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A 'Star Trek' Economic System May Be Closer Than You Think
HughPickens.com writes: Anna North writes about "Star Trek'"s "post-economic" system, in which money no longer exists and anything you want can be made in a replicator, essentially for free. According to Manu Saadia, the author of "Trekonomics," a forthcoming book about the economics of the "Star Trek" universe, when everything is free objects will no longer be status symbols. Success will be measured in achievements, not in money: ""Instead of working to become more wealthy, you work to increase your reputation," says Saadia. "You work to increase your prestige. You want to be the best captain or the best scientist in the entire galaxy. And many other people are working to do that, as well. It's very meritocratic."
In a time of rising inequality and stagnating wages, a world where everyone's needs are met and people only work if they feel like it seems pretty far away but a post-scarcity economy is actually far more within reach than the technological advances for which "Star Trek" is better known. If productivity growth continues, Saadia believes there will be much more wealth to go around in a few hundred years' time. In general, society might look more like present-day New Zealand, which he sees as less work-obsessed than the United States: "You work to live rather than the other way round." Wealthy retirees today also already live an essentially post-money existence, "traveling and exploring and deepening their understanding of the world and being generally happy." According to Saadia we're beginning to get a few hints of what the post-money, reputation-based economy might look like. "If you look at things like Instagram, Vine, places where people put a huge amount of work into basically just gaining a certain amount of reputation, it's fascinating to see. Or even Wikipedia, for that matter. The Internet has begun to give us a hint of how much people will work, for no money, just for reputation."
In a time of rising inequality and stagnating wages, a world where everyone's needs are met and people only work if they feel like it seems pretty far away but a post-scarcity economy is actually far more within reach than the technological advances for which "Star Trek" is better known. If productivity growth continues, Saadia believes there will be much more wealth to go around in a few hundred years' time. In general, society might look more like present-day New Zealand, which he sees as less work-obsessed than the United States: "You work to live rather than the other way round." Wealthy retirees today also already live an essentially post-money existence, "traveling and exploring and deepening their understanding of the world and being generally happy." According to Saadia we're beginning to get a few hints of what the post-money, reputation-based economy might look like. "If you look at things like Instagram, Vine, places where people put a huge amount of work into basically just gaining a certain amount of reputation, it's fascinating to see. Or even Wikipedia, for that matter. The Internet has begun to give us a hint of how much people will work, for no money, just for reputation."
I thought commie threads were on Sundays. This is Saturday.
Oh, right. Star Trek Saturday - we're on schedule.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The Star Trek economy only works with no scarcity. And while there is a surplus of labor, there is NOT a surplus or resources or energy. And energy is the big one here, as everyone keeps telling us. Sure there is solar, and wind, but they run up against some rather hard resource limitations. (Especially plastics which depend on oil...)
The "trekonomy" only works when everyone is onboard a starship and their cabin and their necessities are provided for them. Their "uniform" precludes fancy watches, gawdy jewelry, or anything other than replication of FUNCTIONAL ITEMS.
In the real world (sorry, fellow Trekies) people need HOUSING and the more $$$ you have the bigger the house. Houses sit on property. So if you're trying to get out of the NYC apartment and into a big Texas-sized house on a Texas-sized ranch, it's $$$.
People who are not in the military wear jewelry, and if you're a famous celebrity with no talent, it has to be big on the diamond front. You need $$$ for that, because even though manufactured diamonds are more perfect, they aren't "prized" as much as the flawed one we send people to the deaths in mines for.
- Fancy watches. You can't 3D print a Breitling. But if you could likely it would be prized less, just like diamonds.
- Cars. You can't 3D print a Lamorghini Gallardo or wrap it around a light pole because your $$$ exceeds your talent (see youtube).
- Planes. Kanye can fly on a private jet, but you can't 3D print one, and only $$$ will get you there.
Trekonomy is a cute concept, and I hope that lots of people spend $$$ reading it. ...because you can't 3D print a book you haven't bought...
Ehud Gavron
Tucson AZ US
I think we're closer to another revolution than to a post economic existence.
The food companies aren't going to start giving away food for free. People won't start giving away land for people to build houses on for free.
Post scarcity is a fictitious concept. The wants, needs and desires of the human race will expand to use up all available resources until scarcity is achieved. There will always be some material wealth that will be scarce relative to demand. This will be the limiting factor on human expansion. When the scarce resources are necessary to our survival, then people die off and growth is limited. When the scarce resources are not necessary to survival, then the poverty level rises. Simple as that.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
That journalists are the ones arguing about 'not having to work to live'?
I never see economists or machinists or retail workers espouse this philosophy. I mean really, just because a tiny fraction of the planet doesn't have to work (the 1-2 per centers including the wealthy retirees she touts), it does not follow that the people who make life possible for those economic elite are going to suddenly find what amounts to a pot of gold somewhere.
The Post Replicator fantasy economy is just that - a fantasy. Better to wish for a warp drive. At least it's useful.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Everytime someone talks about resources-based economy where everything is free, I ask this question: okey, so I want to do a realistic movie where I destroy a million cars. Those are free too? Can everyone and anyone do that? I agree that there are some situations where money is not needed, like wikipedia, which is a non-tangible by the way. But don't mistake that with "we need no money".
See, this is all about getting free stuff.
The trouble with these arguments is that base resources (iron, oil, aluminum, copper, etc ...) cost to extract and then there are the people who own those resources. So, in a Star Trek economy, I guess robots show up in your back yard and start mining - whether you like it or not?
And I guess education and medical and food will be free too. And I mean real education - or will MOOCs and other online classes start being taken seriously in the future? That's what killing my standard of living right now: medical, education and food costs.
See, there's much more to our standard of living than cheap or free stuff. You gotta think about the whole supply chain and other aspects of one's life.
"Wealthy retirees today also already live an essentially post-money existence"
You have to be really, truly full of shit to say something like that
I'm sure the Koch brs are looking forward to that day.
if humans weren't retarded apes who exist solely to consume and destroy
I can't 3D print a house on the beach.
Poor San Marino, they're a brutal theocracy and don't even know it. Founded 301 CE.
This one:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2015/07/07/what-the-economics-of-star-trek-can-teach-us-about-the-real-world/
all the other articles are crap.
This will never happen.
Because far too many people are simply greedy bastards who do measure things in money.
This will never be allowed to happen, and this mythical productivity making us all live lives of leisure is false.
It sounds all cool and dreamy, but it simply can't exist.
Americans are collectively too much selfish bastard to allow this. There are Americans who would go to war to stop this kind of thing ... because they'd rather be rich and greedy, instead of a world in which everybody has what they need.
Rand Paul would be shitting bunny rabbits over the idea of something like this. America exists for some asshole to make a profit.
Sorry, but the world is more likely to fall into the Ferengi rules of acquisition instead of some utopian future.
YET. You can't 3D print it YET.
In principle, all you need to make are robots. Robots that plant crops, robots that harvest crops, robots that build houses, robots that maintain the power grid. That's what employees are right now, just complex robots. If we can replace everyone's job by programmable robots, then there's no need to work anymore.
Scarcity is a limiting factor, but human greed is even more of a limiting factor. We will never reach anything resembling a utopian society where everyone's basic needs are met, regardless of the means, because of human nature, not because of available resources.
In a society as described (with essentially unlimited resources and energy) what will you do about the population explosion? Without warp drive to get to other star systems we'd end up like the Moties. Another Crazy Eddie utopia, not well thought out. Also, I doubt the vast majority of people would suddenly fulfill their potential and become rock star artists & scientists, achieving Great Things. Some would, but most will just partake of all that instantly available everything and disappear into the Holodeck, which presumably is also free. That future is more like Wall-E.
3d printed cars...
https://localmotors.com/3d-pri...
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
One word: water.
2. That does not change the fact that the economy portrayed in the show is a version of communism. That is the scientific term for the economic system they used.
3. Morons that think calling 'communism' "STAR TREK ECONOMY" will somehow hide what it is should be laughed at.
4. Communism is ALSO the system used by almost all modern militaries and families. You don't charge your kids for the use of the house. Nor do you charge Fighter pilots for the use of the plane, fuel, bombs, etc.
5. While Communism works pretty well within the military and within Families, it SUCKS for a general economy. See Russia, Cuba, North Korea for prime examples.
6. WE WILL NOT EVER END UP USING COMMUNISM / 'STAR TREK ECONOMY' FOR THE GENERAL POPULATION. That battle was fought and Communism lost during the 20th century.
7. A 'post scarcity' economy is a false idea. there will always be scarcity - fuel, ideas, certain types of entertainment, sex, will ALWAYS be scarce. Merely because we will have solved the scarcity of the original commodities - food, clothing, certain types of products, does not mean nothing will ever be scarce again.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Someone needs to mod this up....
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
This perspective radiates the same level of disconnect that Mitt Romney displayed during his presidential campaign, and Jeb Bush recently flubbed with his remark about American's working more hours.
It's fantastic for the author that he is on the correct side of a very pointy divide between "have's" and "have not's" but his projection that 7 billion people are on the cusp of post-scarcity existence is just a classic example of rose tinted glasses combined with the application of extrapolation which would be more aptly suited for anticipating the world described in "Elysium" than the one described in Star Trek.
Why would anyone want to compete with everyone else in the world when they already have access to everything they need? That makes no sense whatsoever and encourages nothing but hostility.
Regarding the Herald article - educated expats who have been overseas, benefited from returning to NZ with savings, a high reverse exchange rate, significantly higher overseas salary/wages and lower overseas costs of living are not representative of general New Zealanders. Sure, these people are set and come back to NZ with savings, significant equity in property etc - they can afford to value work life balance. Most New Zealanders are not as lucky as this small demographic.
For the millennials who have zero prospects of ever getting on the property ladder (due to foreign investors and baby boomers purchasing all of the housing stock), plus being encumbered with massive student loans, their only option is to focus on work life balance because their prospects are so bleak they may as well enjoy themselves.......
It's interesting how NZ is often perceived as some laid back, cruisey nirvana - the grass is always greener aye?
99.99% of all beneits trickle to the top, and it will continue until the consumers can't consume anymore.
The leeches will continue to leech until there is no one to leech on left, and then they too will starve to death.
Unfortunately, with the lack of need for work, there is also a lack of need for workers. So you'd better hope you own some robots, because we only have to look around at the current situation to recognize that those controlling the wealth are willing to do everything in their power to avoid sharing it. For now they need our labor, and so share a few crumbs with us to acquire it. What makes you think they'll share even that much wealth, when we have nothing of value to offer in return?
Technologically we've been more than capable of providing everyone in the world with a life of comfort and leisure (say a 20-hour work week) for several decades, at least. The problems are not technological, they're cultural and political. Further advances in technology are only likely to exacerbate the existing situation.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
When it comes to predicting the economic system of the future Heinlein >> Roddenberry.
I used to be left wing and a socialist in my youth thanks to Star Trek TNG. No poverty, happiness, people doing what they want because they want too, no pressure on bills, technology to give you everything you want etc.
Then I grow up and took economics in college and tried living out in the real world and putting up with things.
Here is why it can never happen: ... ... not what is best for themselves.
1. We are in a service economy today. While the Chinese are actually working making things, we count on plumbers, starbucks baristas, help desk weenies, airline baggage handlers, military personnel, construction workers, and so on. How many would work for free because they want too? Seriously? Most humans would sit on their butts and watch TV all day. Those who would want to work to get out of the house won't work as long as if they had a boss and deadlines and bills to pay. Which brings me to point number 2
2. How do we divide scarce resources when no money is involved? Yes with services we have scarce resources again replicators or not. In a free market if there are no large hoard of people desperate for any job and a skill or sucky work is required the price will go up. Someone needs to go out in 110 degree temperates in Phoenix to make that apartment ready for the rest of us to live in. If they worked based on the goodness of their hearts WE WOULD HAVE A HOUSING SHORTAGE. Basically if people did what they wanted and make paintings all day and tried to do IT work then no one would do the crappy work that no one wants. In a free market people work for money and the money will work itself out and have people work for what is best for society
3. It takes a lot of work to become a doctor, lawyer, cisco architect, and so on. Seriously it takes years of tests, certifications, work experience, and blood, sweat and tears.
4. People with free food would become rabbits and reproduce and take over the whole world lowering the amount of opportunities for everyone else.
5. What would society be like if we did this? People would have less services, homes, electronics, etc. Reality it would be like the Soviet Union. Even if you remove fascist elements you would have 10 year waits for cars, starvation (or maybe not with replicators), no where to go, high unemployment and so on.
Ask any eastern European on here or Russian what they think about this? They will be flabbergasted and say you have no idea what you are preaching? I remember life in the Soviet Union ... etc.
So it is sad but a cold hearted reality that our childhoods are over. We need to all work our butts off and be punished for not being the best or persuing the most economically sound path which society is willing to pay more for.
Unless someone can come up with some better ideas? My idea if I were king based on the free market would be to give condoms to poor countries and with less oversupply of workers consuming resources live will be better for everyone :-) The only way Europe left the dark middle ages was the bubonic plague. As horrible as this was with 1/3 of the population gone the middle class and freedom started where people didn't have to be a surf anymore and Paris and London had jobs again that paid something.
http://saveie6.com/
There are a few places where the version of communism they are calling "trekonomy" works besides a star ship. Besides modern militaries and families, many religious institutions use something similar. Nuns and Monks are clear examples. So do non-evil prison systems - they don't charge the inmates for food, clothing, etc. Note the highly authoritarian system for all of those categories - military, family, religioun and prisoners.
But yeah, the idea that it is going to be adopted by the general population is stupid. Not all of us want to live like a soldier/child/nun/prisoner.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Housing: http://www.cbc.ca/radio/asitha... - check
Transportation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - check
The reason people want expensive cars and private planes beyond convenience is as an outward sign of Reputation within a community and culture that revolves around money. The article points to a shift away from that mentality.
The problem is you are still going to need technicians to repair the vending machines or cleaning the nozzles of the soup dispensers.
What kind of people are you going to get to do that when money is not a requirement?
I made a shorter version of the article. To get Star Trek type economics you need replicators.
We've been through this before. Computers and automation were supposed to decrease everyone's workload. Keynes predicted we would have a 15-hr work week by 2030. It hasn't happened yet, and likely won't, because the bean counters and CEOs will simply see the untapped 25-hr/week as lost potential growth and will do all they can to exploit it to maximizing profits.
We live in a society that demands growth, not steady-state. Trekonomics does not account for the fact that humans are inherently greedy, some so addicted to shiny things that they are willing to struggle to horde so much wealth that they cannot possibly spend it in a lifetime. Until that mentality is erased I wouldn't make extended vacation plans just yet.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Where would anyone get the idea Star Trek is a post-money situation? Every Star Trek series and a few movies specifically mention people paying for items, trading currency or goods or services. Money is often mentioned and sometimes a source of conflict. How could anyone believe Star Trek represents a society without money if they have actually watched any Star Trek?
In the July issue of downtown Toronto's far left socialist radical community newspaper (The Bulletin) there is an article advocating that the Canadian government pays all Canadian citizens enough money to live a comfortable happy work free life. You don't have to work at all, and it advocated that you go spend your life perusing passions such as going to university to study things that you know won't get you a job such as Greek mythology, just because it interests you. You would only get a job and work a little bit if you want to for fun, or if you want a bit more money. The article says the government issues currency anyway, so why not issue enough to let us all live for free. It says robots will replace our jobs in the future so there won't be much work anyway. Question: who will run the universities you freeloaders want to attend for fun? Oh right, you're pushing to replace teachers with computer software already today. So why have universities in the first place? Just make it accessible online on your free computer in your free home.
They are supported by their savings - and the state. That many of them could still contribute but don't need to and don't feel the need to is an indicator that it's possible and doable for many.
Just out of sheer boredom, what makes you classify this as an "SJW" story?
Or do you have an uncontrollable urge to post anti-SJW snark on Slashdot at least once a day.
We have seen this "everyone will have free time" argument before. What people want is STATUS. Which means having more than the other guy. Freed from all restraints, we can expect to see systems that channel the ridiculous wealth upwards... as they have always done.
In all ways that matter we have been "post scarcity" since the agricultural revolution. The last ten thousand years tell you what to expect.
The only function "money" provides is to decide who gets how much stuff. In the past, you got two pieces of nice bread while I only got one piece of crappy bread because you had more "money". Today we've evolved to the point where it's more a question of you get two flat-screen TVs while I only get one because you have more "money" (only talking about first-world economies, obviously). If we're at the point where everybody can have as many digital watches as they want, it'll no longer be a question of money, it'll be a question of socialization: "Dude, do you really need fourteen watches?"
Once money is removed from the equation, it's obvious that the only reason most people work is for the money. So, yes, most people will retreat into the holodeck, never to be seen again. How is that different from what they do today? They're wage slaves for eight hours, and then they go home to consume media for the rest of the day.
The best benefit from all that, in my mind, is that we'll no longer have crappy doctors (or engineers or waitresses or movie directors) who just got into it for the money. The only people working jobs will be the ones who really love driving trucks (or playing baseball or making furniture), and the no-love, no-talent losers will *get out of the way* and clear the field for those with a calling.
I wonder if Medicine Hat's community housing will eventually become like Toronto Community Housing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XPM7PbKZr8
...minus the replicator:
We're in for a rough ride. A real rough ride. Automation is increasing fast, industry production is being outsourced to 3rd world countries or where labour is cheap, this isn't new, but it's increasing rapidly now. The 1% Richest Elite in America owns 40% of the country, and the rest of the world, the scenario isn't far away. One day, there will be severe uproars amongst the increasingly poor population, not to mention the INCREASING population.
The software companies are essentially building platforms rather than hiring, the industry heads for full automation. The days where you had manual labour is on a fast track to oblivion, all the unemployment numbers speaks for themselves. People are more and more RENTING their own homes rather than owning, more laws are being imposed on the populations "freedoms" to keep them in line during this transaction to new times, it happens with a speed that's similar to cooking a lobster, it dies, but it's so comfortable while dying in the heat that it gets docile and have no clue what's coming, same with the population. We slowly accept the situation.
At some point, there will be so few jobs that socialism technically controls everything, and socialism will by then look more like slavery than freedom and democracy. Voting for all of the above instead of several parties...because they all steer in that direction, they just know...telling you, isn't going to work. But telling you what you WANT to hear, will work. (For them!)
This sounds like some crazy conspiracy tinfoil hat theory, right?
Well it isn't. And it's happening right in front of you, you know it...harder and harder to get a proper job, highly educated people clueless to why they can't get a decent job. Forget manual labour jobs, those are already given to those before you that'll give up their jobs over their cold dead hands before giving it to you, so they now work OVERTIME. Why do you think we just passed laws to allow higher overtime pay?
And property? Don't even get me started. Do you guys remember the 2007 crisis? When hundreds of thousands of people had to leave their homes because they couldn't afford to pay their mortgages? And foreclosures was abundant? Guess what happened after that. Two things, a lot of houses where left abandoned and the banks/financial institutions lost billions on houses that became trashed, unmaintained and uncared for while people still had their debt which they can't possibly hope for to ever repay, now if they had kept their homes - they would have stood a fighting chance, but no. Corporate greed eats itself up.
