(i.e. all the good Manhattan real estate isn't already owned by someone else in the cyber-NYC).
Even living in a virtual reality there would be scarcity of virtual space when in a "consensus" mode. In a private universe, you could have the penthouse of the virtual Trump Tower all to yourself (so lonely), but in the virtual reality network that everyone agrees to share, there would still be some limitations, otherwise you'd have a tragedy of the commons as millions of people crowded their own skyscraper megapalace into the same space, and in order to escape the bad view, they have to recurse a to virtual virtual reality.:)
These virtual cities are only valuable because of the numbers of people there to communicate with (Metcalfe's Law). A city itself can easily be "copied" onto any piece of undeveloped virtual realestate, but without the people and network effects it's worthless... kind of like websites.
The signpost system is abused heavily by users, so that other areas of the world have the scenic views disrupted by billboards.
What, no virtualworld banner filters yet?
No way in hell I'd tolerate being advertised to in-game. It's bad enough seeing a goatse.cx image sprayed on some wall in CounterStrike, and that's FREE!:)
So why not just make the exploits a part of the game?
Because that's fucking stupid. If everyone was using a wallhack and aimbot then why bother? No, really, why bother? "My aimbot is 2 milliseconds faster and 5% twitchier! booyeah b1tches!"
That reduces a game to "press the button to win!" and there's no challenge - no immersion.
That would assume that EVERYWHERE on Earth would be lighted at night, and that will never be the case.
Never? You can't imagine a city-planet like Asimov's Trantor or Star Wars' Coruscant?
Earth's population is still growing exponentially, remember; and assuming a strange future without transhumanism (and virtual space), our bodies will continue to expand outward and upward, including arable land (once we can manufacture food), the poles, and the ocean. Even outer space wouldn't be much of an outlet given that the birthrate would be much higher than the emmigration rate for quite some time.
the marketing department releases material with spelling errors not infrequently.
not infrequently? Why the hell has that kind of confusing not-not-true language become so not uncommon lately? Almost makes you want to drive your not unexpensive certified pre-owned automobile off a cliff.
It's the people who go for the cheap and easy karma by pandering to the moderators. e.g. the people who post/.'d article text non-anonymously, or who preach to the choir just like a poll-driven political whore does.
If people were to be PAID for their posts, that kind of claptrap would get infinitely worse.
Some people may want a reward, but fortunately there are a lot of people who simply want to create and share their creations freely.
Even people who share freely do so for a reward -- but it's in the form of reputation instead of cold hard cash. Knowing you've made the world a better place, and gained some gratious fans in the process, is often more valuable than putting a few extra uneeded bucks into a personal back account.
However, this only works if you're a comparitively selfless person at heart, and don't have to worry about starving or becoming homeless anytime soon. At that point "whuffie" essentially takes the place of money, as it has with OSS devs and especially the scientific community.
I actually moved to Taipei in the early 90s because it reminded me so much of the image of LA in the movie Bladerunner.
And with awesome megastructures like the Taipei 101 you've got more than just the Bladerunner slums to fantasize about.:)
I might join you once they start building on a Sky City scale(!), since the US certainly doesn't have the balls to build something like that anymore; just look at what they're replacing the World Trade Center with.
Why is it, that when someone describes in layman terms some basic exothermic chemistry, they are public enemy number 1?
<condescending devil's advocate>
Because stupid people tend to be more violent than the educated, so making "dangerous information" easily accessible is like giving a child a matchbook?:)
</condescending devil's advocate>
National Security is a threat when taken too far, because security through obscurity breeds a false sense of security and a lot of resentment.
Now obviously keeping some secrets is a matter of national security - like not tipping your hand to potential enemies about advanced military capabilities - but trying to bury information about building bombs, or potato guns, or the locations of your state's water resevoirs, wouldn't be.
Ignorance is Strength ~= "National Security"
Freedom is Slavery ~= Removing civil liberties in the name of safety until you've got a police a state.
War is Peace ~= The "War On Terrorism" which is "a war that is not going to have any end for the foreseeable future."--G.W.Bush
I remember reading that genetic algs were used to optimize the 777 turbofan blades, and to teach a bipedal robot to walk in simulation (from a/. story a few weeks ago), to solving the traveling salesmen problem, or learning to play the best strategy in a game of blackjack. Fascinating stuff.
