Backstage - OOC Forums
General Discussion => The Speakeasy: OOG/Off-topic Discussion => Topic started by: Ken on 03 Aug 2012, 05:51
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Neat stuff: http://envisioningtech.com/envisioning2012/?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000008
Seems big. You might have to zoom in a few clicks to see it clearly. I would probably stretch it out over 100 years rather than just 28, but I guess it never hurts to be optimistic. :)
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That's pretty awesome. Will be interesting to see how accurate it may be.
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Some of it doesn't seem to line up.
An interplanetary internet (Internet 2025) is not particularly useful unless we see a lot more stuff in the space column.
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We're going to have a post-scarcity economy by 2020. I'll just skip planning for my retirement then!
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Really? Nice! I vote we start working towards The Culture. Who's with me?
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I'm already saving up for my future Thorium reactor.
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I wrote a short piece about LFTR (a variety of thorium reactor) recently; they're pretty damn cool things. It's a shame that the technology was largely set aside by the end of the 1970s, if memory serves.
Despite some strange inconsistencies, like the one pointed out by Dex, the graphic's interesting. I'd agree with stretching it out to a longer timescale, though.
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Really? Nice! I vote we start working towards The Culture. Who's with me?
I seek knowledge.
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Post scarcity will not happen unless the whole economical system collapses.
Which would mean that the whole political system would collapse.
...and I would never want to live in the Culture.
It is a horrible concept.
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...and I would never want to live in the Culture.
It is a horrible concept.
Oh? The idea of a post-scarcity world where I can live well without having to spend half my waking time working sounds quite attractive to me.
Of course, the occasional war would be a problem, but that's hardly new.
What's your problem with it?
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Post scarcity will not happen unless the whole economical system collapses.
Which would mean that the whole political system would collapse.
...and I would never want to live in the Culture.
It is a horrible concept.
The "economical system" as it exists basically restricts access to abundance for the vast majority of people. It feeds and amplifies a persistent sense of scarcity and perpetuates our primal instinct to compete against one another (in the unhealthy, cut throat, against-our-own-long-term-self-interest ways).
The political system doesn't have to collapse as a result of no longer needing a monetary-based economy. The first order of any institution is to assure its own continued existence. There are two basic ways to achieve this. The first is increasingly extortionist means of extracting conformity and obedience (which has invariably failed over differing values of time). The other method is for that institution to adapt to the changing conditions of society and realign itself to the new paradigm, to remain relevant.
The political system(s) of the dominant countries of the world -especially over the last 30 or so years- certainly could not continue along their same trajectory should we actually achieve a post-scarcity condition. That is not to say you couldn't have a political system. As long as people seek an improvement in their quality of life, they will organize in some fashion or another to achieve that improvement.
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In the Culture everything 'living' is basically just a pet of an AI.
The term living does not really apply since all sentients are infomorphs.
Post scarcity in that context means immortality and inflation of all aspects of life, happiness, art, overcoming obstacles, sense of success, all lose meaning since all of it has been done ad nauseam by ever increasing numbers of the members of the Culture. All the wickedness of New Eden would be there because of the base nature of humans but it would be suppressed by AIs and superior mind control tech.
Wa-Hey, the perfect future where the Big Brother is in your head.
In the current economic system that is based on scarcity also the power is distributed in exactly same way (wealth is economic power, those that have economic power dictate everything else.)
The same thing goes with the illusion of representative democracy.
The representatives make their decisions based on what increases the overall economic power of the nation, which means they will make their decisions based on what benefits those that have economic power. Since those that have the most of the economic power are the minority, there is no real democracy. Another problem with democracy is that my ignorance is as good as someones knowledge, by having demagogues addressing the lowest common denominator those that are ignorant will always rule.
Changing the economic system would be the key to post scarcity, but to reach that infrastructure for post scarcity you would need economic power, and those that have it are not dumb enough to shoot themselves in the leg and lose their political power as well.
The way I see it education would be the key to breaking the cycle that we are currently part of, the problem with the global culture is that no nation can justify investing money in the education of their citizens because that investment can always walk across the border and be the asset of another nation.
Therefore (at least in nordic countries) the public school system is getting worse and worse, which will lead to the superiority of private schools that will enable the cycle where only the economic elite will be able to educate the ruling class like it has happened in the UK and the US.