The second thing that happened, was that smart real estate investors came and purchased the foreclosed homes, and rented them out.
Joblessness, lack of freedom, lack of happiness, lack of money, lack of jobs, outsourcing, automation will ultimately lead to one of the worst periods in history, civil wars will break out, huge fights amongst growing masses of unemployed welfare recipients fighting against the elite who has the law-in-hand, for food and basic needs. This will probably last a good 20 years or so, until we phase into the next "moneyless" society.
The moneyless society is actually good, but it's going to be a rough ride (as described above), and the hardest part will be to convince those with the money to part with the monetary system for good, for the common good of everyone, this will eventually equal man to everyone, and our future jobs will basically be to secure our planets resources and stability. But there's going to be ONE huge fight before we get there. Brace yourselves!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
You mean the country of 32,000 people with massive tourism appeal but that's about it? Yeah I don't think that systems scales dude.
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
Technologically we've been more than capable of providing everyone in the world with a life of comfort and leisure (say a 20-hour work week) for several decades, at least. The problems are not technological, they're cultural and political. Further advances in technology are only likely to exacerbate the existing situation.
How do you figure that? Here we currently have a 37.5-hour work week. Reading about working conditions back during the industrial revolution (e.g. any book by Marx), and we seem to be progressing rather rapidly towards that 20-hour week.
Heck, the previous generation still remember a 6-day working week.
The problems are, sure enough, cultural. But how would technology advancement suddenly start taking us backwards on this development direction?
"People with free food would become rabbits and reproduce and take over the whole world"
I agree with most of what you say, but the fact is that people stop reproducing once they get wealthy. The birth rate of almost all the developing countries has fallen - most obviously in South Korea where it's gone from over 6 to under 2 in under 50 years. That doesn't mean we don't have a problem in the short term, but in the medium term - 150 years or so from now - our population will be in free fall.
There's also no need for the rich to share the output of their robots with the plebes.
Who's going to cut your grass? Who is going to fix the sewer when things get backed up? Some folks who do it just for the "reputation" as the best sewer jockey?
load "linux",8,1
There are lots of reasons why we need to pay people to do things.
There are and always will be jobs that some people are very good at - but they DO NOT WANT TO DO. Just because you are the best at something doesn't mean you will like to do it. Prime examples are sexual - just because you are the best at giving blow jobs in the entire world, does not mean you want to spend your life giving blow jobs. But the same goes for many other jobs - garbage man, crab fisherman, and Wall Street drone. etc. etc.
Many jobs pay more note because of scarcity but because of unpleasantness. Almost no one wants to be a Wall Street Drone - working 15 hour days unless they get paid huge amounts of money. There is no scarcity involved - lots of people are smart enough to do it. But the job requires such ridiculous hours that the only way to convince people to do it is to pay them gobs of money. Even then, most get burnt out and quit.
More importantly, scarcity can never vanish - instead what happens is that once very rare luxury items become somewhat rare necessities, and specialization differentiates types. At one point in time the average person owned less than 5 outfits. Clean clothing was a rare luxury. Now, most people own 20 to 100 outfits. It has become a commodity. Has clothing switched to a 'trekonomy?" No - cut and style, has taken over, with certain types of clothing - namely hand made by famous people - becoming extremely rare.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
buh ok The mechanical components of the vehicle, like battery, motors, wiring, and suspension, are sourced from Renault’s Twizy, an electric powered city car.
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
I totally agree with your opinion and would give full mod points if I could.
The main solution to that problem will be design - to ensure that that sort of problem is fairly rare. Beyond that - the geeks of the world - especially teenagers - will take great pleasure in resolving those low level problems, applying the knowledge that we've gained from the manual etc. Remember that kids learn to use technical things by osmosis; as long as they are well designed, this will happen. Beyond that, there will be adults who take pleasure in sorting things out - and society will reward them with recognition. Add in a few megalomaniacs who enjoy the power...
Which "previous" generation? In the US, for example, the 5 day work week was established in 1940. For many adults, only their grand or great-grandparents didn't live under such law. For them, that's more than just the "previous" generation back.
I'm assuming the answer to your first question is Husqvarna (who already makes a lawnmower robot).
Don't know that there is a sewer cleaning robot in production, but can't imagine it's terribly more difficult than a lawnmower robot or a vacuuming robot....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
... where the 1% live like Startfleet and the rest of us live like Bajoran refugees.
That is all.
Not everyone likes to compete. Myself, I prefer comfort. If everything is free, I could become such a leech on society. And there are others like me.
But there are those who love to compete. When they can't, or if the prizes are too few, they get downright mean and nasty in their competition. I fear for society when things are no longer status symbols, because I strongly doubt that accomplishments will be status symbols. Instead, I think people will become the sole status symbol, further debasing humanity.
Communism has shown us that going by things other than a currency results in countries that fall over due to bankruptcy in a generation at most.
The sad part about life is that there are only two types of nations which survive for the long haul: Extremely brutal theocracies and oligarchies. The rest just get mowed over by those types, or just collapse from within.
A Star Trek is a nice fantasy, but Ayn Rand's words are reality.
Communism uses currency. The proposed utopia doesn't. Not everything that isn't capitalism is communism.
Ayn Rand died eating her words.Unless you are blinded by the sort of drivel produced by Onkar Ghate - who simultaneously says, yes she received Social Security, but she was opposed to it because it's a theft from the young by the old (though she was old at the time) - but she was a genius, so it's all not true, while it's all true.
I never bought into the Star Trek economy anyway - seemed some owned things that weren't made in replicators (antiquities). Where they gifted them? What did the show mean by Federation credit (a mention at the end of every series)?
Maybe the planets full of people who didn't aspire to a meritocracy weren't worthy of inclusion is series/movies - or the method by which the innate human drive to expend as little energy as possible was magically overcome (were they all on Ice?). I guess that's part of the beauty of fiction - because it's audience can visualise it they can recognise that it's fiction while believing it as almost fact at the same time. Maybe the series was based in a time after the period of which we do not speak (the great troll cull)?
The summary mentions "Wealthy retirees today also already live an essentially post-money existence, "travelling and exploring and deepening their understanding of the world and being generally happy." which sounds great. Though the Balinese may have a different opinion - especially about the money-free bit (but why do they haggle if they have no money?). Meanwhile budget cat food still sells well.
I knew I should have spent more time at the Firehose this week - it's my own fault. Not Hugh Picken's at all, no.
There are a few places where the version of communism they are calling "trekonomy" works [...]. So do non-evil prison systems - they don't charge the inmates for food, clothing, etc.
And the warders work for merit? Interesting.
Nuns and Monks are clear examples.
They are supported by donations or they make a product and become part of the market economy.
So do non-evil prison systems - they don't charge the inmates for food, clothing, etc.
All paid for by the taxpayer.
The Trek Economy could never work because of human nature. For it to work, people are going to have to give something away and there are quite a few people who are very attached to their stuff and labor and would demand compensation beyond "reputation".
And come to think of it, what about a scientist who comes up with something to unique that no one appreciates it until long after his death? I guess he'd be relegated to peon status while he is alive - like most of the great artists.
And the "great" captain - who decides who is great and how? How many Klingons he brutally murders?
The Trek economy is a fairy tale for fans.
Seems like you didn't get the point... All those fancy stuff that actually doesn't matter at all in a Trekonomy aren't needed at all. Why would you need a big house, fancy watch, car, or plane when everybody have access to the same services all around?
In an utopical Trekonomy (I agree is far fetched and cute too) you will have a provided house, time is available all around (I don't get fancy watches in the nuclear time protocol era), cars will be driven automatically, probably shared the same with planes.
Is precisely this mindset of "look at what have bought with my $$$ probably because of my insecurities" what keeps humanity from advancing towards a more equal civilization.
There are some resources which I believe will always be in short supply. If we assume matter and energy are unlimited, it still leaves us with the following limited resources:
- time
- location, location location; or rather, the distance to things people want to be close to, which is really at least partially trading other resources to saving time
- knowledge / skills (AI can increasingly mitigate this, but you will always need to know the right questions and goals to pose to AIs... or submit to being mere babies)
- attention/fame (people can only know and adore so many people) - eternal fame especially motivates some, the need to show that they can do it
anything else?
Even in Star Trek, not everything could be replicated. Trilithium crystals or Romulan Ale come to mind. Trilithium ore was mined under terrible conditions as seen in several episodes on TNG. Other things had to be purchased, actually bartered as Capt. Picard had no capital, from time to time, usually from the Ferengi, Romulans, Klingons, etc.
Because of people like Jeb Bush.
So in the Star Trek universe where money doesn't exist, how does one acquire, say, a collectible item like the badge that Wyatt Earp wore, or a rare tea set once owned by Andrew Carnegie?
> The article points....
It's a book review. About a "utopia" where there is no money. People get cred-points for doing good deeds.
No money implies no crime. Because you have no way to pay a lawyer, and if you're a heinous enough jerk no lawyer will want the cred-points to help you. Judges won't want to work 8-5. Court bailiffs will be happier playing frogger. You know, all that comes with "you can have whatever you want and don't need money or barter to get it."
I can't imagine a single politician lining up to sign that system up.
I can't imagine a single member of anti-bitcoin FINCEN agreeing to it.
I can't imagine a single "Occupy Wall Street" protester thinking it's awesome -- because they don't want "no money"... they want "the money not to be held by the 1%".
My lack of imagination should not be an impediment to you and your utopia, or that proposed by the author of the book that we have the luxury of having read a review of...
It's as realistic as William Shatner fighting off the Gorn.
Ah yes, Ayn Rand the person that uttered 'Consensus is reality'......
Good-bye
I don't live and die by StarTrek lore, but weren't the Klingons representative of communism?
Being a spelling & grammar Nazi is a sign you do not poses the intelligence to contribute to the conversation
Some people never develop past the age of six. Yeah, we get it: "everything should be free and there should be world peace". Anybody who says this stuff while being older than six and not being a contestant in a beauty pageant should have his/her head examined.
Here's just one problem: Raw materials are NOT FREE, NOT UNLIMITED; they require energy and labor to find, obtain, process, package, ship, etc.
Here's another problem: Inventors and designers want to be compensated for their many long hours/days/months/years of struggles designing all those things people want to replicate "for free"
Here's another problem: All gadgets are temporary. Not only do physical machines need to be designed, built, tested, deployed, maintained, repaired, etc, but there's always some person out there dreaming-up the next improved model, and consumers for whom "good enough" is NOT. Just look at every Apple iPhone launch - huge numbers of people line-up to toss their perfectly-good "old" machine and get the new one, not because it has a feature they NEED, but just because it's cooler. The same will happen with replicator machines.
There are plenty of other reasons Star Trek economics are a complete joke - which anybody with a functional brain should be able to rapidly figure out, but which are probably beyond the grasp of most pointed-ears and costume wearing trekkies.
Wake up: Star Trek was a piece of dramatic fiction, like Hansel and Gretel . Transporters were a plot gimmick because the show could not initially afford shuttlecraft props and models. Replicators were a plot gimmick to assist in interesting stories and an obvious extrapolation for the magic transporter gimmick (there's no rational argument against the Replicator, once you accept the lunacy of the Transporter). Even within Star Trek, Roddenberry's economic model breaks down; there are a number of episodes where people gamble with chips/tokens (money surrogates), people mention their pay, and so-on ...... for that matter: If everything is free and money is not needed because there is plenty, then why is the size of Starfleet not unlimited, with millions of top-of-the-line starships?????? Why have lesser Starships? hmmmmmm????? Every time a new advanced Starship is created, all lesser models should be just abandoned and sent crashing into the nearest star while an unlimited number of new ones are replicated (there should never be ANY active Starship that is less-capable than the Enterprise).
[sigh] I guess there's no surprise that lefties believe in Star Trek economics, given that so many of them also believe in Goose That Laid The Golden Egg economics (though they never get the point about it being bad to kill the goose...)
I don't think "post-scarcity" means quite what this writer thinks it does. Its hard to argue that even given the wealth disparity that obviously exists today your average person has a better quality of life than ever before. Even 60 years ago a large portion of the population were living in shacks with wood heat and old news paper "insulation", today its rare to find people living without some access to advanced electronics and central heating/ac. But post scarcity requires a level of technology that I have a hard time believing is even 100 years out. You have to have some kind of massive technological leap, either replicators or exceedingly cheap (robotic) labor. I don't think retirees pulling out of decades of savings to live out their waning years even comes close to counting.
So if you're trying to get out of the NYC apartment and into a big Texas-sized house on a Texas-sized ranch, it's $$$.
??? Have you ever attempted to look at NYC apartment prices? I have friends from around the country, and at one gathering it came out that the person in NYC was paying more for a studio apartment than the person in North Carolina was paying for a mortgage on a full 4-bedroom house. I do not doubt in the least there are apartments in NYC which cost more to purchase than some full hundreds-of-acres ranches in Texas.
The reason for this is scarcity. There's only so much land in New York, and people want to be there. (And conversely, very few people want to be in Culata de la Vaca, TX) $$$$ is the discriminator we use to determine who gets something when there's more demand than there is supply.
That's why "trekonomy" is normally called the "post-scarcity economy". Anywhere where you don't have to compete with your neighbor for something (there is no scarcity), the price falls through the floor to zero or less than zero (basic supply and demand). The question becomes, what happens when most/all of the things people normally want no longer are limited by scarcity?
You are correct in that there are likely to be things which will never become post-scarcity. There's only so many Renoirs (or 18th century pocket watches). Even if you can replicate them exactly, it's not a "real" Renoir. If more than one person wants Bal du moulin de la Galette, then there's going to be some way to figure out who gets it. Likewise, they're not making any more land, so not all 300 million Americans can have a 40 acre ranch in Texas - there just isn't enough of it.
But whether the economy for luxury goods will be a fringe thing or something life revolves around is an open question.
I think the idea of a "post scarcity" world is incompatible with some pretty basic human psychology. Even in the modern world, there are some resources (information) that have, for all practical purposes, become infinitely available. Yes, getting access to it isn't universal yet, but even amongst those who have a broadband connection, information is still locked away behind paywalls, media stores, etc.
This leads me to think we'll always have some kind of scarcity, even if it's artificial scarcity. Because there will always be some things that aren't infinitely available. As technology increases, those finite things won't be material, resources or even dare I say it energy but it could very well be abstract things like ideas (copyright) and inventions (patent). Part of it is probably that people need distinction in order to differentiate themselves from their peers. Another is just pure greed; some people like being perceived as better than others.
It's a nice picture of a possible future, but you have to reserve some skepticism whenever the story starts contradicting what appears to be constants of human interaction.
For instance, look at the online communities which have similar motivational incentives- no money, just "prestige". What is it like to be a member of such communities?
Even in academia, when times are good and the money is available to any credible researcher with a reasonable research project, how do they act to each other and what do they do to each other?
The fact is that "reputation" is a nice word for status which is always shorthand for "relative status" which implies a zero sum game for attention and recognition.
What do people do to each other within that kind of game? Because if you're my competitor and I can ruin you through underhanded means, then I come out on top. Don't kid yourself, making people smarter or richer does not allievate or even abate these dynamics.
How much of the bad things that happen in the world are because the poor are ruining everything for the rest of us? How much are because people with an unthinkable amount of money, post-money people, are behaving in anti-social ways?
Then there's the underlying, ultimate competition - the competition for mates. How is that going to be mitigated
in a post momey world? Do the current crop of post money people behave in a relaxed, egalitarian fashion or are they underhanded, status seeking, manipulative, competitors who stop at nothing to satiate their ever-expanding, ever shifting desires?
The REAL revolution that's so far out there in terms of thinkability is the one where science learns enough about why humans behave they way they do that they can control it and shape it. You know that that is REAL science fiction because whenever you hear someone say something like that, your imagination fills with visions of what a dystopia that would lead to.
The reason we have that reaction is because of the set of facts I was talking about in the beginning of the post- what people are like- post-money or not. The idea that people would naturally and robustly be inclined to act in reliably decent ways such that, say, we would not need a police force to stop criminals and terrorists from doing what it is they want to do, is totally unthinkable science fiction.
Even Gene Roddenberry didn't go there, except in episodes where he wanted to show what a false veneer any such society ultimately was.
That is all we know about humans and what humans are inclined to act like and that's the point. It's not a revolution if it's not revolutionary and making stuff for cheap is not a revolution, it's an evolution.
It's not going to take away the badness of the world or even much mitigate it, at least for people living in developed nations.
For people in developing nations, yes, it will be amaterial godsend and yes, that would be a huge and welcome event.
Seems like TFA is saying that if we don't have to work to live, we're free to live to work.
Seeing as poverty is defined relatively, it simply doesn't matter how much anyone has. If there are people who are starship captains, there are only so many starships in the Federation. Everyone can't be a captain. The definition of poverty first requires a determination of what constitutes basic needs. The 21st century definition of âoefood and shelter necessary for survivalâ will be as obsolete as the 19th century buggy whip. The 25th century definition will be âoethose lacking the prevailing community standard." You can live 24/7 in the holodeck powered by a Mr. Fusion free energy generator, and the social justice warriors will still be bitching and moaning because the self-actualization apex of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs cannot be achieved by most people in society.
"Where cultural progress is genuinely successful and ills are cured, this progress is seldom received with enthusiasm. Instead, they are taken for granted and attention focuses on those ills that remain."
-- Odo Marquard, Philosopher
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The economic system I am speaking of is internal, not external. Yes the warders work for money - so do the soldiers, parents in a family, and the people contributing tot the nuns.
The communist nature of these institutions is all internally. The people involved never charge each other for services rendered.
No, they represented the Soviets. In the first series the federation wasn't overtly communistic. They were sort of a post economy... economies are all about scarcity and the federation has such bounty of wealth that there's no point in any kind of economy because there's no scarcity. Everyone has effectively infinite everything. If you want to cover yourself in diamonds... you can do that. For free.
In the next generation the federation appears more communistic. And it is generally pointed at by nerd communists that the federation is their ideal system... as a wealthy and happy communistic system.
So it didn't start out being about communism but the fans have basically attributed that to it.
Also you have to look at the Ferangi who were a somewhat rival capitalistic power in the next generation. They were painted as being ugly, barbaric, sexist... unenlightened. And that does a lot to paint the federation as taking an ideologically communistic stand if only as a foil to the Ferangi who are capitalistic... although I don't know how valid that is since the writers of these shows are often not as smart as they think they are... My read on the Ferangi is that they're more "mercantile" than capitalistic. There's a very very big difference which I won't get into. But their behavior appears to be more about hording and monopolization of resources rather than about dominating production. That's the basic difference between the two. You could write books about that. Its why the Spanish conquered the new world and ultimately didn't get much for it while the English founded a few colonies here and there and ultimately made bank.
Mercantilists versus Capitalists was something that played out in the West... and the capitalists won BIG.