Here's to hoping that another patent landgrab doesn't occur when people get their "invention machines" in gear. A lot of genetic alg output is incomprehensible to a human,, much like how DNA still is (tho it didn't stop people from patenting "discovered" genes, and squatting on them (like the breast cancer gene)).
Actually, the two to three decades estimate is conservative given our observed exponential progress.
You're even more optimistic than the Star Trek writers. We will be lucky to have "replicators" in two or three millennia.
You have your replicator types mixed up. Star Trek "replicators" were very advanced energy->mass converters, whereas general purpose molecular manufacturing "assemblers" are much simpler by comparison, since all they do is physically put molecules together from the bottom up.
You might want to learn a bit about the history and principles of real science
I'm not pulling optimistic guestimates out of my ass. You might want to acquaint yourself with The Law of Accelerating Returns (more comprehensive than Gordon Moore's observation) if you want understand why two to three decades is actually a conservative estimate, and not so optimistic afterall.
Maybe your problem is that you're old enough to be bitter about not getting the impractical flying car and meal-in-a-pill that you were promised for The Year 2000 (echo... echo... echo...), while at the same time taking for granted all of the other amazing advances all around you.
I believe that we are moving into an era in which people pay for convenience, presentation, and out of general goodwill (e.g. shareware fees) rather than for the content itself.
And I believe that you're right - unless a global police state emerges (hey, you never know), copyright will remain effectively unenforcable. The content itself isn't scarce, but the resources to create certain NEW works IS, and therefore systems like The Street Performer Protocol will allow for them to be funded; a modern day "distributed patronage."
I also believe that just a little further down the road - only two to three decades further - "intellectual property" will become even more meaningless as we gain the ability to molecularly manufacture any object, including food. Nanotechnology will allow us to manipulate matter almost as easily and cheaply as digital bits - and when the necessities and many of the luxuries of life are THIS abundant, the incentive to be greedy for an idea monopoly dissapears (because you don't have to trade for much).
IMO, open source and the gift economy will eventually carry over into the Real World(tm), but the transition will be hell.
--
Re:I've read the article. Here's a summary.
on
Build-to-Order Cars?
·
· Score: 1
You can choose things like Ralph Lauren seats... Tommy Hilfiger seats too
Wow! I could actually pay extra for the opportunity to have my car seats branded with someone elses name? No thanks.
People who buy into these brandname "lifestyles" deserve to be fleeced.
It's rather simple: having power over the environment and other people increases your chances for survival, so over the course of millions of years, those who desired more power - however slight - tended to pass their genes & memes on. The desire to be the successful alpha-male/female is still with us.
The trick will be to have the assembler 'mine' it's raw materials from its environment
That should only be necessary when you're out of reach of some future "global molecular feedstock grid", otherwise a tragedy of the commons is waiting to happen if no accounting for matter is done. For example, nobody likes greenhouse gases, but CO2 depletion would be even worse. When total demand for feedstock increases, the elements should be 'mined' intelligently from various sources, then put in circulation. And perhaps this is also a "smart" grid/nervous system(/active shield) which has invisible capillaries that reach everywhere?
Biggest problem would be that the supply of real estate is limited.
Ah, yes, the four fundamentally scarce resources: time, space, energy, and intelligence (limited by the former three).
I don't think realestate will be much more of a rivalrous resource problem, as long as pre-abundance landlords don't squat too selfishly when the land could be put to better, more fair, use. e.g. Ted Turner now has 1.7 million acres of land all to himself and I'm not so sure society will be OK with such gross excess in the future, unless there's some kind of consensus that Ted is such a GREATLY respected person, and property rights are still so important, that his right to live there exclusively will be respected. "This land is my land, this land is your land", right?
Besides, there's still 70% of the Earth's surface area left to build on, and I for one would love to live on one of the thousands of artifical island communities in (and under) the Oceans. Engineering these moving and anchored megastructures wouldn't be nearly as impossible as it is today.
And of course there's also outer space, and, eventually, any environment you please in a virtual "matrix" space.
Once needs can be satisfied without an economy, why have one?
Because at that point money'd be just for keeping score?:)
If everyone can have everything they want based on raw resources, what stops people making more and more stuff.
