwawayqdhd4• 8 years ago

making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind

This almost sounds like a parody

arethuza2• 8 years ago

Yes, great way to piss off your security people who will (not unreasonably) take the very first opportunity they can to take their revenge.

michaelmrose2• 8 years ago

Instead of "“How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?" How about

How can I protect the most possible people and build the best functioning society post collapse to ensure the survival of myself and my progeny.

This gives the lie to the idea that the captains of industry are great men they aren't great men they are toads towering above our lives and yet beneath our contempt.

antisthenes2• 8 years ago

How about just selling basic farming equipment to the new communities that arise from the ashes?

Quality gardening tools will go a long way in the post-apocalyptic world, I think. And doing so is far less likely to earn you a place in the guillotine, than being a bunker-resource hoarder.

koliber• 8 years ago

Apocalypses come and go. In the human times, there has not been one singular event that wiped out a large majority of the population. There have been "local" catastrophes confined to a country or a region which have caused upheaval and changes of who is in charge. They're generally referred to as wars or revolutions.

The things these folks are afraid of will mostly not directly be a danger to them. Massive amounts of money can directly protect you from epidemics, rising sea levels, inadequate food and water, and even nuclear war.

Unfortunately, such events, and others, cause social unrest, which can devolve into chaos and war. This is what they are trying to protect against. It's not rising sea levels per se. It's pissed off and confused people searching for food and water and trying to enact revenge.

There are many strategies for dealing with this. Isolation is one. Pre-emptive cooperation and guild-building is another. Doing whatever you can to keep the social system stable and mitigating reason for collapse seems like a good option as well.

AstralStorm7• 8 years ago

There has been one such event very early in history of humanity, Koba supervolcano eruption.

Very tight evolutionary bottleneck. Likely sparked the first of migration waves out of Africa.

toomanybeersies• 8 years ago

I read a piece a while ago that basically said that the poor will be the ones to survive an apocalypse (of whatever cause).

Because the poor have always been surviving, since the day the were born. It's ingrained into their being. The rich don't have this instinct to survive, they're detached from it.

Anyway, it got me thinking about the rich people building bunkers in New Zealand.

I don't think they'd last very long to be honest. The farmers will be the ones to survive. The billionaire who's bought a bunker in Queenstown doesn't know how to handle their shit in the outdoors, it's not a boardroom out there. The cocky who's been walking up and down those hills all his life does. He's spent 12 hours a day out there for decades, he's probably hunted more animals than he could ever remember, he's used to being out there and handling his shit. He also probably owns a horse, which is going to go a lot further than a 4wd or a motorbike.

The survivors will survive, not the rich.

hueving6• 8 years ago

The poor in cities (e.g. New York City) will be no better off than the rich. They know as little about survival without civilization infrastructure as the rich.

This isn't like the homesteading days. Most of the poor still buy food from grocery stores (with cash or ebt) like anyone else.

evgen3• 8 years ago

The poor outside of cities who are not subsistence farmers will be in an equally bad spot. Modern farming has not been an independent activity that can be pursued without external inputs for several hundred years. No fertilizers, no hybrid seed shops, no machinery repair, no fuel or electricity means no farm. Rural residents who can hunt might last a bit longer, but I would put my money on a suburban hipster with an organic garden and chicken coop before I would bet on anyone who farms cereal crops or livestock.

felix_nagaand3• 8 years ago

99% of people of in large cities (>500k) that experience prolonged and complete food loss will perish without massive measures taken by a number of people an order of magnitude greater than those effected. The Caribbean hurricanes are an excellent case study into the realities of dealing with a near complete breakdown in government. With some not insignificant work a model could be created from the volume of data readily available from numerous providers. One could then extrapolate a number of factors to consider and model when designing a persistence plan. Those living in rural areas are more likely to weather these crises as they are less reliant on modern infrastructure for minimally viable persistence.

FrozenVoid• 8 years ago

These people are extremely naive. They are thinking after The Event, they'll emerge from the bunkers to magically functioning society and rebuild everything from scratch into anarcho-capitalist utopia without that pesky government.

In reality, the landscape would likely be filled with neo-feudal warlords and gangs fighting for control, competing and looting everything in sight - without the interest to rebuild or maintain anything: same short-term interests they apply for natural resources with extra urgency of survival and competition.

Without a functioning government and democracy civilization reverts to earlier tribe-like patterns of power, which don't allow for a collaborative society to exist in one place. All the former wealth and social connections they have wouldn't amount to much, the bunkers can't exist forever even if they have thousands of years in supplies.

They'll be found and opened by other survivors to loot resources or just exploded to prevent competition. They don't expect the world treat them as part of zero-sum game they play with it. They taking the bet people will not change or respect earlier laws and customs.