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We are already at a point (in western countries) where most stuff is dirt cheap. If I didn't worry about style or location, I could re-start my life each month from almost nothing. What this means is that the thing that differentiates the rich from the average is not wealth but control. The powerful can control my access to stuff by setting the prices and rules/laws. The most powerful are the lawmakers - most got there (or were substantially helped to get there by wealth.
Absolutely, while this may be the dream of Democrats, Communists and Roddenberry (and Slashdot editors), it is absolute BS.
First of all, we already have replicators, but it is illegal to use them! There is a warning on every DVD that I have that tells me this (and even though I supposedly own the DVD and the DVD player, the player will not skip past that warning. Similarly, while it is perfectly fine for the music labels to cheat the artists, it is not fine to cheat the music labels. And with the stated intention by big industry including Disney to subvert the U.S. Constitution, no copyrighted works will ever pass into public domain again. So if you want to see a movie, listen to music or pay that ever increasing cable bill you are going to need money.
Also, there are finite resources like real estate. Unless your ideal world is one where the party bosses and their pals get to live in big estates and everyone else gets put in a small cell in an undesired location that is deemed perfectly adequate for them, then the Slashdot editor economy doesn't really work. Similarly for any personal service, from a gardener to calling the plummer to domestic help. The fat cats will have all of the body guards (i.e. private mercenaries) that they want, as well as servants (paid slaves) but it will be wrong for you to expect any or not want to wait five to ten years while you go on the list for the plummer.
Even if we had real viable perfect replicators for all physical items and free unlimited energy, this system would never work. In a world where we don't have these, it is ignorant to even suggest that such a system is "closer than you think".
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
... Star trek's federation is basically a "post economy"... like post modern... you're beyond economics. And the only way you get beyond economics is if you're beyond scarcity. Economics are a way of rationing finite resources. We only have so many of anything. How do we determine who gets what and who doesn't? Demand always exceeds supply.
A post economy is one in which supply exceeds demand. Where you have more stuff than anyone actually wants.
We're no where near that.
Our 3d printers etc might let us produce things personally that would otherwise take a factory somewhere. But that doesn't mean the resources that we needed to produce that are going to be free. And that doesn't mean the apartment or house you live in is free. A certain amount of labor is going to be involved in lots of things and none of that is going to be free.
And then of course the government is going to want their taxes... for reasons. And that will make things less free.
You're going to work. Deal with it.
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I don't really know what this has to do with the whole SJW thing, but this isn't even really communism either. We're headed towards a point machines/robots will essentially replace all unskilled labor and a lot of the service economy can be replaced by semi-sophisticated AI. This doesn't even consider other advancements or productivity gains that will change the way the world works.
Eventually we reach a point where it becomes possible to provide everyone with enough to live comfortably at no cost to anyone else. We'll be able to produce so much wealth that it doesn't matter if someone leaches off of the system or never contributes anything of value to society. There will probably be a lot of people like that, but there are going to be those who do add value back and move humanity even further ahead.
People will still likely have ownership over the things which they create, and I expect that more people will venture into artistic pursuits and make all manner of weird or interesting things when there's no pressure to make what's popular, but in such a world, reputation and renown are a new commodity instead of money as we understand it today. However, that system will still operate under market principles where something is only worth what the market considers it to be worth.
The summary mentions "Wealthy retirees today also already live an essentially post-money existence, "travelling and exploring and deepening their understanding of the world and being generally happy." which sounds great.
Yes it sounds great. Of course it's their savings -- ie: money -- that allows them to do all that. So not so "post-money" after all... TFA and TFS are misguided in that respect. And budget cat food sells well because there's a difference between spending and wasting money :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
And as every communist system it cannot function without being funded externally.
We are already pretty much in a post-scarcity economy in places like the US and Europe. Has that gotten rid of money? Of course not. Money is mainly used to keep track of "merit" now. The problem people like Anna North is that she doesn't like how money assigns merit. Most people couldn't care less about "the best captain" or "the best scientist". What they care about is the biggest breasts at the MTV music awards, the shiniest gadgets, and the best people at throwing balls through a hoop.
The kind of "Trekonomic" system people like her usually want is one in which a big bureaucratic hierarchy, let by an intellectual elite, assigns merit and promotions, just like in Star Trek. Even much of Star Trek is about how that system frequently tramples on individual liberty and how it is subject to corruption. And the Federation can probably only survive because people have the freedom to leave it and live outside it and not conform to its rules.
I'd settle for a robot mod that erased all the junk posts so forums were useful.
I'm going to work to be the best damn custodian I can be.
Does this mean we are also closer to, when we transmit our doctors across the galaxy, that we have to delete our local copy after transmission for DRM?
All of those examples work by taking resources from somewhere else.
"Trekomony" works because there's a surplus of resources.
That's not happening anytime soon.
Not to mention, not everyone was allowed to have their own galaxy class starship. There were plenty of things in the Star Trek universe that one could lust after that couldn't just be instantly created by a replicator.
What have YOU done that was so productive it supported the lives of a dozen or more other people???
If everybody wants to life for free on a beach somewhere, SOMEBODY must provide all the stuff everybody needs like clean safe food and water, medicine, healthcare, transportation, sewage containment and processing, etc. Don't badmouth ANYBODY else as a retarded ape unless you are doing YOUR part to support all the needs of AT LEAST a dozen other people.
Someday, YOU may graduate up to the level of "Retarded Ape", but you will have to mature enough to at least get a burger-flipping job and move out of mommy's basement first. I'm not gonna hold my breath waiting....
to the problems Greece is having right now.
The economy of Gideon
So, basically, you are saying we can never get there, because we aren't there now. Remind me never to take a road trip with you.
The Wall-E economy and way of life already started. For those who've seen that movie..
Such a system - or something very similar - is possible. And it will come to be, as soon as the 99 percenters are done away with.
...I dispute that it would be such a utopia in any case.
We (in the Western world) live in the most benign circumstances ever in human history.
We largely have no fear of death by war, plague, famine, or pestilence. We live longer than ever before, and our primary health problems stem from TOO MUCH FOOD. Violence is steadily decreasing, and average wealth & comfort constantly improving. The average American lives better than a king of only several decades ago, and in fact has many abilities at the touch of a button that the greatest emperors never dreamed of.
Nevertheless...as our comforts increase, so does our bitching. Every imagined grievance, every contrived slight prompts paens of ceaseless grief over how horrible everything is.
-Styopa
> budget cat food still sells well.
The Republican dream for the elderly. They have fought for decades against allowing the elderly to eat. They want to send SS so that the retired people starve. They want them to starve and die. They're also fighting to end WIC. Currently, only 53% of infants are on WIC. They're trying to hurt nearly half of the children born by refusing to help pay for formula. They hate children.
Instead, we need to make sure people that have those jobs pay their fair share so the people that aren't working don't starve like the Republicans want them to.
the competition for mates. How is that going to be mitigated
Sex robots and artificial wombs.
Hmmm... Not really.
Greed is your way of saying "people should limit their desires to what is collectively obtainable within the existing scarcity".
I mean... fine... but you're admitting scarcity is an issue.
If there were no scarcity then how could there be greed? I mean... imagine a world where you could have as much of everything as any sane person... even a really greedy one... could possibly want?
in Startrek did you ever look at the population numbers? That people skip over that one is always baffling to me. Whole planets get blown up and they'll say stuff like "there were 3 million people on that world"... Three fucking million people... on an entire planet... and not a shitty one... a giant green/blue idealized paradise planet. Three million. Which means every douchebag on that planet could have a scale reproduction of the French Sun Palace staffed with nympho holograms that bear you on a litter about your palace whilst your dick is being sucked at all fucking times.
That is startrek.
That is what it means to be a post scarcity economy. And we are no where near that on old planet earth.
We'd need about a thousand more planets, probably a few million starships, and of course replicators, the infinite power of however that matter/anti matter reactor works... and computers so powerful that they can create sapient life on a whim just by saying "make a hologram smart enough to match wits with Data.
The untapped idiotically overpowering technology of that show is astounding.
If you think about half the crap they have and then think about the way they do things... it makes no sense.
Take their stupid wars against whomever. Why do they fight that way? That's completely insane.
First, they don't need to have crew compliments of those sizes on those ships. They clearly could automate just about everything. Maybe put one person on each battle wagon. But more to the point, why don't they have specialized warships and why are their specialized warships so completely shitty? They keep closing to knife range and firing ineffectual "phasers" at targets that are clearly best dealt with in other ways.
Their torpedoes seem like they're pretty nasty. Okay... why are they so under powered? In WW2, we had torpedoes that could cripple a ship... ONE torpedo. And for big nasty battleships... maybe you could sink them with four or five of them. But in startrek they're firing dozens of the fucking things at each other. Maybe take the torp size and increase it by a factor of ten or a hundred. Fucking fire a warp core at someone. Eat it. The Borg or whatever shows up with their big ship... You have a big torp ship that has nothing on it but big fuck you torp launchers. It warps into point blank range... fires its entire weapon's compliment in .01 seconds... then immediately warps away. Borg goes boom... everyone returns to their orgies on the holodeck.
Think of the way real war works. You don't just sit there poking at each other like that. It suppose that happened in WW1 but that was more owed to people not understanding the technology. So machine guns pinned people down and tanks were not understood to be the counter to that. By WW2, a big machine gun line just meant you had to bring in a tank column and over run the area.
On and on and on and on... so many things didn't make sense in that show.
But the point is... we don't have any of that stuff. And we're not going to get any of it any time soon.
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Technologically we've been more than capable of providing everyone in the world with a life of comfort and leisure (say a 20-hour work week) for several decades, at least. The problems are not technological, they're cultural and political. Further advances in technology are only likely to exacerbate the existing situation.
How do you figure that? Here we currently have a 37.5-hour work week. Reading about working conditions back during the industrial revolution (e.g. any book by Marx), and we seem to be progressing rather rapidly towards that 20-hour week.
Heck, the previous generation still remember a 6-day working week.
The problems are, sure enough, cultural. But how would technology advancement suddenly start taking us backwards on this development direction?
Where do you live that people are going toward a 20-hour workweek? Maybe if you work at McDonalds. Any other type job (including both labor and white collar) are increasingly eroding work-life balance. I worked in a factory about 7 years ago packing boxes and increasingly they'd demand overtime or you'd lose your job... often 10+ hours a day. Now I work in a white-collar job, where (get this) they're beginning to demand 10+ hours a day or you'll be seen as "ineffective and lazy" and will lose your job. So please tell me where I can find these 20-hour workweek jobs that pay as much as a regular job? I'll be waiting patiently to hear...
Unless it was established that it couldn't be replicated in a book, Romulan Ale was just illegal (and was supposed to be an analog of similarly embargoed Cuban cigars).
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"What makes you think they'll share even that much wealth, when we have nothing of value to offer in return?"
When that day comes, the abstraction of wealth will be seriously questioned - the relative wealth of the billionaire is really only made meaningful by the relative suffering that he inflicts on everyone who does not have access to his options. But all his options really only exist in a society that is made up of all the people below him. Society is made meaningful by the chaotic and individualistic needs of all its constituents - without the vivid and active participation its constituents, wealth has little meaning.
I'm working (yes, for free) on this. I did years of undergrad research in ML/AI in service of my goal to maximally improve life for all (as well as a lifelong interest kindled by dear Asimov). Eventually I realized that path to the future, as gleaned from the singularitarians/transhumanists, suffered from tunnel vision: too future focused, literally reliant upon the deus ex machina, and, as usual, formed in the vacuum of anthropo/egocentrism.
I have the framework of a notion of a plan. It involves community agriculture, bicycles, a re-imagination of currency, AI (but not as we know it), and a space elevator. The primary objective is to ensure the sustenance of Life, particularly via environmental symbiosis as an economic imperative and the propagation of gestalt organisms throughout space, and secondarily to maximize "quality of life," which is naturally subject to continuous re-definition. I don't know how likely this future is, but I can tell you that the gears are already turning... some things are bigger than any of us.
Posting as AC because I don't even care about merit, only results. (nevermind that my profile was cast in stark relief about 2.5 sentences in, anyway)
Well then, we're headed for a catastrophe given the amount of human-replacing automation that's just over the horizon.
It's an interesting concept, but I think that it is flawed.
The problem is that the people who want Reputation don't really have the skills to get it. Look at society today -- sociopaths are over-represented amongst the wealthy. Many of these sociopaths don't have any advantages other than their lack of concern for others. Thus in a true meritocracy, they would not be wealthy or have a good reputation.
Society has to deal with these socipaths before any kind of meritocracy is possible.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
When there is no person on this Earth suffering from hunger, war and disease, we'll be in a post-economic system. Until then, it's just as much sci-fi as it was in Star Trek.
One thing you could not have in Star Trek was protection from unlawful search and seizure by paramilitary personnel who could beam into your home without permission. The Federation was a dictatorship where Starfleet kept small folk in check all the time. No wonder geeks love it, they delude themselves into thinking they would be the elite or its enforcers in that world. In reality, they would be small folk.
I would have to disagree. The Soviets were the Romulans. Large military power, relies on stealth and maneuvering to achieve foreign policy objectives (supplying the Duras sisters to undermine the Klingon Empire). Paranoid population where the intelligence service was also the secret police (Tal Shiar = KGB). The Cardassians were the East Germans. Odo remarks that the Obsidian Order was even more ruthless and feared then the Tal Shiar, just as the Stasi were considered more dangerous/ruthless then the KGB. Also, like East Germany, the State was everything and the country was resource poor and relied on conquest/military rule to keep things together.
I don't understand, do you mean plumber?
Can my reputation get me a home to live in?
Of course, comrade! For great socialist justice!!
"anything you want can be made in a replicator, essentially for free"
Have you noticed how expensive ink is for our (relatively) free printers?
No, they were the chinese.
Regardless, the Klingons were absolutely the soviets if you return to the original series and even most of the movies.
The "undiscovered country" was about the fall of the soviet union for example.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
After that, the federation and the Klingons are on better terms... mostly because the Klingons know they can't fight the federation and the federation fears the Klingon's less as the Klingons are increasingly a minor power.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
How does the ST fantasy economy distribute private property? How did Picard family get to keep a vast tract of French wine country and a country home? Do they keep it by meritocracy? Can Riker earn it away from him by being a better captain?
How come it is not shared, since there are not many of them?
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
And crap for pedos.
But collapsing powers can be dangerous. If art mimicked reality then the Klingons would be slowly trying to reestablish their power base with invasions, assassinations, etc, but the federation would keep avoiding doing anything to stop them out of fear of provoking them and ending up in war. But the Klingons would no matter what the Federation actually did continue to view the Federation as being deliberately provocative and trying to encircle them and take advantage of their collapse.
The human body can be drained of blood in 8.6 seconds given adequate vacuuming systems.
A money-based economy is a fairly recent addition to human society. People mostly made their own stuff and traded without for most human history. Perhaps in a society of perfect abundance money will fade. That doesn't mean that human power structures will fade also. They were around since the beginning of settled society. Future ones may not based on money as they have been in recent centuries.
Scarcity is a limiting factor, but human greed is even more of a limiting factor.
Greed, yes. And that includes artificially creating scarcities in items which already belong to those who are greedy (sociopaths, narcissists, and the like). For an example, just think of Disney's nearly-eternal copyright on Mickey Mouse.
Can we autoban anyone who uses the word "SJW" ? It's about as meaningful as the word troll, in that it means "someone I disagree with" except SJW is a bit more narrow, pertaining just to social issues.
Always read at -1, don't let others decide what you should and should not read.
Whatever happens it will take energy to replicate and therefore dereplicate stuff (or the entire place fills up with old iPhones and Ferraris).
So it comes back to the central fight man has done forever. Energy. No unlimited energy no post money society.
.
It depends how you define 'basic needs.' In socialist hellholes, 'basic needs' are a mud hut and a few kernels of corn picked from pig shit. Why? Because being 'equal' is more important than maximizing your potential. (where have we been hearing these implications recently?) This is also a convenient way to keep the masses subjugated by the state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I liked better the economy model from "Voyage from Yesteryear". An economy truly based on skills.
Beware of programmers who carry screwdrivers!
That is merely what the creators of the show thought would happen.
Everyone underestimated the stupidity of the Russian government to continue to dick with the Western hegemony after it lost... horribly.
The last episode of the show in the modern time line was about 16 years ago. As of 16 years ago, the Russians arguably where trying to integrate into the global economy as a productive member of the global community.
We had the invasion of Georgia in 2008 and the invasion of Ukraine in 2014.
The show simply hasn't done anything recently.
If it were to be represented in the show, there would be a faction of the Klingon government that missed the old days. And caused troubles with the federation. The federation would respond by sending diplomats and sending forces to secure various border worlds. Eventually the Klingons would either back off or engage in some kind of war... which they would of course lose because the challenge to the federation is pointless much as the challenge against the Western hegemony is pointless.
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It's basically a military state. It's not some idealistic hippie commune. I feel the society set up in Starship Troopers was far superior. People had to earn full citizenship status to have rights to vote and have babies. Military service was only one way to achieve that. It was explained at the beginning in the classroom scenes, and then the rest of the movie was about killing giant bugs.
As for energy and resources, the movie Chain Reaction addresses the idea of cheap renewable energy. Morgan Freeman's character gives a nice speech towards the end about the economic impact of such a change. He mentions slowly introducing such technology to the world. IMO the only way to ease people into that kind of tech is to shift more towards solar, wind, and ocean current power generation. It is far easier to go from those sources to something approaching "free energy", rather than the jarring transition of going from burning something to generate power to just plugging wires into a box to get free power. Other than that, imagine the New Jersey Turnpike if everyone's cars ran off some kind of free energy device. Adjustments have to be made.
Another angle to look at it from comes from Martin Luther King Jr., who said, “We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” That's not a technological barrier. It's not a resource barrier. It's a societal change where people must become less focused on self preservation and all its twisted manifestations called "evil", and do things for the good of all. Ask not what your world can do for you, but what you can do for your world.
That Husqvarna mower bot isn't exactly a post-scarcity poster child - it's priced more like a Maserati than a Roomba (and, for that matter, what happened to the $99 Roombas, they seem to start at 3x that, now).
The 'bots are so expensive because of the labor involved in their design, construction, and a hidden cost of maintenance (the $299 Roomba does seem to require less end-user attention than the $99 ones used to...)
I could install a "bot" to open my garage door for me, but since I only use that door about 200 times a year, I prefer to open and close it manually, as compared to the effort required to get a professional installer out to do the work, plus the periodic maintenance required to keep it working. The $400 isn't the problem, it's the choice of spending a predictable minute per use opening/closing the door vs an unpredictable hour or two dealing with a broken opener when the opener breaks down.
"people only take jobs if they feel like"
FTFY
Fuck yeah Republicans want to kill children and starve old people!
We will fail. I think we all know that we will fail. Not for any external reason, but because the cancer is within.
By simply eliminating the poor.
Scarcity is a limiting factor, but human greed is even more of a limiting factor. We will never reach anything resembling a utopian society where everyone's basic needs are met, regardless of the means, because of human nature, not because of available resources.