At least in Finland we are currently at a situation where 75% of our representatives are from families that have have been 'representing' our people for generations.
I think we need an emoticon that waves around a plaque that says 'The End is Near'.
Personally I believe that the blind belief in technology and science to 'fix things' is a bit naive.
It is up to education and personal choice, I think its more about the microcosm than the macro.
The big things won't change the world, the small things will.
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Post-Scarcity's (http://www.ted.com/talks/rob_reid_the_8_billion_ipod.html) impact on the music industry.
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We all have played a sci-fi simulation which is in a post-scarcity economy.
EVE.
New Eden contains endless amount of isk and endless amount of resources.
With PI even trade goods became something that is coming from a never ending cornucopia that is the capsuleer driven economy.
Did these immortal transhuman demi-gods create a utopia amongst themselves?
... or did they do the exact animal instinct thing that actually leads to a scarcity driven economy.
Band together out of fear of not getting enough resources and start denying access to some part of the endless resources so that they can benefit from it.
I do hope that some sciency person is making sociological and anthropoligical papers out of EVE.
Because I think it might be a cornucopia of those as well.
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Eve isn't post-scarcity, or there wouldn't be refugee camps full of people without enough food.
I often think that one of the reasons that the Eve universe is so hobbsian is that there are no effective defences against the use of power except more power.
In the Culture, the average person can live quite comfortably with very low risk of losing life or property due to violence, so they don't need to respond pre-emptively with violence to the unknown.
In Eve, if you're mining in a belt and someone unknown in a hauler shows up and starts moving close to you, you have to assume they're the warp-in for a ganker. run away or esplode. If you're in lowsec and you see someone you don't know, you have to assume they're a threat and, not unreasonably, a lot of people decide the best way to deal with threats is to shoot first.
Take away the threat, and a lot of pilots would be perfectly happy to live peacefully in their post-scarcity society.
But CCP thinks that would be boring (and they're probably right), so they've set their universe up so that can't happen.
I don't really think that's a counter-example against the idea of the Culture.
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EVE is post-scarcity, to capsuleers.
I think the problem is that the players are lacking in the commodity that the characters have the most.
Time.
Immortal.
That means that you (personally) as an immortal can be richer than nations if you bother to gain more than you spend every day.
The Culture is a shangri-la Star Trek kind of future, where humans are fundamentally better than regular humans because of the tech that they use.
It even shares the same fallacy that Star Trek does, once you are living in a post-scarcity society you will automatically start doing 'higher' things and have 'higher' standards morally.
Which of course is complete and utter bullshit, even in the Star Trek universe where the other cultures live in the a different culture in a different post-scarcity society and they hold completely different ideals and goals.
Klingons and Ferengi for example.
In the Culture the homogenization of the Culture is done through exactly the same means as the capsuleers are controlled through in New Eden.
The technology that makes the individuals superior to those that are not living in the post-scarcity society is the thing that actually restricts the freedom of choice of those individuals.
The Culture has an installed neural net that enables you to be an informorph, pretty much every AI can access it and tweak it, controlling you completely in the process.
EVE has the pod and its interface.
The Powers That Be control what you can access through it, what you can interact with.
Controlling the results of your actions completely in the process.
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Actually, when I look at the Caldari State or Gallente Federation their means of automated production and access to interplanetary resources might allow them to enter a post-scarcity culture if they didn't direct large portions of their industrial and research base to manufacturing military goods. What I find even more odd is that I'm not really sure where most of the employment in the State or Fed is because you honestly don't need that many people to ensure an automated assembly line produces goods. Unless rubber stamping bureaucracy and service industry are the cornerstones of their economy.
Then again, the State and Fed could just be wholly artificial maintained systems aimed at preserving the status quo and the establishment that doesn't reflect their actual technological and industrial capacity. The Fed outlawing strong/sentient AI research for one seems to show conscious attempts to prevent technology that would upset the order of things. Strong support for CONCORD keeping tabs and controlling freelance capsuleers is also another.
As for the Culture, there always seemed to be this artificial limit in that even though they're almost at the technological zenith, human beings have a preference to remain as meatbags and not upload themselves directly to have access to the same technology and abilities as the Minds.
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I would like to apologize to the thread that my throwaway post about wanting to live in the culture has apparently caused this. My mistake!