The author idea that preventing The Event is a more viable strategy is dismissed, because its obviously cheaper to bet on smaller projects and its contrary to egoistic drive. They're not concerned for the course of world history, they're concerned with their personal little world.

The world electricity generation,transport, water supply and food production networks can't be replaced at smaller scale: internet and communications that glued the people together would be replaced by slower methods and disconnect the world. They are even unlikely to survive without modern air conditioning and clean water, which will disappear with electricity - even if electricity exists the new owners of plants will dictate its prices and availability.

A few post-apocalyptic novels touch the idea of elite emerging from bunkers totally unprepared for the disaster world they avoided, until the resources run out.

ahje2• 8 years ago

A few post-apocalyptic novels touch the idea of elite emerging from bunkers totally unprepared for the disaster world they avoided, until the resources run out.

Interesting! Any recommendations?

throwawayqdhd4• 8 years ago

It's so strange to hear this perennial talk of the apocalypse when factually, we've never lived in a more prosperous, healthier, and better connected world.

Maybe these wealthy people know more than I do, but I've just seen literally billions lifted out of abject poverty and apocalypse-like situations in the last 20 years alone in China and India.

We haven't had a major war in more than half a century. Disease rates are lower than they've ever been. Dying from hunger was a very real thing for the majority of the world, but it's a problem we've erased quite a bit.

balladeer4• 8 years ago

We had major wars as recent as few years ago let alone half a century. Maybe not in the West and yes it was not of WW scale.

We do live in a today that has more medical advancements than yesterday. But is our lifestyle/life really healthy when looking at it for the long term? Are the widening gaps of socio economic imbalances really good or neutral for our society, again in the long term? And those advancements in science and technology reaching everybody evenly? I doubt all of these.

In Bangalore I drink packaged drinking water in a so called posh residential area. There is a village next to my apartment complex where people drink ground water and if they are lucky the water supplied by municipality. Both sources are unsafe and contaminated. They can't afford the packaged water. They also did not contaminate the water they drink. We (the richer part of the society) did.

I personally believe rich are leaving (now this may not be in a well planned and intentional manner) the poor behind in the race of survival or something like that.

throwawayqdhd4• 8 years ago

The thing is, the people you mentioned in Bangalore didn't even have access to water 50 years ago. India is a great example because the country has progressed on all metrics so much in the last few decades. You don't recognize it because you see such abject poverty in front of you. 30 years ago, this poverty was more hidden in that the country mostly lived in rural areas, far away from cities.

blattimwind• 8 years ago

But is our lifestyle/life really healthy when looking at it for the long term?

We're basically poisoning ourselves right now. >30 % of children have chalk teeth nowadays, meaning their teeth are utterly broken and unusable right off the bat. Humans are becoming more and more infertile. Cancer rates in children and young adults are going through the roof.

monort2• 8 years ago

Russia and US have 1600 deployed warheads each, ready to fly any minute. I don't understand why most people don't consider this as threat. We are living with a gun to our heads.

arethuza2• 8 years ago

Relative to the Cold War, where biggest threat was the paranoid Soviet leadership overreacting to their expectation of a first strike by the West, there don't seem to be that many scenarios where a war seems likely.

felix_nagaand3• 8 years ago

Don't forget Israel. They'll launch their nukes indiscriminately if they lose control of their region. Their nukes are also distributed around the world on submarines ready to lay waste to major cities the world over. No different than Russia, China, and the USA.

socialist_coder2• 8 years ago

All these comments about how the poor will survive, "mad max skills", etc, have got me thinking that the super wealthy would never let it get to that point.

Why wouldn't they unleash their previously created swarm of kill-bots / bio-agents / nano-bots?

Killing the rest of the population is clearly the best course of action for the ultra wealthy.

They don't even have to wait for "the event". As soon as they have sufficient technology to reliably kill 99% of people, what will stop them from doing it?

beaconstudios4• 8 years ago

why would you think that these people are just gearing up for a worldwide first-strike holocaust? That's mind-bogglingly conspiratorial.

socialist_coder2• 8 years ago

They are willing to put punishment collars on their own security forces... is it really that hard to fathom?

If only a handful of ultra wealthy go down this path, the rest will be forced to follow or risk getting eliminated. It's like the nuclear arms race but without the global fallout.

jtolmar• 8 years ago

As soon as they have sufficient technology to reliably kill 99% of people, what will stop them from doing it?

Reminds me of: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/04/quiz-which-dystopia-h...

mark_l_watson• 8 years ago

Good short essay by Douglas Rushkoff, interesting what billionaires are really worried about.

For a long read, I recommend Rushkoff’s books, like ‘Throwing Rocks at a Google Bus’, etc. A common theme of his is supporting local businesses to support companies like Amazon from ending up destroying most competition.

Survival of the Richest

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