Comment by jongjong

Great point. The people who popularized 'the end of history' were right about it from the PoV of innovation benefiting humans. It's been marginal gains since. Any appearance of significant gains (in the eyes of a minority of powerful people) has been the result of concentration in fewer hands (zero-sum game).

The focus of politics after the 90s should have shifted to facilitating competition to equalize distribution of existing wealth and should have promoted competition of ideas, but instead, the governments of the world got together and enacted policies which would suppress competition, at the highest scale imaginable. What they did was much worse than doing nothing.

Now, the closest solution we can aim for (IMO) is UBI. It's a late solution because a lot of people's lives have already been ruined through no fault of their own. On the plus side it made other people much more resilient, but if we keep going down this path, there is nothing more to learn; only serves to reinforce the existing idea that everything is a scam. This is bound to affect people's behaviors in terrible ways.

Imagine a dystopian future where the system spends a huge amount of resources first financially oppressing people to the point of insanity, then monitoring and controlling them to try to get them to avoid doing harm... When the system could just have given them (less) money and avoided this downward spiral into insanity to begin with and then you wouldn't even need to monitor them because they would be allowed to survive whilst being their own sane, good-natured self. We have to course-correct and are approaching a point of no return when the resentment becomes severe and permanent. Nobody can survive in a world where the majority of people are insane.