Well, "human nature" is somewhat malleable by social constructs. So I wouldn't say "never." But there are significant roadblocks.
For example, John Maynard Keynes predicted that only workaholics would be working over 15 hours per week by 2030. We don't really seem to be on that path, despite the fact that worker productivity has basically quadrupled in the U.S. since 1950. (I know some people are going to argue over how accurate this claim is -- but the exact numbers don't matter so much. It's undisputed among economists that worker productivity has gone up significantly over the past 75 years.)
We could all be working 10 hours per week and living with a similar economic standard of living to 1950. Personally, I'd be fine with that, though I know many people wouldn't.
Or we could be less contentious and go back the productivity of 1975 or so... and basically keep our current standard of living for middle classes, but just pay rich people less. Alas, we've chosen greed over spare time.
Land is scarce. Roads are scarce. Seats at the concert are scarce. Seats on the airplane are scarce. Etc.
And, regardless, labor is scarce. Somebody has to do the work to make any of this happen. How are you going to incite the laborers to work if everything is already free?
There is still a need for rationing, and for labor, so there is still a need for wealth, even if we have replicators.
The answer, obviously, is to exterminate the poor. What do you think the Eugenics Wars were really about?
If you've ever seen one of those rich people, they don't think about money. At all. They spend it, but there's no need to think about it.
That's what is meant by post-money.
Yeap, it wouldn't be a day on Slashdot without another communism or SJW plug as each day.
I guess you rolled up communism today.
Just out of sheer boredom, what makes you classify this as an "SJW" story?
Or do you have an uncontrollable urge to post anti-SJW snark on Slashdot at least once a day.
Need to properly read the original. It's obvious that this is the communism for the day. The SJW story is likely going to be something about people who don't like Ellen Pao being misogynist zombie nazis who ride flying sharks.
Automation only happens when it's useful to the plot. When Kirk stole the Enterprise in the third movie, Scotty rigged the whole ship up to be automated because (a) would a crew of 400 really go along with stealing the ship, and (b) they didn't want to make many sets beyond the bridge. So yeah, the ship could easily have been automated. On the other hand, the show isn't about technology or drone exploration of space, it's about humans encountering ethical dilemmas, and that means they need humans on the show. The crew represents humanity in its finest (supposedly -- it's a humanity with little art, organized around a military hierarchy, with strongly misogynistic tendencies in the 60's show: go back and watch "The Zetan Lights" for examples), and the aliens man's imperfections: thus the undesirable qualities of man are literally alienated and held up for inspection. So, you need a crew to have such a plot.
In a real space battle, if you have beam weapons and FTL drives, you probably don't engage within sight of the enemy but from a range that makes you hard/slow to detect, and you probably fire and leave hoping that the enemy doesn't detect you before the beams hit. I'm not sure why you'd want to be at point blank range. I think you have a point about orgies on the holodeck, though: with a true no-scarcity society and holodecks, I'd expect a lot more orgy than what we see on ST.
And why would anyone do that? I own my own robots that grow food, make stuff, and provide security. The smelly homeless guy in the street expects me to shelter, cloth, and feed him? ROBOTS SHOW THIS TRASH TO THE CURB!!
Sure there will be plenty of charity types who will do the good work, but society as a whole will eventual get sick of those that can't or worse.....wont. With robots as weapons I can see the wonts pushed out pretty hard.
Essentially there will be no need for the bottom %'s. Those is power will bribe or force those at the bottom to stop breeding. Eventually the world will be filled with nothing but the top percent. Is this a bad thing? Maybe may be not depends on your philosophy.
Troll certainly now has the meaning you ascribe to it. At least in terms of moderation where I usually see it used to mean, factual statements contradicting a given viewpoint.
SJWism usually is much closer to what trolling used to be. It usually involves taking false offense at otherwise unnoticeable things, see Micro aggressions, Shutting down conversations in the name of tolerance, and other wise using the tactics of demagoguery instead of dialectical reasoning. The sure mark of a SJW is they will start shouting racism or sexism of some sort if they are losing an argument.
We have a reputation based economy in academic scientific research. Like in StarTrek, this works well when there is growth. As long as there is no external limit on advancing good people into desired positions (professor), developing a good reputation leads to professional success. In a stagnant economy (i.e. the past 7 years), people who have developed enough reputation to justify independent projects have no opportunity to do so as resources for additional positions aren't available.
> Their torpedoes seem like they're pretty nasty. Okay... why are they so under powered?
Because it's entertainment. If a 24th century photon torpedo had even as much power as a 20th century nuke, then you could obliterate even the largest ships with a single hit, no matter how strong their 'shields' were. But that would be decidedly harder to write epic space battles around (or maybe not, depending on your level of creativitiy).
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
As to engaging at point blank range... I was talking about slower than light torpedoes. That's their big nasty weapon right?
FIRE THE TORPEDOES! :D
The thing is a torpedo... ONE will destroy most ships outright. I'm talking about a real one in our navy inventory right now. ONE torpedo. A battleship which is a big stupid turkey that no one builds anymore could take maybe 10 or so torpedoes but in the show they eat volley after volley which is stupid. They don't even have active defenses against them. Ever seen them shoot a torpedo out of space with a point defense phaser? Nope. They just eat that on their shields like big idiots.
As to the point of the show being about morality etc... that's fine. I'm just saying if you talk about the economics of the show then you're going to have to talk about the technology and that brings up the discussion I'm having now.
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Yeap.
It's not a law of nature that a Breitling is expensive. All of what you're saying boils down to human psychology. The point of Star Trek economics is NOT that everybody can have a yacht, it's that no one wants a yacht anymore. Essentially, everyone (including ordinary civilians) live in a similar way as you do on a starship; the only material possessions are necessities plus maybe a few sentimental items of personal value. This is apparent if you look at civilian clothing on the show: People from the federation wear clothes that are incredibly bland: http://i184.photobucket.com/al... whereas people from other places (especially the Ferengi, for example) often wear extravagant clothes and jewellery. Being obsessed with material wealth is frowned upon even if you're a civilian, which is why for instance Vash is chided for her shady trade in ancient artifacts.
(Of course, being a TV show, I'm aware that there are a lot of examples contradictory to this general idea)
In fact there's nothing to suggest that the Federation has overcome material/energetic scarcity. Far from it. In the Borg war and the Dominion war they keep saying how they don't have enough ships or enough men, so there's obviously some kind of internal economics going on where net demand outstrips net supply, just like our world. So the economics of the show isn't really about overcoming scarcity, it's about something far deeper and probably far harder to achieve: convincing everyone to live in the same frugal and spartan way. That's why star trek economics will never probably work: There will always be greedy and wealth-obsessed people.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
What would it take?
1) Atomically Precise Manufacturing - read "Radical Abundance" by Eric Drexler. Basically the cost of almost all produced goods drops by orders of magitude. Think of super 3D printing at the atomic level and and cheaper than subtractive manufacturing.
2) Abundant cheap energy - We need roughly 2x - 3x more energy than we use now to bring everyone up to the level of say the EU now. How do we get it? In about 2-3 decades according to major solar components we will have large scale cheap energy storage and other advances essential to making solar fully as cheap as the cheapest 24x7 grid wide electricity generation today. In the mean time modern nuclear plant designs are failsafe even in Fukushima level once in 300 years style disasters and produce only 5% of the nuclear waste of most current designs which are totally out of date. Also we have enough thorium for thorium based nuclear plants to last 20,000 years. We need to overcome nuclear hysteria to license and built such plant and to remove extraneous legal costs that are far beyond what is reasonable and needed for safety.
3) Access to knowledge/computation - Moore's Law is doing a fine job of spreading this across the globe and rapidly. We also need to fix the very broke IP laws that balkanize the global mind into petty fiefdoms.
All of these could quite easily be done within 50 years producing more than enough physical abundance and delivery to meet all the needs and many of the desires of everyone on earth whether they are working or not. IF WE HAVE THE VISION AND THE WILL.
If the wealth created is captured by the rich.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Actually you are missing something huge. There is no need to stay in the cities for work and so on increasingly due to the tech making remote work more and more possible. Land out away from the current hubs and houses there are very very cheap compared to those hubs. Also contour printed houses are coming fast along with much better and faster prefabs. Add in gigabit internet everywhere which is in the cards. We will spread out to much cheaper digs.
What for if we can meet everyone's needs and many of their desires with a trivial fraction of total productive capacity? The question of whether we have a job for all these people will or at least can become completely irrelevant. The notion that you can only receive if you contribute is a notion rather mired in scarcity thinking. Yes, it will be a HUGE challenge to get beyond scarcity thinking from the individual level and throughout society. But the problem of eliminating scarcity is quite solvable at the technological level. The social and psychological and institutional level is something else again.
I disagree... It would just change the nature of those battles.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The battles in startrek are based on Napoleonic ship of the line battles.
Starwars is based on WW2 carrier battles.
One of the things i found to be the most disapointing about the Enterprise series was that it wasn't based on Submarine warfare.
The whole idea was to have a weaker, smaller, more cramped ship. The ship didn't feel cramped and they just charged into shit the same way they always do.
it was dumb.
The Klingons make things more interesting with their cloaking devices. It basically lets them be pointblank submarines. They vanish and they appear.
You can have an epic space battle without closing to knife range and beating the hell out of each other.
Look at Das Boot. Barely anything is really done at any point but the whole movie is full of suspense and drama because the sub is so fragile that it just can't take that kind of punishment.
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Give many people the chance to destroy themselves through one indulgence or another and they will do so, look at what cheap and plentiful food has done to the majority of people in the first world. They are eating themselves to death, because they can.
MLK and Gandhi were SJW's. What I do like about the term is that I have a plugin set up that replaces "social justice" with "skeleton" and it makes for some amusing reading. Similar amusing replacements: cloud --> butt, cyber --> wizard
Always read at -1, don't let others decide what you should and should not read.
MLK and Ghandi were men of conscience and sincere belief. I don't think those terms apply to these people. Perhaps Outrage Troll would be a better word. Seeing as they are something akin to Concern Trolls.
Once everybody can have anything they want, the novelty wears off.
I just want to live on an orbital and live 400 years in my original packaging. Drug glands would be handy too.
I realised I didn't express myself too well there, but I get your point. SJW means someone who shuts down dialogue in the name of not inadvertently hurting a specific subset of humanity. Curious thing about many issues in which "SJW" pops up is that it can refer to both sides of the argument. Gamergate, MRA's, etc. #notallmen is a good example of an attempt to stop discussion on a subject. And I've seen (threats of) violence used as a counterargument by both sides.
Hence I think it's about as meaningful as "troll". The same tactics are used by those on all sides of an argument.
You can strive for social justice without doing that, MLK and Gandhi are examples of that. Both also pissed some people off, doing what they thought was right, and they got murdered for that.
Violence or threats thereof are a bit of an admittance that someone doesn't like what they're saying, but has no counterargument, and resorts to this out of desperation. It does indeed shut them up. But the murdering side of the discussion then indirectly admits not having a good argument anymore, and is therefore effectively the losing side of the argument. Bonus: You also create martyrs out of the victims.
Always read at -1, don't let others decide what you should and should not read.
If there were no scarcity then how could there be greed? I mean... imagine a world where you could have as much of everything as any sane person... even a really greedy one... could possibly want?
Greed isn't a question of absolute amounts. It's about having more than others, whether or not you can actually use/consume/enjoy it. It's about status and power -- limiting what others can have so that you get to have something special.
Of course, a sane person will care little about status. If your neighbour has a faster computer, you can still be a better programmer, which is something no amount of greed will ever take away.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Not only are we not getting any closer, it is not going to happen. There will always be something claiming a monopoly on violence demanding a pile of certain trinkets from you, trinkets only they can produce. Like someone said a long time ago .. Death and Taxes, they are certain.
Some people have no fucking clue what money is. Star Trek is not REAL!!!!!!
Best comment in ages.
Welcome to the former USA. Where life was easy.
I think this must be referring to the 1%. If you're in the 1% in New Zealand, you don't have to worry about progressive tax rates, capital gains taxes, gift taxes, or death duties - money is free to grow in abundance. Perhaps for the 1% it realy does feel like they're living in a Sci Fi future. But otherwise stagnant wages, longer work hours, and less employment rights are the stuff of life.
And maybe that's the a reflection of where we are at - somewhere above the 1%, money no longer matters, these people are living in a Sci Fi future today.
All that you need is a few people with an interest in providing some limited input. Most of the effort will be fully automated, with intelligent machine spotting holes and repairing them properly. The supplies to do so will come from automated quarries and factories. R&D will be done by people interested in it etc etc.
In a post scarcity civilization how can you possibly be greedy?
I mean... how? There's no way to horde things because there's no lack of anything. Everyone in such a society can have diamond encrusted mansions. What are you hording?
The only thing I can think of would be entire fucking planets. Just one dude... my planet. That's about it.
As to sane people not caring about status... don't be silly. Status has material consequences. If you have status people do what you say and you have high social standing. Which means if you want an actual women to hop up and down on your genitals it is a lot easier if you're higher status than lower status.
Any social species is going to be status conscious.
peasants... *shakes head*
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People will still want to pass on their knowledge. Parents will have the responsibility of doing so - using computer aided approaches no doubt. If Sesame Street can achieve it without trying too hard... http://www.theatlantic.com/edu...
We may very well end up covering all basic human needs - if people can be prevented from having too many children and thus re-establish scarcity.
This will not get rid of "economy" or status symbols though. Status symbols will simply move to unnecessary expensive stuff. Such as Rolexes that nobody actually need.
With no jobs or money, anarchy would reign supreme. Since money would no longer exist in the normal sense, the only way to keep society from collapse would be to give away stuff for free.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... suggests that the USA, like most developed countries, is well below replacement. Of course the US population is continuing to rise because immigration is pumping in, and the echo of the post war baby boom means there's a disproportionate number of women of child bearing age in the population. But overall, the long term trend is stable to negative.
Consider that what we are may not remain static; that's where I get my hope from.
Most people are good some of the time, even saintly (secularly considered). We're not just , you know, totally divorced from goodness.
But as we are, we have brains created under evolutionary pressures which are effectively a bunch of hacks, "designed" not for goodness or beneficience but for survival in the near-zero-sum-game we call natural selection.
You have to believe that we can learn enough about ourselves to tweak ourselves, to close the difference between the best person you know and the worst.
Yes, if we just keep on giving ourselves more nad more powerful technology without making our selves the target of that technology in the way I mean, then we're fucked. We're fucked just for the reasons Einstein said:
"Many persons have inquired concerning a recent message of mine that âa new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move to higher levels.â(TM) Often in evolutionary processes a species must adapt to new conditions in order to survive. Today the atomic bomb has altered profoundly the nature of the world as we know it, and the human race consequently finds itself in a new habitat to which it must adapt its thinking. In light of new knowledgeâ¦an eventual world state is not just desirable in the name of brotherhood, it is necessary for survival. ..Today we must abandon competition and secure cooperation. This must be the central fact in all our considerations of international affairs; otherwise we face certain disaster. Past thinking and methods did not prevent world wars. Future thinking must prevent wars."
Just substitute "future brains" for "future thinking"
And why would anyone do that? I own my own robots ... The smelly homeless guy in the street expects me to shelter, cloth, and feed him?
Possibly, but sounds like it would be in your best interest to have your robots at least wash, and possibly scent him. As a bonus, if they sheltered him, that would address the other issue as well.
Scarcity is a limiting factor, but human greed is even more of a limiting factor. We will never reach anything resembling a utopian society where everyone's basic needs are met, regardless of the means, because of human nature, not because of available resources.
Well, "human nature" is somewhat malleable by social constructs. So I wouldn't say "never." But there are significant roadblocks.
For example, John Maynard Keynes predicted that only workaholics would be working over 15 hours per week by 2030. We don't really seem to be on that path, despite the fact that worker productivity has basically quadrupled in the U.S. since 1950. (I know some people are going to argue over how accurate this claim is -- but the exact numbers don't matter so much. It's undisputed among economists that worker productivity has gone up significantly over the past 75 years.)
We could all be working 10 hours per week and living with a similar economic standard of living to 1950. Personally, I'd be fine with that, though I know many people wouldn't.
Or we could be less contentious and go back the productivity of 1975 or so... and basically keep our current standard of living for middle classes, but just pay rich people less. Alas, we've chosen greed over spare time.
That is great and all, but we are not heading that direction and there is no indication that we are or will be headed there in the near future worker productivity wise. Currently employers see employees as worthless cattle, in general, and those with the real expertise keep getting funneled into entry level jobs and ignored for advancement. If you don't have experience in a thing, you don't get experience in a thing. This is what is wrong with the economy ! No one wants to work or contribute to bettering things it is all about making the company BIG $$$$$ and paying the little guy as close to nothing as possible. (the Ancient law of Buy low, Sell high.) We are not going to go back to the 1970s or the 1950s because we are too busy going headlong into the 2020's where we will have a divided class system, workers who are looked at as idiots who will be happy to kill themselves working for the whims of the upper class, who views the lower class as less than human. This may sound made up , but look around you.. it is already happening.
Though the Balinese may have a different opinion - especially about the money-free bit (but why do they haggle if they have no money?)
You're wrong on all counts -- I don't believe they haggle, and you can't back up your statements with citations. Besides, why would anyone haggle, bicker, or argue if they had something better to do?
Some folks who do it just for the "reputation" as the best sewer jockey?
There was one like that once -- John Henry his name was, if I recall. Beat an electromechanical sewer cleaner in a side-by-side competition, then the man just dropped dead. True story, I was there.
I think it's more likely that a fighting force armed with ACTUAL weapons of mass destruction fighting against other, similar forces would fight in a similar manner as the USA and USSR did during the cold war. Namely: Few if any direct confrontations, a lot of military buildup, and plenty-o-proxy wars. Now you could say that on an interstellar scale nukes are no longer WMDs, but then we already have the _ability_ to build planet-destroying nukes. They'd be about the size of office buildings and cost a few tens of billion dollars (a modern high-tech bomber costs about a billion dollars). We just don't have any need for such massive nukes so none ever got made. But they'd be very useful fighting against a multi-planetary enemy, if only as a show of force.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
Thanks for an informative and deep-thinking post. I agree with you fully! The Dominion war is an excellent example of [lots of things in real life but also] not necessarily a "scarcity" as much as a "non-infinity" of resources.
In ST-OS there was an implied lack of starships, manpower, etc. In STTNG that was not the case. Voyager is a different set/series/quadrant of the galaxy... and DS9 again returned to a detente/war situation where resources were NOT omniplentiful.
Great summary!
Ehud
The word you are looking for is "complement". A crew "compliment" is a very supportive crew.
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So if you want to see a movie, listen to music or pay that ever increasing cable bill you are going to need money.
You could have made the same argument a few decades ago about software, and look where we are today. Creative Commons content is growing continously, and with storage capacity increasing, it's not going away. You need money to connect to the Internet and download or stream digital content, but it's not an area where you have to pay to get a pretty rich experience.
