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[Ken]

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.

[Daniel LSiata]

That's pretty awesome. Will be interesting to see how accurate it may be.

[orange]

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.

[Makkal]

We're going to have a post-scarcity economy by 2020. I'll just skip planning for my retirement then!

[Tiberious Thessalonia]

Really?  Nice!  I vote we start working towards The Culture.  Who's with me?

[Gottii]

I'm already saving up for my future Thorium reactor.

[Kybernetes Moros]

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.

[Lyn Farel]

Really?  Nice!  I vote we start working towards The Culture.  Who's with me?

I seek knowledge.

[lallara zhuul]

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.

[Ulphus]

...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?

[Syylara/Yaansu]

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.

[lallara zhuul]

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.

[orange]

Post-Scarcity's impact on the music industry.

[lallara zhuul]

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.

[Ulphus]

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.