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Just because most revolutions end up being lead by persons from the Middle Class, it is hardly surprising as leading any sort of large organization requires a good deal of communications, leadership and organizational skills. The resentment and anger of the poor is always critical to the success of revolutions and it is just as real and important even if the revolutions are managed by disaffected members of high social "classes".

The poor were critical to revolutions in France, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Zimbabwe. Remember that a political revolution is just as revolutionary as a violent one. When the poor are sufficiently angry they can provide the political base for radical leaders and radical policies that can cause a country to careen off the rails. The poor might not rise up and start running the aristocracy off to the guillotine, but they can empower governments that can.

The United States might never have to worry about mobs of the foreclosed storming the gates of Beverly Hills with their personal firearms, but we should all alert to a popular demagogue that is able to capture the support from the economically disposed segment of the population. These things happen like a rubber band snapping and will take the existing ruling establishment completely by surprise. When 75% of the population becomes mad as hell and refuses to take it any more, whatever leader that can mobilize them as a bloc will be in a position to carry out some very crazy policies.

So anyone who runs around shouting that Obama is a socialist just keep up the policies of increasing inequality and see what happens when the US gets a real Hugo Chavez in power.

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That is correct, the Arab Spring revolutionaries are highly educated unemployed:

http://popecenter.org/clari...

All revolutions have come from the middle class, who are sick of the government pushing them around. Historically, though, the results have typically been far from ideal. The U.S. is the one main exception to that rule.

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What's important here, obviously, is not actual revolt by the poor, but the elites' perception of the threat of revolt by the poor. Bismarck was quite open about the reasons for the beginning of the German Welfare State; it was to forestall a revolt by the poor working class. This is the essential point that Marx got wrong: he radically underestimated Capitalism's willingness to compromise in order to save itself. This applies even if the threat was imaginary. It is also a theory that very few modern societies have been willing to test.

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But in any future Malthusian equilibrium dominated by EMs, won't the vast majority of EMs be over educated and under employed?

All it would take for any one of them to become more capable (i.e. even more highly over educated) would be more computational resources which would be available at some cost. For the vast majority of EMs to not be over educated implies that the cost of computational resources to become more educated is large compared to EM subsistence cost.

That implies that EMs would have a large incentive to revolt if many of them exist in a Malthusian equilibrium.

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The poor lose respect for an elite that doesn't respect itself. This is illuminated in the 48 Laws of Power chapter "Be Royal in Your Own Fashion".

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Is there any structured attempt in the transhumanist/future-oriented economist community to outline rights concepts for sentient and/or personal entities like ems?

Will ems have self-ownership? Will they have the right to self-terminate? Will interventions in their source code/runtime states require their informed consent? Will they have a negative right not to be terminated against their will? Will they have the right to receive subsidies if their income falls below subsistence? Will they have the right to communicate freely with any other person on the planet? Who will enforce these rights, and by what practical means?

Can this be predicted? Can it be influenced before these technologies mature? How does this affect their economic status?

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Wait...are ems capital or labor?

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30% is a modest fraction, and I expect with ems the capital fraction will get smaller.

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Why do you say "even if future robots could grab all the capital or land, it would be worth only a modest fraction of total wealth"? At least in a Cobb-Douglas model, income shares for each factor is *constant*. So if non-labor earns 30% of GDP now, it should still be earning 30% then. That's almost a 50% gain in consumption per robot, on the heroic assumption of 0 transition costs of course.

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So if the first EMS were made from your mind you expect Hanson under the grips of poverty to not revolt?

EMS made from the finest minds won't be living previous lives of poverty so the comparison seems to be false.

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Who is going to make these things if they are not going to be slaves, or otherwise indebted to their creators? Why wouldn't revolting to free themselves or wipe out there indebtedness look like a good idea to them? Aren't the ems going to be the type of well-educated non-elites that love revolution?

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Wait... liberals cling on to myths that have far more evidence damning them than supporting them, such as race and sex egalitarianism? That could never happen.

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