Greed is infinite, and is ultimately about power and control. If it were possible, I am sure there would be those who would own the entire galaxy, if for no other reason that to say it's theirs.
Even now, you have executives that earn multi-million dollar salaries, with super yachts and homes that they use for a fraction of the year. What's the point? There is little additional benefit from having a 100 ft yacht compared to a 200ft yacht, but there is a huge difference in the money you have to have to pay for them.
All those dollars have been paid to a single executive to afford such things has been done so instead of making goods and services cheaper for the customer, or by paying better salaries to the rest of the company's employees.
Executive salaries in the 60s were typically 25x the average salary.
Now they are more than 200x the average salary. More efficient production is not going to change this.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Mod points. I needed it. Now. :D
This is exactly how I think, neverthless I too still believe. Why is that? Elton John? "Imagine all the people"?
eliphas
New Zealand. Population 4.5 million people. NZ$98 billion in national debt. 5.8% unemployed (official figure so grain of salt and all that). I remember the socialist minister saying NZ$20 million is spent per day on unemployment bennies.
So not the most financially enlightened government. And yet by comparison one of the less indebted developed nations of the world. Let's watch what happens.
Frankly the economics of ST are bullshit. It's not like there's a great single episode that looks at alternative economic systems. Instead of the thought provoking and insightful sci-fi episodes the economy of the Federation is just present in the background. There are frequent contradictions between episodes, and many times (usually in war) suddenly they are constrained by resources! But on Earth (the no money utopia) and elsewhere replicators are unlimited! Makes no sense.
People still work. More importantly governments are still fighting. Politics introduces massive inefficiencies inside Star Fleet senior ranks. It's just nonsense people.
Things ST got right: mobile phones, tablet PCs. Not economics.
You underestimate just how corrupt some people are. There are those who enjoy destruction, there are those who enjoy killing, there are those who enjoy making other people suffer. A dedicated destructive person can break much more than hundreds of people can make, and if robots do all production, the only difference will be the destructive person will have more to destroy.
No. It is based on the concepts of justice and personal worth. You only deserve to receive if you contribute. Otherwise, you are a waste of protoplasm, an abandonment of human potential.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Some people are pickier than others. If you're happy with posters of poker playing dogs, are you going to insist that everyone else who wants artwork be limited to those same posters? Will you enforce by law that nobody be allowed to buy unique artwork of Michelangelo quality? If you're happy in a hovel, will you insist that everyone else live in nothing bigger than a hovel? Will you prohibit someone from building, with his own hands, a mansion? Will you take it from him when he does?
Generally speaking, when a person has a lot of nice stuff, it's because he's done a great quantity of valuable work and traded that work for stuff. If you take the stuff away from him or prevent him from acquiring it, you perpetrate two evils: he won't provide society with the great work because you've removed his incentive, and you've stolen from him.
If you think that "a more equal civilization" is a good thing, you are a destroyer. The only thing humans can be truly equal in is death.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
MLK and Ghandi were men of conscience and sincere belief. Yep, and they are both good example of genuine SJW's who managed to change the world and operate in good faith while doing so, today the term SJW has become associated with obscure, petty minded, professional victims trying to boost their wallet and/or their ego. These people may get their 15 minutes of fame but they lack the strength of character required to change the world.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Read this website which explains corporate rule future vs star trek future very well.
www . changethewayyouthink . net
The world and especially America needs to wake up and stop letting the super rich use and manipulate them. There are enough resources to provide medical care and basic needs for all. We need to change direction and start moving toward Gene Roddenberry's vision of the mankind's future.
Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality could provide all the space you ever want, imaginary space but it's for many people already very impressive.
Unless your ideal world is one where the party bosses and their pals get to live in big estates and everyone else gets put in a small cell in an undesired location that is deemed perfectly adequate for them
A 50'x50x20' holodeck would make a perfectly serviceable family home practically anywhere, although that presupposes that power won't cost an arm and a leg, and also that a holodeck was a real thing.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Those poor Wall Street Drones eh.
I think there will always be greed.
See "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never do Again" by David Foster Wallace.
You know what you are doing. Take off every Zig!
Yes, life expands or contracts in response to the energy available to it, (within a narrow range). Our response (as a species) to energy from fossil fuels in the 20th century is not that different to the way yeast responds to sugar in a home brew kit. Unlike the yeast we have the capacity to foresee the consequences and do something about it, question is - do we have the political will? - Judging by the number of views on this (rare) attenborough speech, I don't think so.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"The Trouble with Tribbles" - star trek episode dealing with the issue of population control. Start trek is fictional and not to everyone's taste, I grew up watching it in the 60's. As with any popular fiction you need to "suspend belief" to enjoy it, you need to enjoy it to understand its humanist commentary. You need to know something about mid 20th century politics to see that it is a very optimistic metaphor for what the UN could become in the far flung future.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Though the Balinese may have a different opinion - especially about the money-free bit (but why do they haggle if they have no money?)
You're wrong on all counts
You seem to be an expert on wrong.
-- I don't believe they haggle,
Try facts instead of a belief based "reality".
and you can't back up your statements with citations.
How hard would it be to check your own facts instead of living with your head up your arse?
Besides, why would anyone haggle, bicker, or argue if they had something better to do?
You're ideally placed to answer that question for yourself.
it doesn't matter... the machines that make everything in that show are not in short supply and neither is the energy that powers them. So... lets say some guy owns a planet... fine... you still own an island the size of Hawaii full of sex bots. Who gives a shit.
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Only outlying planets would be vulnerable to something like that. Core systems would not.
And really if you wanted to take this to the next level, I'd suggest you check out the "Culture" novels which are sort of a take off on the federation concept.
In the Culture novels, everything of importance is on giant starships that move around the galaxy like huge cruise ships giving every luxury imaginable to the humans.
The civilization is ultimately run by super intelligent AIs that are sympathetic to humanity and... sort of see humanity as their pets.. sort of.
Anyway, the Culture as it is referred to gets into wars every so often where stars are detonated. It doesn't hurt them. Only the border systems are ever effected and even then... populations are relocated out of hostile areas before they can come under attack. And even if they are destroyed... which... is profoundly unlikely... they have the tech to back up their minds and store them somewhere else. So if they get killed... they just jump into a new body with slightly out of date memories and are told what happened to the last version of themselves.
Point is... if you want to fuck with the Culture, it is quite happy to blow up stars if that's where someone wants to take it. And long before that happens the Culture has an infinite variety of weapons to use against someone that is hostile. They have sapient "knife missiles"... drones that are about the size of golf ball that not only have enough processing power to sustain a limited independent intelligence but also all sorts of other stuff can be crammed into the body. Power supply, propulsion, weapons, etc... into a fucking golf ball.
And the star trek federation has just as much technology if not even more. The odd thing about star trek is that they have too much technology to explain the way they live. It doesn't make sense. The culture didn't have transporters or replicators for example. The federation has that and more. But the culture was vastly more formidable. If the Culture went against the Federation, the Federation would get plastered. Not that the Culture "would" do that... their attitudes towards such things are a bit confusing but they appear to genuinely not want to interfere with people that aren't intending them any harm.
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WMD salesman: "This is our most powerful bomb, it can vapourise 50% of the planet's surface".
Mad Dictator: "I'll take two".
- Appologies to Billy Connolly.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Sweet jebus man! A 50x50 house is pretty good sized ready. Add a second floor(your 20' ft) and you got giant 5000 sq house.
I really need to invest in wax futures. You libertarians sure seems to use a lot of it on the crosses you put yourselves on.
You were critically hit for no damage. The bruise will look nice, and maybe the scars will make good party talk.
I always considered Klingons to be Japanese, Romulans to be Ancient Rome (hence the name) and Ferengi to be middle ages palestinans (mercantile as the gentleman below suggests). The Federation to be Future Europa (Picards comment about 20th century Eurozone being the beginnings of earth world government).
The Ferengi were the leftist writers' ridiculous caricature of capitalism. They didn't even bother to come up with a culture for them, all they knew is that capitalism was BAD, and they needed to display their political biases on the show. The writers were prudes as well, like most leftists, TNG hardly ever touched on sexuality. If it was me I'd be on the holodeck covered in girls but the only ones who ever said anything about females were those icky Ferengi. Those barbarian, sexist bastards with the big ears who only want to capture and enslave human women...mmmm....forbidden fantasy....
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
This kind of posts, remind me an ex-friend that works in Microsoft and share to the poor souls that follow him, all these kind of BS articles of people that for sure never had travel beyond USA in their life.
Like "This week in Microsoft debate: This age is more safe since few people die of accidents or illness than in middle ages. See the WMV podcast now!". Say hello cancer, sars, hebola! Hello guns and car accidents! Why this nerd that is an PhD. in history, ignore that yours guys kill thousands of people every year more than in all middle ages?
The rich guy says that we are fine, because HE is fine. As the same level of comments posted here "I don't use DVDs/Blurays anymore, so NOBODY use them now". Little pricks.
With 8 billion people on planet Earth, I don't think there's room for 8 billion starship captains.
So you're saying that it can't work because ... dramatic storylines?
Pretty much, though they redeemed themselves to some extent in DS9. There was a bit where someone tried to high hat Quark and say humans were better or something. And he responded "My people have never genocided anyone. My people don't go to war." something like that... I'll try to find a clip on youtube because it was in a lot of ways a redemptive moment:
This one is interesting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Here it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Which is a hell of a change from this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
DS9 is seriously underrated in the cannon of that franchise. Its frequently much more interesting.
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Did we start calling sjws libertarian? Go back to Reddit please. They are in need of you guys returning to fix all its woes.
Who's going to cut your grass? Who is going to fix the sewer when things get backed up?
Captain, ah kin beerly keep the sewer clean ez it is. "Scotty, we need more mower".
So when we, as workers, are underpaid (or victims of wage theft) by the wealthy so that we can't save, then who is at fault?
Never posted to leddit, aside from occasionally getting linked to a thread. And I sincerely doubt you were following the (derailed) topic if you're calling the people I was replying to SJWs anyways. Maybe get some sort of grasp of the English language and what the words you're using mean before you post? Just a thought.
You were critically hit for no damage. The bruise will look nice, and maybe the scars will make good party talk.
If there were no scarcity then how could there be greed? I mean... imagine a world where you could have as much of everything as any sane person... even a really greedy one... could possibly want?.
Some people want more that what everyone else has. The idea of greed as getting more for one's self, will simply morph into making certain others do not have as much.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Look at Das Boot. Barely anything is really done at any point but the whole movie is full of suspense and drama because the sub is so fragile that it just can't take that kind of punishment.
Das Boot is a true masterpiece. I was glued to my seat the whole time. Did you see the alternate ending also?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
We could all be working 10 hours per week and living with a similar economic standard of living to 1950. Personally, I'd be fine with that, though I know many people wouldn't.
Or we could be less contentious and go back the productivity of 1975 or so... and basically keep our current standard of living for middle classes, but just pay rich people less. Alas, we've chosen greed over spare time.
This increased productivity is not being used to sustain our higher standard of living. Today's extra technology doesn't require our quadrupled productivity to maintain our standard of living. The extra productivity mostly goes into today's sales, marketing, and service economy.
All overall productivity increases end up being shared among an entire industry eventually, and then companies still need to find ways to differentiate themselves. If productivity enhancements means we don't need as many secretaries and factory workers, those expenditures will go towards marketing and sales.
The idea that productivity enhancements will ever reduce the need for human labor was always laughable. Only people such as an ivory tower economist like Keynes could have ever thought this.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
No... you're describing some sort of megalomaniacal horder. That's not the same thing as greed.
Most "greedy" people simply want what they consider to be a good life. They want things... sure... but they don't necessarily need you to not have them. A guy that wants 20 Ferraris doesn't necessarily want no one else to have one or thirty for that matter.
Do some people measure their accomplishments by what they have and others do not? Sure... but in a post scarcity environment you're not going to horde STUFF you're going to horde POWER.
You see this in societies that centralize all political and economic power in the state. The greedy people as you term them just become government ministers. THat's where the power and the wealth went so they just control the government and get to live in the mansions with the servants.
The communist party members tend to live that way. They talk about equality etc... but then they live in the mansions with the servants and the whores... and what really changed for the peasants? Nothing. If anything it tends to be worse because the old oligarchies were generally authoritarian instead of totalitarian. Totalitarian states are the worst. If I had to live in one, I'd need to kill people in the government on a regular basis just feel normal. Would that mean I'd probably get tortured to death at some point? Sure... I can't stand totalitarian states though. The North Koreas of the world. Utterly intolerable. I'd need to go Hannibal Lector or possibly Dextor in that environment just to stand it.
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I've only seen the ending where he dies on the docks after his sub sinks from an allied dive bomber.
That was the director's cut. I've never seen anything else.
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Compare to an average property area of 6000 sq. ft or so for a family home. With a holodeck, your virtual living area and property size could be as big as you wanted while taking up a relatively small amount of real estate.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
No... you're describing some sort of megalomaniacal horder. That's not the same thing as greed.
Most "greedy" people simply want what they consider to be a good life.
But sometimes, the two are indistinguishable.
Greed as a good life sounds pretty good, but that is a very modified definition, as dictionaries define it quite differently, as in a desire to have more than is needed, and as a synonym to avarice.
By your definition, I'm pretty greedy, I've desired a good live with adequate resources to live well. And I've worked hard all my life to insure that sans bad luck, I'd succeed in doing just that.
And that definition is a pretty good description of what makes an economic system work well. The citizen has a good chance of living well off as long as they are willing to put the work and time in. P. But I fear too many have tried to turn the greed of the dictionary definition into a positive. It definitely exists
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I don't think they are indistinguishable.
I have many words for many different things because I perceive differences between them and I use the correct word for the correct thing. I don't think this conflation of different concepts is helpful or constructive. It just clouds the issue.
As to definitions, having more than is needed is not in conflict with having a good life. You don't need to have a good life. You don't need the little luxuries we all have and take for granted. I mean, do you NEED to have social networks where you talk about tech issues on the internet for fun? No... its a luxury. Are you greedy for wanting it?
In a poor country the only way to get a good life is to have substancially more than everyone else. You want a big house in a country where everyone lives in mud huts? You want to send your kid to a nice university in a country where most people can't read? Are you greedy? From the perspective of the poor people that don't know anything... yes. But maybe you're smart... maybe you worked really hard... maybe you deserve to have a good life... maybe your earned all that stuff. But the fucking peasants aren't going to see it that way. All they see is that you have more than them so they hate you.
And frankly I find that entire world view to be ignorant and regressive. Just because someone has more than you doesn't make them a bad person or greedy. And just because someone likes nice things doesn't mean they're bad people either.
Enough with the fucking moral judgements of people you don't know.
As to greed being good... it depends on what you mean.
Enlightened self interest is obviously good. Stress on the "enlightened"... aka... not being a fucking prick about it. A society where people don't try to better themselves is going to be a shitty society. So yes... a society were people try to improve themselves is superior. It just is.
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If there were no scarcity then how could there be greed?
Because there's always scarcity. Else I could personally own 10^80 galaxy class starships (there's about 10^80 atoms in the observable universe). Ridiculous? Yeah, but greed has no limit. If one person owns a planet, his neighbor won't be happy unless he owns a solar system, and his other neighbor won't be happy unless he owns a galaxy.
What is the only thing a billionaire needs? Enough money to become a trillionaire. Because that's what some people are like.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Don't be silly. The only person that would want such a thing would be a literal crazy person. And in most of these speculative utopias... they would just drug you one day... and you'd wake up later with them congratulating you on your new mental readjustment.
You're welcome... we cured you.
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Since it's an insult aimed at a strawman it can be anything you want it to be, thus totally meaningless to anyone else.
Be honest guys - yelling SJW is just because you want to yell an insult such as "Nigger" but are too cowardly to do so.
- Fancy watches. You can't 3D print a Breitling. But if you could likely it would be prized less, just like diamonds.
Who's doing the "prizing" here? Because I don't know a Breitling from a doorstop, and the vast majority of people I know don't either. And sure, if you could print one it might be cheaper... which is to say the price is less. If you value things just by the amount of money you spend on it... ugh, thank god I don't know you.
Well tolerance was too nice a thing to have for very long, especially in public discourse. The problem isn't just murdering the discussion, when you take out the people who would argue the points before they even have a chance to it becomes ridiculous.
Are we really better off when someone like Tim Hunt can no longer contribute to biology because he made an inadvertant remark ? We certainly aren't better off because MLK was taken from us. Do we gain anything when comedians like Andrew Dice Clay get shut down ? (he was never as funny again), or Lenny Bruce for that matter. They all said things people didn't like and were taken out of the public square one way or another. Unfortunately we have lost as a culture for this.
We have reached the Orwellian state where even the news outlets rewrite themselves to comply with political fashion and try to erase the details.
http://newsdiffs.org/diff/9343...
Here is the New York Times recasting it's article on Ellen Pao's resignation from someone who annoyed everyone at Reddit , to Reddit not liking women.
Shuts down the discussion and erases any chance to argue the point all in one go.
There is more than one type of post-scarcity economy.
There is the fictional one in Star Trek... which is fiction based on fictional assumptions.
Then there's the interesting ones which already exist... in real first world countries. The reasons that there are many US citizens who have to work 50+hr weeks to get by are about distribution, not scarcity. Increasingly disproportionate amounts of money are funneled to already wealthy people. People have convinced themselves that the narrative of scarcity and neccessity is actual scarcity and necessity, despite primary production, manufacturing and distribution accounting for a diminishing minority of people's jobs. Scarcity in first world economies is not real and would vanish as soon as people stopped believing in it.
Everyone would just sit in the middle of their own giant pillow.
So, if I understand what you are saying, the people in the US are shallow zombie like creatures that are impressed by shiny objects. Perhaps I am being a little simplistic in this analysis, but this is the quintessential US philosophy appears to be 'money makes you happy'. But you have been lied to. Everything you see and hear in your culture has been designed to make you unsatisfied with what you have, to buy that bigger shinier car, that bigger house, that juicy big mac, and then and only then will you be happy. Except then you will be told it isn't big ENOUGH.
You are being brainwashed.
You don't need the new car or the flash house, or the food laced with so much sugar you could run your car on it. More importantly, you are not a failure if you choose not to make obtaining stuff your life purpose. In fact - get this - you will be much happier if you realise that the only things you have absolute control over is your judgements and your actions. Is it easier to obtain those things you desire or to simply stop desiring them? Are you in control of your own life, or are advertisers telling you what to desire?
Once you start to think deeply about what is really important you begin to understand that family and community are important. That you can do with less and do more for others. When you shift your perspective from doing what makes you wealthy to what honours you happiness and contentment naturally follows. You can let go of your ego, your desire to be rich, good looking or powerful, and instead focus on helping others.
This is why I pity people like Bill Gates, who spent so much of his life building a edifice devoid of everything important. What is important? It is people, it is people, it is people.
Love the analysis of how impractical Star Trek is.
