IMO that's worse.

Yes, and if it doesn't crash it's better than fine. Objectively.

> I have handmade crafted products and I have assembly line products. Not only are the latter cheaper and more consistent, they're often better.

Completely ignoring the care and work that (ideally) goes into making and running the machines at assembly lines, and the cleaning that takes place every day, or sometimes several times a day, all the strict regulations. You cannot compare 99% of software engineering with food production in modern countries. Similar for furniture, it can hurt or even kill, and it would do at a much higher rate if it was made like most software is.

There's gross factory food, and super nice street food, there's healthy factory food and super gross street food. That has nothing to do with anything. All else being the same, you want the person who prepares your food or runs the factory to pay attention and not be sloppy, or you end up with food poisoning, glass shards, and other fun stuff. You just take allll of that for granted, instead of imagining how awesome computing could be if the people involved in it took it similarly seriously instead of just applauding their own laziness.

And "solving needs" is kinda vague. We drank from lead cups for a long time, because perfect knowledge of material and biology was secondary to just having a cup. And no single sip from any lead cup killed or maybe even much harmed any person, but it all added and adds up.

Of course the comparison with lead is kinda over the top, but it's just to illustrate the principle. If your software crashes the computer 1 out of 1000 runs, and it otherwise crucial and unique, people will still use it, and the longer and the more people use it, the more human lifetime it "destroys". If it would take you 1 year to find the source of the crash, it may not be worth it, if it would take you 30 minutes, it might be. You just won't get recompensated for it, you'd have to get satisfaction from it via something like craftsmanship.

Your users don't know either way, so it's your job to know. Saying it's not, everybody just has to be content with the transaction, is a bit like saying a doctor doesn't have to do medicine according to what they know is likely best, but according to what their patient thinks they need.

At least that's what I thought of when I read that; because answering in place of other people is another thing I find annoying. So I'm speaking for myself, but with some optimism I may have guessed the intent of OP correctly :)

What's the criticism? That you can't ignore something you're ignorant of?

[0] or maybe you don't understand what that means in the first place, making it impossible for you to hand wave it away [1]

I hate this style of discussion, "uhm akshually there's a piece of dust" that is just left hanging, as if that means the point is somehow diminished. And then there isn't even a piece of dust most of the time, or it's completely besides the point.

> Then you say “it replaces human interactions” which it absolutely does not. It seems the pro ai and anti ai crowd seem to have this misconception that humans are removed from the equation

If you replace one person giving another person an object with that person A leaving it at a dead drop and person B picking it up, you removed the interaction without removing the humans.

> when the reality is the position has shifted.

To where? You're just hand waving the removal of human interactions away [0], to say all that can be dismissed, instead it's something that means nothing at all.

"we haven't disconnected people, we just put them behind bulletproof glass on separate continents, we just shifted their position"

[1] See what I did there? I put the a footnote where it doesn't go, just as a little quirky thing, because why not.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10319-8

Anyways, your quite pedestrian life story changes none of the data, e.g. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wealth-reduce...

Being aware of said data is not "hatred" or seeing things black and white.

Why? It goes up. As I said.

> I think it's silly to do that when we have an unbelievably dramatic increase in wealth in recent centuries which needs understanding first.

That's not pushing back, that's wanting to talk about something else first. That's just not something I'm interested in.

> distorting what wealth means?

It simply means both things, from context it was obvious how it was used in this instance, you ignoring that and going on tells me explaining it yet another time won't help.

I claimed no such thing, you read way too much into your missing the point.

> if the Vikings (or whoever) caught you alone, or outnumbered and overpowered your hired guards

Wait, I thought it was just because "some people do evil things", nothing to do with relative power?

    Fighting hard to catalogue
    Sacrifice for the disguise
    Disconnecting analogues
    Anything to synthesize
    Nothing here is what it seems
    Nothing can be recognized
    Perfect fit for the machine
    Everyone is synthesized

Because people have and share ideas, and I was using that as a shorthand. Even if they aren't, if you completely strike that part -- my point remains completely untouched.

> why the relative difference in wealth today is more important than the (magical?) existence of a system were everyone has continually gotten more access to resources and technology

Because in the context of "Wealth is having economic power over the people around you.", that is the definition of wealth that is used. To quote a randomly picked one, emphasis mine:

"Large possessions; a comparative abundance of things"

> You are aware that the default state of humanity hasn't been one of continually increasing access to resources and technology?

There was no default "state", at least by the time you're talking about humans, we probably already learned from each other by observation. Sure, politics and wars and religion and feudal dynasties and whatever make bumps in the line, but generally it goes up. Once things get out, they're out, roughly speaking (that's the keyword here), and even in the animal kingdom.

And as I said, even if that's completely false, doesn't matter for the wider point about wealth, and that it can only buy you power over others if they have less of it.

The latter is absolutely zero sum, because of everybody has a billion, a billion isn't that much any more. E.g. human trafficking exists because some people are rich and others are poor, and the fact that even those poor people might have access to things an emperor 1000 years ago would have dreamed of doesn't change that, because the people who treat them like slaves have even more. It's all about the relative difference between people who are alive today, the absolute increase compared to people who lived N years ago is a red herring.