On the scarcity discussion: I think my problem is that I don't see an end to scarcity of some things, even in a Star Trek world. Two great examples:
* Planets. How would we give one to everyone who wanted to own their own planet? Or solar system, for that matter. A single individual's inability to consume an entire planet's resources doesn't really matter in this case. Enough people want their own planet now; many, many more would want it in an absence of scarcity of other things. We are greedy beyond our ability to consume.
* People. Owning another person necessarily limits their resources to what you allow them to have. We've been doing that since the dawn of civilization.
Hopefully if we ever did get to that level of resources, our nature would have changed enough so we didn't get in our own way. I doubt it, though. I imagine we will always find something in limited quantities to fight and kill each other over.
If a 24th century photon torpedo had even as much power as a 20th century nuke, then you could obliterate even the largest ships with a single hit, no matter how strong their 'shields' were.
I think the Enterprise has taken direct hits from nuclear weapons before in the original series (eg, the first episode with Romulans). Those shields are quite spanky.
And I can only assume that the author had never actually been to new Zealand.
Wtf makes him think new Zealand is an any way what he dreams of? I can assure him people there work damn hard, and life is most certainly not done easy street.
Perhaps he needs to climb down out of his ivory tower from time to time and visit the real world.
worker productivity has basically quadrupled in the U.S. since 1950
I see that chart brought up every time worker productivity is mentioned.
It is misleading. People ignore the fact that the U.S. moved off the gold standard in 1971, which is when the red line starts deviating from the orange line. That's not just coincidence; switching off the gold standard caused the deviation you see.
The red line is real wages, or wages after adjusting for inflation. Since 1971, that line is essentially flat because wages increased at around the rate of inflation (because the value of the dollar has been tied to the cost of goods and services). But that wasn't true before 1971. When the U.S. was on the gold standard, the value of the dollar--and thus the rate of inflation--was tied to the value of gold, and gold held its value better than average goods. Thus the inflation-adjusted value of wages appears to increase before 1971.
It's pretty much just an accounting trick. It doesn't say much about purchasing power; it says everything about how inflation was accounted.
But the biggest thing to consider is that inflation doesn't account for how the quality of products and services will change over time. The average cost of a nice TV has increased by around 3 or 4 times since 1970, but the quality (including resolution, thickness, sound, number of supported channels, capabilities, etc.) has increased by a much, much larger amount. Housing, vehicles, and a ton of other things are much better than they were in the 70s. If you put that on a chart, I would imagine it would look something like the orange line. In other words, the same real wage today buys you a better life than it did in the 70s, and that is where all that extra productivity goes.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
People have easily been excluded from society by force. A machine to make anything can be protected and access restricted by force.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Well... its a question of how crazy you get with it. I mean... no sane person is going to demand they get a whole world all to themselves. A crazy person might.
So yeah... you're not giving a planet to one guy. But one guy isn't going to ask for a planet.
More commonly you find in star trek that a little community is given a whole planet. I mean... a thousand people that all sort of share the same views and like each other are given an entire planet. That happens in startek.
As to owning people... that's less a scarcity issue than an ethical one. And in any case we're just coming back to questions of mental illness again. Why do you want to own someone when you can get everything that owning a person could give you from the technology... short of some sort of sadistic pleasure from dominating someone... and that's sickness.
In startrek they "fix" people that have that sort of notion. They get "corrected"...
So can we just exclude the people that are mentally ill?i
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yeah... but the incentives by everyone to have the machine replicated and stratified throughout society would be huge.
The federation has some sort of quasi democracy... I don't know how it works exactly but they have some sort of democracy. So "give us access to the everything maker" would have to be a powerful political platform.
And then you have the economic incentives... everyone that has nearly as much clout as the people with the machine would be kept down almost entirely because they don't... and they'd have an incentive to get close to it and take it. And then the people with the machine could buy temporary clout by giving the machine or causing it to be leaked.
The point is that it wouldn't be sustainable. And as soon as it leaked it would be out there.
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Your confusing two separate things, which, whilst often related, are not necessarily so. Economic growth is a result of the better use of factors of production, achieving output that is of greater value with the same population. China's economic growth at more than 8% a year over the past 20 years or so has had little to do with its population growth, but everything to do with building factories and using more resources. Whilst there is a suggestion that a stable population, especially an older population, will be more resistant to change than one where there is a flow of new entrants to the work force, it is not inevitable.
The interesting other issue that you raise - that profits now constitute a larger component of the GDP of developed countries than used to be the case - IS something we should be concerned about; it reflects a failure of competition to ensure that such profits are competed away, as different suppliers of the similar product offer lower prices...
Well I understand that it's science fiction, so I give them a pass, but in the real world there's obviously no way you can 'shield' against a freaking nuclear weapon. Unless you're willing to consider a solid metal shield with a thickness of a hundred meters. Wouldn't be much of a ship though.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
I dunno... It seems unlikely - given history. I would expect something along the lines of a replicator that could only replicate things smaller than itself - and I am even envisioning something that will replicate at the atomic level so would not need input resources. It would also self-destruct if opened. It would also get its information from another source - streamed "recipes" would be the method. Now, could one program their own replicator? Probably. Will they have the resources to get that far? I do not know.
It seems likely that there is a potential outcome that is good. Now, achieving that goodness is possible but unlikely. It is not something I expect to happen given the nature of humans.
This does not, of course, mean you are wrong. It just means that I expect a different outcome. My outcome could, eventually, transition to your views. I think your views could easily end up resulting in my own as well after a period of time has passed. I also expect there will be a "Luddite" sect who resemble the Amish of today.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Technically the federation is a purely civil government and entirely democratic. This is often glossed over because the show focuses on star fleet which is a naval force. A lot of people conflate star fleet with the federation and mistakenly imagine that the star trek universe is a militaristic society. It's not. That's life on a federation star ship but it's as far removed from civilian life as life on a gunboat today is from our civilian life. It's frequently made apparent in the show though that the federation civilian government has authority over star fleet. In DS9 when earth is under great threat and in a state of martial law a faction of star fleet tries to claim authority in the name of security Sisko actively opposes and ultimately prevents that.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
It's only enlightenment self interest if you figure out that the best thing to do to secure your position is to not only not be a dick but be altruistic in the extreme. You can't just pay lip service to it either. .. you need to be the guy every revolutionary would want to not shoot.
No revolution has ever made the poor better off. Yet they keep happening. Why is that ? Because even when they don't you get to shoot at the people currently making you worse off.
To actually be enlightened.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
The tech can replicate itself. So the instant it breaks out you won't be able to put it back in the bottle again.
Initially something like that would be tightly controlled if only to give the creators and whomever owned it maximum return. But eventually the thing would break out one way or the other.
And then trying to control who had it would be an exercise in futility.
That's another thing you just don't see in star trek which indicates some very reliable psychological controls... you don't see terrorists or lone gunmen. They have the tech for any idiot to print a phaser. This is a weapon that in the first series they could vaperize hillsides... with a hand phaser.
And there is nothing to stop the person from printing out a much larger weapon if he wants that.
No one even tries to do that sort of thing though. Which means everyone is reliably "sane"... and that doesn't happen naturally.
Some of us are naturally crazy. So that has to be something monitored and regulated.
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The enlightened self interest only mean you do what is in your own best interest without trying to fuck over everyone else in the process or otherwise damage your society. That's all that means. Its not that hard.
As to revolutions never doing anything... wrong... a revolution is chaos and the results of it are unpredictable.
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As to your seeming attempt to correct me about the distinction between star fleet and the federation... I know all that... I don't think I said anything that would suggest otherwise.
I'm not sure what you're responding to here.
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Super-nukes would be just as useless for fighting a multi-planet enemy than normal nukes were for fighting the Cold War. You can't use them without getting yourself killed too, so all they do is take up valuable resources that could be used for expansion, research, economic development, etc. And of course in the interstellar scheme this is all made worse by the fact that you're either surrounded by other empires eager to exploit your distraction, or empty space you could be colonizing.
What's even worse, justifying such useless cost to your own populace means a massive propaganda campaign; the mindset bred by said campaign will take a life of its own and limit your options, even after the conflict is over. When all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail; when you have a military you went a trillion dollars into debt to build, you will damn well look into excuses to use it, which in turn will provide reasons to maintain and further develop it, ultimately destroying both your economy and society.
So I suppose the truly succesful interstellar empires will be the "unofficial" ones, which specialize in getting around - or perhaps even assimilating - occupying forces. So the grunts of future space wars will be smugglers like Han Solo rendering Empire's effective control near zero, not fighter pilots like Luke trying to fight it on its own terms.
We're already at the point where wars typically result in expensive failures, damaging both the economy, culture and prestige of the participants. Future belongs to whoever can solve the problem of having an organized society with zero reliance on coercive force. It's not an easy problem, but the prize is also tremendous: nigh-invincibility combined with the ability to devote all resources to productive activities.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
"Greed is infinite"
Prove it? please provide me with a single example of infinite resources that a single person owns but still attempts to take it from others. You can't. Even the richest people in the world have limitations to what they can actually afford. Yeah, some guys can only afford that 100ft yacht, which is what makes that 200ft yacht cooler for the guy who can. If we could all have 200ft yachts then most people would probably go with something closer to what they needed. You are using established greed and projecting it onto a level of production we have never experienced and assuming it will be the same. Every point you make is based entirely around limited resources, yet you're modded insightful? Resources being scarce is why executives want to make more money, and make you pay more for the goods. You keep spending large sums, giving them more money and you less.
Take a few steps back from the situation and follow all the greed of today, and you'll follow it back to limited resources. Land, food, water, etc. Now, picture a world where land, and every possession you could ever imagine is free. No wait period, no money, nothing. How does that not have a profound effect? Some people will still be gluttonous regarding specific things, but their greed no longer impacts anyone but themselves. I think those that are truly greedy will always seek power, and they will attempt to claw their way to the top of whatever political structure we have in place. Influence will become the new limited resource.
Just turn your engines towards the explosion.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
We could all be working 10 hours per week and living with a similar economic standard of living to 1950. Personally, I'd be fine with that, though I know many people wouldn't.
So are you doing that? Or looking for a job that lets you do that? Probably easiest if you're self employed and limit your customer base.
I see you are assuming that the tech will eventually break out and, while noble, implies that the underclass has the capacity to make use of that information and has access to resources to that information. It also implies that the tech will, in fact, break out. The whole "information wants to be free" charade.
I do not have your slashdot password because you will not give it to me. (Not the best example but it will do.)
These machines will need something to replicate and be programatically controlled. They will use recipes that are encrypted and the device will be secured against tampering and will use strong communication encryption as well. You will not have access to the device in any form other than that of a consumer.
The last paragraph is my expectation. I do understand the merits of your argument and agree that you have a probability of being correct. I do not agree that your argument is more probable than my own because, frankly, we are human beings and have a history of being human beings. Expecting that to change is silly. We have had many changes made already and throughout all of them we have maintained very little other than human nature. I do not expect this to change while we can still be classified as Homo Sapien Sapian. I think it naive to expect otherwise but do agree that there is a probability, however low, that you are correct.
You may, and I encourage you to do so, think the best for the future and believe in a quasi Utopian society. I do not see this as being viable and there are no quantifiable metrics to prove anything other than probability. I humbly submit the entirety of human history. We have not now, nor will we ever, remove the differences between the haves and the have-nots. That is my submission and reasoning.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
No it doesn't. That's just self interest. Enlightened self interest is doing what's good for others because you recognise the benefits of doing so for yourself. It's altruism for sociopathic people who can't be nice for its own sake (cue one, probably a randrpid and definitely a libertarian, showing up to argue that there's no such thing as a non self interested act. Which even if its true doesn't actually matter to what I said except to make it more true). Self interest is putting out a fire in your house. Enlightened self interest is putting out a fire in your neighbours house because:
1 - if you don't it may spread to your house and
2 - if you do then when your house is on fire your neighbours are more likely to help you put it out.
Anything that benefits you is self interest regardless how it affects others. Stealing or murdering your spouse for their life insurance are both self interested acts.
Only actions which benefit you indirectly by directly benefitting others meet the definition of enlightened self interest however.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Nobility doesn't enter into it. The damn things make copies of themselves.
And your obsession with class is not helping the discussion. The separation between classes are often arbitrary. Which means the people in a lower class are often every bit as smart as people in a higher class. And that means the lower class as you put it can occasionally outwit the upper class. And if they do that so much as fucking once they'll have the damned thing.
And that is just ONE way it can get out.
Another way is that rival oligarchs could struggle for power and that will require that whomever is challenging the primary authority will need one of these machines doing things and likely minions. that situation is chaotic enough that something could break out.
Another way is that the middle class which will be responsible for guarding it, programming it, etc could sneak out a copy of it which could then make copies of copies and then it is everywhere.
Another way is that once it is known that the technology exists it will be much easier to replicate or reverse engineer. People will know roughly how it works, the components that make it up are likely sourcable or producible using lower end machinery that is harder to regulate. And then it is just a matter of trial and error to make a version of the thing that works. And then the only thing that might separate the one from the other is a certain amount of refinement.
When I said... you CAN"T keep it bottled up... I did not use that word loosely. You... CANNOT.
Nobility doesn't enter into it.
All your attempts to control it will do is delay the inevitable. I don't doubt you could keep it bottled up for years. But eventually its getting out.
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No, they get paid out as management bonuses and dividends. Productivity enhancements have gone towards making the 1% richer at everyone else's expense. That's not sustainable, and will end up in either social reforms or outright revolution, just like it did the last time.
Then why do all developed economies struggle with unemployment?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I don't agree with your definitions and reject them.
We cannot communicate much less have a discussion without mutually agreed upon terminology.
Self interest is merely doing whatever is in your interest indifferent to any other consideration. Period.
Any attribute beyond that is in addition to self interest. Period.
I defined what I believed to be enlightened self interest. That is additional qualities in excess of simple self interest. You appear to have a complex and counter intuitive and frankly very confusing notion of what enlightened self interest means.
So I'm going to not use that term anymore because I don't wish to debate the point. Its a waste of time.
I'll simply stand on my previous definition but instead use the designation "socially acceptable self interest" which has nothing what so ever to do with... whatever you were talking about. I couldn't get past your statement that something that was quite obviously more involved than self interest was just self interest. That triggered an instant error trap and I stopped.
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Enough with the fucking moral judgements of people you don't know.
Then discuss a different subject. The label of "Greed" is inherently a moral judgment. And when you start talking about what it means, you naturally talk about everyone's moral judgments.
Mine would be the definition used by absolutely everyone except you. Including the entirety of moral philosophy on the subject. Creating your own new definitions of common terms to fit your agenda and then expecting them to have the same emotional connotations is a fallacy.
Your definition of enlightened self interest is ignoring the reason for the adjective "enlightened " as opposed to something like "inteligent" or "effective" or "greedy". All terms which would qualify "self interest" in very different ways. Intelligent self interest would mean what you're claiming to mean by enlightened self interest.
Let me put it this way: enlightened self interest is intelligent self interest but intelligent self interest may not be enlightened self interest.
What makes it enlightened is that it is self interest realized in a counter intuitive manner: by protecting the interests of others. This is not a new idea. The biblical golden described enlightened self interest 2000 years ago.
I didn't make it up. You are the one trying to attach rhe positive connotations of the term "enlightened self interest" to behaviour that is essentially the exact opposite of what the term predicates.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
You have far more faith and hope in humanity than I. I do not disagree that class is stupid. I disagree that it will change. However, I hope you are right. I just do not think you are or that it will take much longer and will be akin to how features trickle down into lower cost cars.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Humans are status obsessed. It's innate behaviour.
No, they get paid out as management bonuses and dividends. Productivity enhancements have gone towards making the 1% richer at everyone else's expense.
I didn't mean all the money being saved by productivity enhancements went towards paying marketing and sales. Just the human workers who were displaced. Since these new workers are more skilled they generally make far more than the secretary and factory worker positions that were lost, but not four times as much. That money goes to the 1%, as you stated.
Then why do all developed economies struggle with unemployment?
Unemployment is a different problem than lowering the number of hours in a work week. Since it takes money to train workers, it will almost always be more profitable to have one employee working 40 hours than two workers working 20 hours. In manual labor jobs, it would usually be more profitable to have one worker working 80 hours, but laws prohibit that. In knowledge jobs, it is usually not more profitable for a worker to work more than about 50 hours, so the laws have negligible impact on their work week.
Unemployed workers are only a problem because of either a lack of skills or heavy regulation. The lack of skills are not always the fault of the unemployed workers; they may have just had their whole industry undergo massive changes (like the housing industry). Countries that make it very hard to have an agile workforce make it hard for companies to hire. This generally leads to happier workers, but higher unemployment.
That's not sustainable, and will end up in either social reforms or outright revolution, just like it did the last time.
It unfortunately may be sustainable, because past revolutions were caused by lack of opportunity for the poor, not specifically the gap between them and the rich. If the middle class was drastically dropping in wages and net worth, you may have the seeds of revolution. But in the western world the middle class is simply stagnating. But their lives are still very good compared to what it takes to spark revolution.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
"Who's going to cut your grass? Who is going to fix the sewer when things get backed up? Some folks who do it just for the "reputation" as the best sewer jockey?"
Some folks will come up with robots that do these things.
Then make these plans available for free.
Just like the ArduMower is already:
http://www.instructables.com/id/ArduMower-Do-it-yourself-robotic-mower/
The more 3D printers wil be able to print all kinds of structures. The less assembly will be required.
In a star trek economy, you just pick a computer file, put in some solid starting ore and watch the machine build a fully functional machine by itself.
Star Trek economics work because of 3 major breakthroughs in science that have yet to happen in reality for mankind.
1. Energy, humans have yet to create a real functional, more out than in, sustainable fusion device.
2. Disease, humans still haven't cured very much, oh there are pills to help you COPE, but no actual cures. Medical science is more on blocking what cells do, instead of actually destroying them.
3. Goods, humans have yet to create the replicator, this is the main factor that opens up a shift away from money. Even in the wonderful fiction of Star Trek, money IS still used, and so are CREDITs. Things still cost, but the majority of every day things are free to a degree, there are rules and laws protecting them.
Now, nanotechnology has been hailed the savior of all this above, but until we Solve at least 1 of these items. I don't want to hear any lip from anyone on what the future holds, because as it stands now, humans future is closer to World War 3, than any wonderful made up idea of Utopia in a TV show.
BTW, my comment about productivity (the orange line) and quality is just my hypothesis, but I don't have data to back it up. I'm not saying that I can prove that quality is correlated to productivity, or that productivity is tied to purchasing power.
My point is that the chart fails to show that the gap exists, as it claims. The gap may very well exist, but this chart doesn't show it.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
China is an interesting case - they have slowed population growth, but are in the process of rapidly "tapping into" the existing population as members of the economy. Simple head counts don't tell the economic story, it's how much those people participate in the system - are they isolated farmers, basically growing their own food, building and maintaining their own houses, roads, wells, etc.? In that case they contribute essentially zero to the economy beyond what little "tax" the government might be able to levy off of their farm production. Now, if the farmers buy equipment, increase efficiency in the fields, send their children to the factories to work, and start buying other things from the factories, that's going to be a similar effect as an increase in headcount in an "economically engaged" country.
Tune-in, turn-on, drop-out can have an opposite effect, turning active members of an economy into commune-dwelling non-members. I don't think we've ever had a significant example of this kind of economic exodus that out-paced immigration and birth rates.
On the issue of profits and the "free market," one of my bigger concerns is how volatility is being used to stifle competition. It looks like a wildly competitive market when commodity prices swing up by 80% then down by 40% the following year, but, in reality, I think it damages competition and increases profits because consumers aren't in control, they don't have time to find the best price when the prices are changing by 10 and 20% on a weekly basis. Of course, gasoline is a huge poster child for this, but I have also seen it in the grocery store - weekly "BOGO" specials cutting prices by 50%, seemingly to desensitize consumers to the fact that "normal" prices are now at 100% markup, and if you want to bargain shop, you'll have to build your own warehouse to take advantage of the pricing scheme.
"dialectical reasoning": the fallacy that 2 wrongs make a right.
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Fascinating. 2 heads of government, from the opposite parties. Term of office: 6 months. "Once this term is over, citizens have three days in which to file complaints about the Captains' activities. If they warrant it, judicial proceedings against the ex-head(s) of state can be initiated." (wikipedia). What a wonderful mechanism for discouraging entrenched abuse of power.
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Let's see. You're implying that you want the government to tax everyone into poverty, so that when they're no longer able to work, the government can keep them in continuing poverty (SS) as long as they vote Democrat.
As opposed to that, the Republican plan is to allow people to keep what they earn, so that they can provide for their own retirement without caving to political pressure.
Your statement on WIC is too confused to make reply possible.
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Well, you're wrong. The Klingons were the Russians and the Romulans were The Chinese (regardless of their name).
The new BSG was the best thing I've seen so far as far as space battles go. Hopefully the actual use of physics will catch on.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
all they do is take up valuable resources that could be used for expansion, research, economic development, etc
With the side benefit that if you have them you're far less likely to be "liberated".
It is true that a century ago we were rapidly moving towards a 20-hour work week. But then the 40-hour week was officially signed into law (in the... 40s?), and all further reductions ceased. And we've now reversed the trend to the point that we're now averaging somewhere in the 50-hour range.
Meanwhile, hourly worker productivity has much more than doubled in that time frame, but the vast majority of the associated wealth increase has been claimed by the top fraction of a percent, and what little was left has largely been lost to the spread of rampant consumerism.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
We have had combine harvesters for the last 70 years that can replace hundreds of farm laborers. We have automated factorys that can run at night after we turn the lights out. Despite all of these advances we work longer hours than peasants in the middle ages, and longer hours than hunter gatherers. Something tells me that a magic replicator will not create a leasured utopia. We have had the technology for a leasured utopia since the industrial revolution and probably since the birth of agraculture. If you think technology will bring about post scarcity your a fool, we have had the technology for post scarcity for the last 80 years.
>You only deserve to receive if you contribute.
I would take exception to this, at least if you claim the current situation in any way reflects that ethos. What do the ultra-wealthy contribute? They take a disproportionate fraction of the wealth created by laborers, and leverage it to capture even more wealth for themselves, while generating no wealth themselves.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Plot devices don't necessarily map to real life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plot_device
I say the thing we would need the replicator cannot replicate is energy.
It would hardly be the first time such a situation has occurred. The traditional strategy is for the wealthy to handsomely reward the mercenaries in their private security "army", and let the rest of the world burn. Just look at Somalia today - anarchy only hurts the working class.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
oh don't feel bad
They don't really explain how phasers work in the series, but photon torpedoes use antimatter, which evidently can't be replicated in the Star Trek universe. I'm sure they'd come up with [tech] reason why phasers also can't be replicated, which would explain why they have ships running weapons from system to system.
Since it's all driven by stories and characters the writers come up with, they can put whatever limits they want on the technology, but we can certainly enjoy speculating on what would happen if the technology were real.
Meritocracy is a very risky and manipulable concept
Self-satisfaction is a better goal IMHO
...speaking of stupid, What did they do with all of the stupid people in the Star Trek universe? Slaughtered? Ground up and used for matter packs for the replicators? There will always be stupid.
You are lacking imagination
Market economy is pushing robotics and automatism to a point where a very large part of the population wont be needed as a working force and where product can be manufactured cheaply enough that subsidizing the population rather than work maybe a better alternative
Two things we need to avoid disaster
Energy supply, that may be solved if fusion pans out
Resources, that may also be solved if we figure out a cheap enough way to mine the solar system
those are two big ifs to solve but given the alternative we better solve them early rather than later
Well, as far as I can tell everyone would love to live the way the author claims. Unfortunately this author must know a lot of rich people, because the only retired people I know who travel and see the world, and there are quite a few, they tend to retire from above average jobs, i.e. government jobs, or high paying management positions. The average Middle class, or poverty stricken retiree in my opinion struggles to make ends meet, and help the others in their family to do the same. As much as I would appreciate the ability to work to just improve my own standing in society, the reality is I work because I need to make that dollar. In any case, until a replicator is invented and the ability to have whatever you need/want on a moments notice exists, then there will be no "meritocratic" system that works. And even that will pose serious problems in the world. Consider all poor people in the world suddenly had access to everything they ever wanted by just speaking it into a computer and it is made. There would be junk EVERYWHERE! We couldn't live like that at the moment, it would take a very structured system, and a huge learning curve to society to allow for such a technology to even exist today.
In any case without a replicator, without the elimination of greed, without a complete change in the way the human species thinks, this can't exist.
Just my two cents.
Havok
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They would be no so rich it they don't have nobody to sell their product
also several billion youngsters with nothing else to do may not be very happy with the situation you paint
bottom line is in a society where everything can be made very cheap without human work the current market economy is not necessary also ownership becomes must less of a drive as in if you have enough money you do not need to own a house because or a car you basically can afford to rent live anywhere you like and travel anyway you wish
If we where talking about local changes, external forces may prevent this but we are referring to a global change, basically a market economy cannot out-compete a post scarcity economy no mater what
No, take all the greed of today and you'll follow it back to a limited ability for others to tolerate unlimited greed. Ie, revolutions, lynchings, etc. But humans put up with an enormous amount of shit under ideals instead of pragmatism. Think no further than the homeless. For every homeless person in the US, Europe, etc there are more than sufficient resources to shelter and feed them. Yet instead of merely going into homes and taking what they need to survive, plenty will starve and freeze on the streets. And for all the threat of jail time for stealing or committing other crimes, the very act of committing a (sufficient) crime guarantees food and shelter: jail time.
So, in a real sense, post scarcity is not about per-say having unlimited resources and fulfilling unlimited greed. It's about recognizing every person is entitled to sufficient resources to live without it being hooked into some punishment/reward system and without the whole system collapsing from too many free riders. To that end, I think we can look no further than the homeless and the threat of jail time to see that we could have such a system. Those who didn't work would be deprived of unneeded luxuries but sufficient resources to live and the vast majority wouldn't commit crimes but instead work to achieve the luxuries they desired. And the status symbol of those luxuries would drive not many to work but sufficient productivity in those hours would be enough to provide for everyone, just as farming is no longer the predominant occupation of every waking hour of near every person on Earth.
I liked the battles in Babylon 5. Earth was relatively low-tech and engaged in carrier-style battles. The Minbari were invulnerable and basically didn't care, so they just walked all over Earth ships. The Shadows preferred to engage from across an entire solar system, because they had beam weapons and no need to engage from closer ranges. The Centauri didn't bother with planetary invasion when they could just hurl asteroids at the surface. Lots of diverse tactics.
Read Asimov's Robot novels for an alternate view on how things will play out in a fully automated economy. The 0.001% won't need the rest of us and wind up living on giant estates, surrounded by robots fulfilling their every wish.
Seems we are 20 years behind you, then. Hopefully not following, though.
It would be interesting to find a statistic over these figures from a number of countries. Is there a trend towards oscillation in the hours/week over time? Or is either of our datapoints anomalies.
My first reaction was oh great a society based on arrogance, then I remembered the point systems that psychologists of the 60's and 70's loved so much. So there would some possibly easily corruptible or fooled organization keeping track of the points based on their opinion of one's ideas or work? The same greedy people would vie for high rankings and status like the office suck ups we have now. Money has the advantage that it is real and not usually awarded because of wishful thinking. There would still be haves and have nots; everyone would have stuff but the have nots suffer from lack of motivation, not really needing anything. Worse they would have to listen to the haves. I have loved Science Fiction since seeing Forbidden Planet as a child and Star Trek even more but it was mostly written for children or the child in us. They left out a lot of human nature especially the darker parts. While a few things will come true It's just fiction. Bart - Bad karma and proud of it.
Not in the original sense, no.
Allow me to quote urbandictionary:
That is what "SJW" has always meant. MLK was not a SJW, Gandhi was not a SJW, Anita Sarkeesian is not a SJW, and almost nobody on Slashdot is a SJW.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
This depends on the technology. If you have self-replicating machines to do your building, then it doesn't matter what size thing you want - you set a machine off and tell it to come back once it has built what you want. Apart from resource depletion in an area (so just go choose somewhere unoccupied and otherwise useless), there is no real cost to this. If you achieve machines that can build other machines from raw materials unsupervised, then a stupidly-gigantic weapon - or 16 billion of them - is pretty much trivial except for the waiting time. Set and forget, come back when you want one to use. It would have basically a zero governance requirement.
In other, related, news, we don't really have a clue what post-scarcity looks like.
Certainly the "society with no reliance on coercive force" is attractive, although "virtually unlimited access to coercive force" might be a more realistic eventuality.
Incorrect. And obviously so since mine came out of a dictionary and yours came out of your ass.
I literally cited the dictionary. Kill yourself.
https://youtu.be/qiukc1yfzCI?t...
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Its not a faith in humanity... it is a realistic estimation of the ability of elites to control ultimately uncontrollable technology.
If the elites could control everything gun gun wouldn't have been invented and neither would the crossbow. We'd be mud farmers used as fodder in wars that were more games while our betters ran around in shiny armor mostly hacking peasants apart.
But what happened? Another set of elites found it advantageous to break from the script and use peasants as the primary fighting force. And that meant arming them with something that could kill knights with minimum losses. No games. Fucking kill them. Long bows... cross bows... guns.
And then the battlefield was no place for the elites because some peasant was going to fucking kill you which was not how it used to work.
Then look at the rise of the industrial revolution. Here you'll say "but the peasants still worked in factories and that was bad"... yeah but the old aristocracy was overturned and overwhelmed by the new money and the new innovators. And those people rose out of the middle and lower classes. And they brought with them middle and lower class sensibilities to the upper class. Notions of hereditary power were overturned in favor of money, innovation, balls, leverage. Doesn't help the guy with nothing but every so often someone with nothing has leverage and balls and they can make something happen.
The elites can't control the spread of technology.
Look at what is happening in China and Iran. The peasants of both societies are communicating with the world despite their regimes wanting to control all speech.
Did you see the ghost gunner? Its just a specialized CNC machine... nothing special. But it lets any moron make an untracable AR15... just as a starter.
I can buy a reasonable 3 axis CNC machine for about 800 dollars these days. 800... dollars. How much longer until I can buy a 5 axis CNC machine for two grand? And with a 5 axis CNC machine you can make anything out of metal that a machine shop can make.
So lets say you had something better than a CNC machine... you had a replicator? That's getting out. You're not stopping it. You could at best slow it down. But its getting out. And that isn't faith in humanity. That's faith in chaos against order. That's faith in the uncontrollable being uncontrollable.
Its like trying to ban drugs that are grown in the dirt. How do you ban a plant people are growing? You can't. It isn't possible.
Same thing for banning alcohol. You can't. Its fermented carbs. You can't ban carbs and you can't ban bacteria... so you can't ban alcohol. It isn't possible.
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Yes and no.
It had some of the most exciting space battles I've ever seen. The one where galactica fights for the jump point at Ragnar station was really cool and my second favorite would be the assault on new caprica with galactica jumping into the atmosphere, launching vipers, and then jumping out before it slammed into the ground.
Exciting. But I think probably really stupid.
For one thing, fighters don't make sense in space. I can nail you with light speed particle beams so all that juking around isn't going to do anything. Beyond that I don't know how you're maneuvering like that because you're in a vacuum... you're also spending fuel like a crazy person. I just don't think fighters make any sense in space combat... at all.
The startrek model is less stupid but still really really really stupid. Because weapons tend to be more powerful than defenses. I mean... the best battleship in its day would still get killed by the best guns of that day... practically in one good shot. Battleships lasted so long in fights against each other because they mostly missed. Over and over again. Direct hits with a 16 inch shell? Good night princess.
Point is... they let themselves get hit. They don't dodge. They don't use point defense against the incoming fire.
The klingons/romblians are somewhat better with their cloaking devices which lets them ambush people. But the Federation especially are fucking crazy. They LET themselves get hit. I mean... if I were the Klingons... I'd just build a super torp that would insta kill a federation starship. then I'd give each of my ships two or three of those because seriously how many do you need? And then they'd decloak behind some federation turkey... mag the shit out of them.... and recloak.
But in the startrek universe, the weapons are for no apparent reason much less powerful than the defenses. The defenses can take direct hit after direct hit and stand.
What? That isn't how it works today.
Take a tank... a mainline battle tank takes a direct hit from another comparable mainline battle tank... say one Abrams directly hits another Abrams... the other Abrams is dead. Instantly. Everyone inside is dead. The tank is trashed. One hit. What the armor lets you do is shrug off lesser weapons than an 80mm smooth bore fired armor piercing whatever the round is... And it lets you shug off glancing blows.
But a direct hit? You're done. Period.
Mainline battle tanks avoid this situation by first engaging at long range so most shots are going to miss and it gives the attacker something of an advantage because it will take a second for the defense to figure out where the enemy is etc. Also... the defenders all dig their tanks in... use dirt to absorb the hits... and they camo the tanks so they aren't as easily seen.
Its all about NOT being hit in the first place. And that's assuming you're not using air support to blow up all the tanks before you even engage with your own tanks.
In BSG... they get so god damn close to each other.
Do you know the range battleships were engaging each other at during WW2? Over 10 kilometers. They wouldn't get any closer to each other than that. Part of the whole advantage of a battleship is that the guns have longer ranges. Which means you can sit outside someone else's range and pound them and they can't pound you back. that was something of the idea behind cruisers. A cruiser is supposed to be a ship with battleship class guns but destroyer class armor. And the idea was that it didn't need the armor because it just wouldn't get close enough to get hit.
Now that didn't work for various reasons. But the point is that you want to engage people in YOUR range but ideally OUTSIDE theirs. So you can shoot at them and they can't shoot back.
BSG got too close in fights. And they didn't use their jump in combat enough. That was especially crazy. You'd you'd "spin up" your FTL... jump near them... fire off a barrage... then jump away.
They even had that stealth ship that apparentl
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Except that three things happen in the Star Trek universe to explain this. One, there's a horrible nuclear war that results in hundreds of millions dead (perhaps billions if you count all the people who die indirectly). Two, the Vulcans spend 50+ years as effectively stewards of mankind effectively providing the sort of enlightenment on what can be done and enlightenment on just how small and insignificant humanity is if they do just dwell on a little rock planet. Three, the fact that there's thousands of habitable worlds and the technology to get there and really near have a whole planet to yourself--admittedly, even the crazier people still want on the order of 100s of people as colonists.
To me, the first one might well be the biggest. For all the world wars and the threat under the Cold War, to actually LIVE through the aftermath of nuclear Armageddon I think would radically change your views on life. That to then know that there are plenty of other planets which manage to live in peace and for which there's some value to be had in them possibly above humanity without any real means of conquering all of them (humanity is over-represented in Star Fleet precisely because they are so desperate to prove themselves, I think, but they're a vast minority in the total population of the galaxy), and you'd have to be pretty insane to not be humbled by it all.
So, yea, it's a revolution of sorts. It's a revolution of thinking about humanity and one's duty to it.
And morality is subjective to your moral system. Which means you're basically citing someone for violating a rule that isn't even a law.
Who the fuck cares what you think is or is not moral? I don't give a shit what the Jihadis think is moral. I don't give a shit what the evangelical Christians think is moral. And why the fuck would I give a wet rat fart what YOU think is moral?
Who the fuck are you to decide what is and is not moral? And on that basis how can you even begin to presume to judge what is and is not greed?
My definition for greed came out of a dictionary. Your definitions came out of your ass.
I don't have to validate my position to you.
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The dictionary defines words. Not phrases. Try looking the concept up in a book of moral philosophy or even a fricking Terry Pratchett novel. The example of putting out your neighbours fire to protect your own thatch came straight out of several of them. He understood the concept. You read a bad dictionary.
The dictionary also defines "literally" as "not literally".
I'm going to guess you used a American dictionary. Dictionaries are the wrong tool for phrases with a technical or academic meaning but American dictionaries aren't even good for what dictionaries are for because there are lots of countries that speak English and only one where that dictionary is considered correct.
Telling me to kill myself just proves you have no sane response. You want a real example of enlightened self interest. Try corporate social responsibility. Giving money to charity as a form of marketing. Assured of making more in new sales from good publicity than you spend or at least spending less than you would lose in bad publicity if you didn't give money to charity.
It's doing things that benefit others because ultimately it benefits you too.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Who is going to fix the sewer when things get backed up? Some folks who do it just for the "reputation" as the best sewer jockey?
The sewer is getting backed up because it is defective. Some folks would gladly attain the "reputation" for being the Engineer that solved that problem.
Lamplighters used to light the gas lights every night but then someone came along with an electric light that did not require a Lamplighter. If your vision was correct we would all be in the dark too!
Do ever get tired of being wrong? If I were you, I would...
""literally
ADVERB
in a literal manner or sense; exactly:
"the driver took it literally when asked to go straight across the traffic circle""
What dictionary are you reading that defines "literally" as "not literally"? Because the answer has to be "your ass" again... or something equally reputable.
Do you even know how crazy you sound?
Seriously. Just stop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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Who the fuck are you to decide what is and is not moral? And on that basis how can you even begin to presume to judge what is and is not greed?
I'm khallow. Of course, that is sufficient to issue moral judgments from my point of view. That's how subjectivity works after all.
I don't have to validate my position to you.
True, you don't. And honestly, I think despite that lack of obligation, you did a satisfactory job of validating your position from my point of view.
My point however is that in this argument you can't win because the person issuing moral judgments and perhaps even redefining the meaning of greed to suit themselves is hermetically sealed. Their reasoning doesn't have to make sense to you. Of course, as a result none of the rest of us have to care either.
I graduated HS in 1968 and they were teaching this BS back then. They are teaching it still. Machines will make everything they said and we will only work to improve ourselves, yadda, yadda.
Sorry folks, it's never going to happen. Star Trek's economy is purely totalitarian socialist. A fantasy greater than a one world government Utopia where socialism actually works. No work to do, no jobs, no morality, everything free. Sounds like a liberal politicians promise. We will all freeze to death in the cold and put in shallow graves before this becomes a reality.
this immediately http://www.dailymail.co.uk/ind...
Star Trek led economic revolution? Wait, aren't these the same people who won't allow genetic modification to prevent genetic based diseases because Ricardo Montablon or Benedict Cumberbatch turned up as some freaky super human(dubious science at best) due to misguided eugenics experiments so they allow people in the future to still suffer these diseases because someone in the past made a boo boo? Thats like saying because Atomic weapons were developed and deployed in WW2 we discard the whole field of nuclear medicine because someone might blow up the world!! What a load of nonsense This way of thinking precludes humanity learning from it's mistakes and learning how to use the technology in a more productive way I wouldn't worry about Trekonomics until we get our moral compass aligned correctly otherwise while people are worrying about their reputation score others will be begging just to survive due to fixable genetic impairments and cursing the name Montablon and Cumberbatch
Resources are in finite supply... to build anything... or to travel anywhere... consumes resources. This is what we call cost. For something to be worthwhile, one must gain a return on the investment of resources. We cannot change these fundamental principles. As long as resources are finite, we will always and ever be deciding how to allocate those resources in order to maximize our return. This is equation is built into the fabric of our universe.
Raise the capital gains tax, problem solved.
The gold standard has nothing to do with it, and the US was de facto off the gold standard much earlier. If I can't conduct transactions in gold, and I couldn't back then, it isn't really a gold standard.
You appear to be looking at inflation-adjusted wages and assuming that's productivity. It isn't. Productivity has increased, wealth has increased, and those of us who work for a living aren't getting much benefit out of it.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Dear readers, let me ask you one question: What is money?
Does it have any real value to your survival? You can not eat it, You can not use it as shelter, medicine, or what have you.
The value of money is reached through the consensus of it's users. Se believe that the accumulation of bytes in computer placed somewhere in this world is a record of how much our work (or whatever) is worth.
Basically, there is no significant difference in the REAL value of records in some bank, or on some other server. A Wikipedia server for example. Or a Bitcoin record of some sort...
Now, let us imagine a world that suddenly realizes that there is no way that the value of $, €, or other currency has a foot hold in reality. We are actually well beyond this point. Now, of we trade one illusion (value of money), with other (value of our work or other credit). What difference does it make? Do we really need post-scarcity society.
Allow me to digress. Let me know when you realize that the "communist" countries of eastern Europe in mid-20th century had been even close to communism. They had everything as today's capitalism, plus denial of individualism. As today in Europe and US, ID's were mandatory, ever-reaching surveillance, and no way that you can succeed big-time, no matter how much you tried. Be honest, today - most of the wealth in western ("rich") countries is inherited, not earned. There are examples of people making it different way, of course.
It has always amazed me how people call Star Trek a "perfect society". As much as I absolutely love Star Trek, trekkies who rave about this rarely point out that this is "Star Trek Economy" is the military of the future. Looking at the modern military is a unique part of free society. Captains of a ship do not pay the enlisted to do their jobs, someone else does. But do not get caught disobeying the Captain! For food, when you are on board a ship, you have access to the Ship's Galley, but because of today's food creation limitations, you have to eat when the cooks can create food for you. We do not have food replicator technology. I suspect we will not have FOOD replicator technology until AFTER we get teleport technology working and instead of actually transmitting the food(i.e. printing an organic), save the contents of RAM to a file. Basically taking all the advances of the printer(3D or 2D) and merging them with the idea of a transporter(printing an organic thing)--which is currently NOT a scientific fact.
The Economics of the military does not and will never translate into the real world.
Where is your super computer? You can not have one because you can not afford one. What you do have is a version of what was once a super computer. Today it is obsolete and will not do anything close to the calculations of the new super computers.
Where is your tank? Your F-22? Your aircraft carrier? For a variety of reasons you do not have one. You do not have the capacity to have any of those things. A replicator will be, in my expectations, exactly the same even if it worked at the atomic level and required no resources other than energy. You may get some version that you can "afford" like a computer. You will not have access to a version such as a super computer.
It is not the best analogy but it should be close enough. That is why, or a simplified version, I do not expect this to be a utopia. I expect it to be better but not an equal society based on merit without the class distinctions. I know of no time in history where we have been a classless society.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
That would be interesting data, but I'm not sure how useful it would be for seeing trends, at least predictive ones - what with the technological shifts in productivity.
In the US at least I suspect part of the problem is that, as I recall, early last century, during the WWI/II labor shortages, there were certain limits on "head hunting" put in place. One of the outshoots being that non-monetary compensation such as retirement and medical insurance became a standard feature in compensation packages - which had the effect of both reducing worker mobility, and provided incentive to overwork employees since a large portion of the compensation package did not scale with hours worked. That puts us in a position now where it's substantially cheaper for a company to work one employee 60 hours than two employees 30 hours each. A contributing factor to our 12-15% unemployment rate (it's actually something like 30% for those in their early twenties, and far worse for young minorities. If *that's* not a disaster in the making I don't know what is)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
And that's why Star Trek's replicators will cause a ground-shift in economic thinking.
I mean, so you have a faster computer today. In 5 minutes, I can have one just as fast as yours out of a magic machine.
That's the thing - "things" are effectively infinitely replicable. You want gold? Ask the machine to make it for you. But you having 100lbs of gold doesn't mean I can't go and do the same. So now having more "stuff" is really an exercise in futility because what you have, I can get easily.
And that's what changes the greed equation significantly - because what you have, others can as well.
Greed works when others can't have what you have. I have a 200ft yacht, you don't, therefore "I'm better than you".
But geez, if you can get a 200ft yacht easily, then my 200ft yacht is kind of pointless.
About the only thing that's not easily replicable is things that are not "stuff", like knowledge. But you better keep that on your own, because otherwise anyone else can look it up too.
You realize that most of these "Executives" are actually "Owners". This is largely forgotten.
the US was de facto off the gold standard much earlie.r If I can't conduct transactions in gold, and I couldn't back then, it isn't really a gold standard.
I don't think you understand how the gold standard worked. If the exchange rate was fixed between the US dollar and an ounce of gold, then we were using the gold standard. Whether most places of business accepted gold as currency is irrelevant.
You appear to be looking at inflation-adjusted wages and assuming that's productivity.
No, not at all. In fact, you just described the two lines on that chart, which are obviously not the same.
What I am saying is:
1) the chart is misleading (particularly the "real wages" line), and
2) you can't make a meaningful comparison between the two without additional information, such as quality of life.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
First, why do I need a super computer?
Second, the comparison is false because a super computer cannot make a super computer. A better comparison would be "why do you not have that bit of software" Because a computer can replicate data. And because of the internet... I think you'd have to admit that there really aren't any programs only held by one person or organization. The best example in your favor would be high frequency trading code and hacking intrusion code. But both have leaked. The high frequency trading code is available to anyone that wants it from Goldman Saches no less... and the NSA's hacktool set has been published.
As to your list of things that can't build themselves... I think there is a core misunderstanding as to what we're talking about.
As to your belief that technology is controllable... I'll just point at tens of thousands of years of human history that prove otherwise. You can keep ahead of the curve through innovation. Adopting new technology faster than your rivals can steal/buy/implement your technology... but you can't stop it.
How long after the US nuclear bomb did the Russians have it? How long after the British jet fighters did the soviets have it? The chinese make versions of everything we have. Are our versions better? Perhaps... but it is just a matter of time before their versions catch up with whatever our versions were at that time. The trick is to never stop so by the time they copy something it is already obsolete.
The US maintains a 20 to 50 year tech lead on most of the world. And anyone closer than that only keep that close because we just give them our current tech.
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and it wants its optimism back.
It wasn't that most businesses didn't deal with gold, it was that using gold was actively discouraged, if not illegal. US paper money had switched from gold and silver certificates to Federal Reserve notes. Gold simply wasn't currency in any practical meaning of the word.
Any two-line graph is going to be oversimplifying a lot of things in the economy, but there's a pretty big difference between productivity and wages. While we can buy better stuff now for the same inflation-adjusted cost, that isn't going to close the gap.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The system I mentioned, the one ending in 1971, was Bretton Woods. It was not the kind of gold standard where gold was treated the same currency. Nevertheless, currency was convertible to gold at a fixed rate, which is as far as the relevance here is concerned.
While we can buy better stuff now for the same inflation-adjusted cost, that isn't going to close the gap.
As I said before: "The gap may very well exist, but this chart doesn't show it." So far, I haven't seen data that shows evidence to support this chart's claim that such a gap actually exists.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
It's really hard to say at this point what space battles would actually look like. There are just too many variables we don't know about. We don't know what kind of weapons will exist. Will they be energy/radiation-based weapons? In that case they have near-instant speed but limited range (as particle beams/lasers dissipate after some radius). Will they be kinetic weapons? In that case the speed is limited but you have virtually infinite range. What will the armor look like? Current spaceships have to be extremely light because we need to launch them out of gravity wells. But future ships could be extremely heavy and well-armored. Alternatively, not, because they may need to be light to easily accelerate around.
It's like those ridiculous drawings of 'future battle behemoths' that people drew in the early 20th century depicting the immense and insanely armored battleships of the future... whereas in reality the ultimate 20th century weapon (the weapon superior to all others) wound up being the nuclear ICBM.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
... well... you're right... there might be too many variables but lets just go with physics as we understand it.
That means no impulse drives, no warp drives, no teleporters, etc.
The reality is that you're probably only going to have enough mass and fuel for a hybrid engine weapon system.
Likely a high energy particle accelerator that is used both for propulsion and the likely only weapon.
You'll need to be a hole in space. So you need to be small enough to avoid detection, have minimal radar return, and your thermal signature needs to match the background of space.
The craft would have to be a drone of some kind. Squirt the weapon/engine once to get on a good trajectory and then scan for a target if you don't already know exactly what you're going to hit. Then when you see it... you fire on it if you're in range or carefully reposition.
Its more a game of assassins than anything. Anything big will be too expensive to move around much and too easy to hit and too easy to find.
Communication and synchronization with the rest of the swarm will be done through radio and communications lasers. Laser links will be used by anything that wants to keep its exact location a mystery. Radio will be used either by communications buoys or fixed bases that aren't really possible to hide. The lasers will communicate with the radio buoys and the buoys will broadcast. The radio buoys will be detectable but will be low value targets... and anything that goes after them will get scragged by one of the stealthed drones.
Getting rid of excess heat will be a big problem for the drones. I'm not entirely sure how they're going to keep their temperature down. But they have to remain undetected to remain effective while also not burning lots of fuel simply to be difficult to hit.
That is "MY" understanding of what a space battle would look like given our current understanding of physics. It will be a lot of hide and go seek... snipers in gillie suits fighting by star light.
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I can't see this happening with people the way they are. Can you imagine how the average BMW-driving CEO type would act in a world like that? Whenever there is anything to be worked for (whether it's cash or achievements under ones belt), someone will always be there to acquire more of it than others by whatever means possible, at the others' expense if possible. It's their way of keeping score. "I have it, you don't, because screw you."
And what's this nonsense about "wealthy retirees living in an essentially post-money world"? They're "post-money" because they have so much of it they don't need to worry about it. That is called "wealthy", not "post-money". Seriously the stupidest thing I've heard in the last 30 days.
I don't see how you conclude any of those things. Why would your weapon need to be the same as your propulsion system? Few, if any, current battle vehicles are arranged like that. A propulsion system and a weapon have very different design criteria. If this is just to be lightweight, then why couldn't you use the vehicle itself as a missile?
> You'll need to be a hole in space. So you need to be small enough to avoid detection, have minimal radar return, and your thermal signature needs to match the background of space.
That's effectively impossible as the background of space is 2 K or so. There is no stealth in space. http://www.projectrho.com/publ...
I'm not saying what you're saying is wrong; it's just one of the many ways that space battles could be fought. There's no reason to think it's the only way.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
As to why you'd need a hybrid device... mass issues.
Look, if you're zooming all over the solar system then every acceleration is going to cost you fuel in proportion to your mass and the speed you wish to obtain. Assuming you want to arrive any place any time soon... you're going to need to either burn a lot of fuel... which is likely logistically unsustainable or you're going to need to economize your mass.
The weapon is going to need to be powerful enough to tag an enemy target and long range enough to strike a target before you're detected and intercepted.
So we're talking about a pretty nasty weapon here.
And if you're using a big nasty weapon then you're going to need to propel that thing through space to its target... and that will need a big propulsion system. Having TWO big systems on the craft when you could have just ONE is uneconomical. If the same system can do BOTH then you'd be foolish not to combine the two.
The most sensible weapon for space combat that I can think of is a particle accelerator. You can't really defend against it short of burying yourself in an asteroid or something. Ammunition is mostly power which can be harvested from solar radiation or generated by a fission reactor.
As to missiles... you seem to think you're going to get into proximity with your target.
Lets say it is likewise small, hard to detect, maneuverable, and able to engage your forces at long range using near light speed particle accelerators?
So you fire a missile at one of these things. Dozens or perhaps hundreds of undetected stealthed particle accelerator drones all open fire on your missile long before it even gets close to the target. The missile is slagged turning it into a ballistic hunk of whatever it is made out of... and then whatever you were shooting at just makes a small burn to get out of the way.
All the drones reposition on to new random trajectories and what exactly did firing that missile accomplish?
Now you might say "but you won't detect the missile"... sure... but what makes you think you're going to detect the target either.
I can see missiles like that being used against fixed bases... asteroid bases or something. But against the war drones? Useless.
As to there being no stealth in space... that may well be so. I would point out that no one has ever played hide and go seek up there either. It could be valid that there is no stealth... or it could be that there is a simple way to do it that escapes our description at this point because we've simply no experience with it yet. This is all speculative. I just don't believe that you can't hide...
This is more a tactical adaptation than it is a technological one. Stealthing is often a matter of how you move and when you move as much as what technology you use to move.
Thank you for that link by the way. That was very interesting.
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> The most sensible weapon for space combat that I can think of is a particle accelerator.
For a broad enough definition of 'particle accelerator' I agree with you. Your particles can be subatomic or macroscale, and you can accelerate them to either relativistic or slower speeds. If they are macro-sized particles (say, specks of dust) then you need fewer but your particle accelerator has to be bigger to accelerate them to the same speed. For very large particles (marble-sized all the way up to asteroid-sized) and very high speeds you have a fearsome relativistic kinetic-kill weapon.
All of these are fine choices that may be suitable for various purposes. I just don't think we can predict what those purposes are right now.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
I was talking about sub atomic particles. To be as efficient with mass as possible you want to eject matter out of the back of the craft at as near light speed as possible. Then when you're interested in burning something you turn the accelerator on target and very precisely target the beam on where the target will be when it intersects your beam.
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One possible option for a kinetic weapon would be, for instance, a high-power laser shooting thin metal foil at a target. The foil is accelerated by the laser power from the moment of launch up until it hits the target. i.e. the projectile is in constant acceleration during flight. We've already been able to accelerate thin films to 1000 km/s velocity; this would cause considerable damage if it were to hit a target as the atoms in the foil would fuse with the atoms in the target, multiplying energy output by 100x or more.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
That implies the target's position in space is predictable days or even months into the future with pin point accuracy.
A military target should make a point of either being hardened enough that it could take such a hit without serious damage or unpredictable enough that you simply couldn't be that sure.
Beyond that... the laser would be detectable. It would both make the "foil" detectable which would mean it could be intercepted by something else.
OR even worse, the source of the laser could be targeted.
This foil idea would obviously be an act of war if a state of war was not already in effect. It could thus be openly targeted the same way you can target missiles that are still in their boost phase.
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hoard not horde
I'm not trying to plug the book (I personally didn't enjoy it all that much), but I'm surprised no one seems to have mentioned Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow. His book mentions "Whuffie", which is a reputation-based currency. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie) I'm pretty sure it describes exactly what this article is talking about - people doing things essentially for fame. Meh, could happen...
> A military target should make a point of either being hardened enough that it could take such a hit without serious damage
Well, with a foil weighing just a few micrograms you could get a yield equivalent to several kilograms of TNT, assuming an impact velocity of several thousand km/s (and thus significant fusion yield). Increase the impact velocity by a couple of orders of magnitude and you're looking at about a ton of TNT.
> or unpredictable enough that you simply couldn't be that sure.
How? In space it's not like you can just change direction at will. Doing so requires a lot of fuel and a lot of mass. You yourself are saying that your missiles would have to be light and they'd fire their thrusters once to head towards their target.
> Beyond that... the laser would be detectable. It would both make the "foil" detectable which would mean it could be intercepted by something else.
Not necessarily. Unless you're directly in the beam path, it's hard to detect lasers. And if you're in the beam path it's already probably too late.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
As to a hardened military target... a hardened military target can take... many... tons of TNT delivered to its surface.
You want to see a hardened military target?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I'm talking about targets built to take a hit and perhaps come out of it bloody... but grinning.
If you have an asteroid base with your facilities all in the core of the rock... then a ton of TNT exploding against the surface of the rock isn't going to be a knock out punch.
As to being unpredictable... Maybe I'm misunderstanding how this will work and you can't be sneaky. But my assumption was that you could. If you can be sneaky then you can be unpredictable.
As to the beam path... the foil you're hitting is going to be very hot and is going to show up clearly. The target will know what it is... and they'll therefore know that at the other end of it is the laser. And by simply drawing a line between the foil and the target... you can figure out exactly where that laser is right now. Then you fire something back at it.
Optics equipment is exposed to light... so if you fired a powerful laser right at their laser... you could probably destroy it more easily than most things just because its guts have to be exposed to even emit the laser in the first place. Any sort of defect in the lens of their laser is going to force them to shut it down immediately or their laser will destroy itself. You just need to damage it a bit and it will shut off. Then you can fire a something at the likely large target that is a good deal nastier than a bit of foil.
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Hey! Anonymous coward here.
i'z just thinking about this. Anyone attempting to find that dude that knows how to find rocks that can make fire can tell you it's *been* about reputation ever since.
As a medium of exchange among humans it pays to remember that money is a unit of measurement capable of exchange into any measure of any unit, including the nominal measure of unscrupulous behavior. Think about the determination of just which hit-man to hire, should you think that that is the way your life should go. The reason this is never going to happen is because too many people are too busy and can’t be bothered by the inconvenience a prudent choice would require, so somebody else determines those decisional details, and anytime the agent leaves those details to us we say they aren’t doing their job. The truth is they aren’t doing our job. The reputation enough to have a reputation of determining who has the reputation of earning what their reputation is worth is already here. Has been and always will be here as long as technology is. The End.
I am a fan but not a super trekkie so I could have this wrong. But from my limited experience isn't this "star trek" economy limited to those within starfleet? I mean we could all have the "military" economy whenever we wanted right? We do away with democracy, submit to a rigid hierarchy, do whatever job we are told to do, and then receive free food, lodging and weapons.
Who's going to cut your grass?
There's actually an answer to that: someone like Boothby. He was a recurring character that showed up in both TNG and Voyager.