You mean, what's to stop someone from hoarding an unfair share of molecular feedstock (like carbon), living space, or solar energy? Probably a new social contract which says that if you haven't earned enough respect (see: whuffie) then you aren't deserving of a greater than average share (which is more than enough anyway) of the resources collectively owned.
e.g. Great thinkers, designers, and artists who bring joy to millions of people might be deemed worthy of "wasting" an ungodly amount of carbon on a thousand-story diamond palace on prime beachfront property, whereas your average Joe would be content with a five-story porn palace floating in the middle of the ocean, in the clouds, or in orbit. Total assholes might have to make do with a climate controlled 20th century mansion in Antartica.
... ask me in 200 years. With the current rate progress
You need to update your rate of progress. The Law of Accelerating Returns puts this pre-Singularity nanotech well before the middle of this century.
Yeah, and there's no avoiding a nasty trainwreck at those crossroads; the train being the entrenched interests with all the inertia (mountains of cash and old IP cashflow), and the VW Van being the public who is being refused the legal right to easily stand on the shoulders of giants as they've done throughout history...
A future where ideas are owned in perpetuity is dystopian to all except a tiny minority....Such as in the short story Melancholy Elephants:
"My husband wrote a song for me, on the occasion of our fortieth wedding anniversary. It was our love in music, unique and special and intimate, the most beautiful melody I ever heard in my live. It made him so happy to have written it. Of his last ten compositions he had burned five for being derivative, and the others had all failed copyright clearance. But this was fresh, special?he joked that my love for him had inspired him. The next day he submitted it for clearance, and learned that it had been a popular air during his early childhood, and had already been unsuccessfully submitted fourteen times since its original registration. A week later he burned all his manuscripts and working tapes and killed himself."
...for the Apple trendwhores, right? Because nothing says style and performance like a purple neon card inside your computer. WTF?
I wonder what these casemodders are going to do for lifestyle status symbolism when personal computing devices finally shrink out of sight over the next decade? Paint their smartcards with glow-in-the-dark paint? Have the OLED display woven into the back of their shirt display the SETI@Home screensaver with a message like "345,000 work units complete, beeyatches!"?
Yeah, pondering the implications of nanotech for years can do that to you. Of course, it's easier for people like you to be pessimistic and overly cynical about the future because you didn't get the impractical flying car that was promised you for The Year 2000.
And, like anybody else, the creator of this work needs to eat.
Like anyone else, they've gotta eat.
Every time I hear someone say that I just stop to wonder how much the world will change in only a couple short decades once no one has to worry about slaving away at a dayjob just for the basics of life. When the necessities - and many of the luxuries - are no longer scarce, there will be a LOT less selfishness out there, and open source, in its many forms, will be the norm.
Molecular manufacturing is "just around the corner", and this ability to "grow" anything given energy (sunlight) + molecular feedstock, will be more liberating than even the information age.
When everyone's living like Kings, it'll be those who GIVE the most (instead of TAKE and HOARD) who will earn the real wealth/respect.
And as for the existing rent-seeking landlords who won't give an inch... well, the cities won't be the meccas they used to be, and 70% of the Earth's surface area is water - perfect for floating communities... and then there's outer space, and then finally innerspace. Now living space ain't so scarce anymore either.
Slashdot Mirror
Even living in a virtual reality there would be scarcity of virtual space when in a "consensus" mode. In a private universe, you could have the penthouse of the virtual Trump Tower all to yourself (so lonely), but in the virtual reality network that everyone agrees to share, there would still be some limitations, otherwise you'd have a tragedy of the commons as millions of people crowded their own skyscraper megapalace into the same space, and in order to escape the bad view, they have to recurse a to virtual virtual reality. :)
These virtual cities are only valuable because of the numbers of people there to communicate with (Metcalfe's Law). A city itself can easily be "copied" onto any piece of undeveloped virtual realestate, but without the people and network effects it's worthless ... kind of like websites.
--
What, no virtualworld banner filters yet?
No way in hell I'd tolerate being advertised to in-game. It's bad enough seeing a goatse.cx image sprayed on some wall in CounterStrike, and that's FREE! :)
--
Because that's fucking stupid. If everyone was using a wallhack and aimbot then why bother? No, really, why bother? "My aimbot is 2 milliseconds faster and 5% twitchier! booyeah b1tches!"
That reduces a game to "press the button to win!" and there's no challenge - no immersion.
--
Never? You can't imagine a city-planet like Asimov's Trantor or Star Wars' Coruscant?
Earth's population is still growing exponentially, remember; and assuming a strange future without transhumanism (and virtual space), our bodies will continue to expand outward and upward, including arable land (once we can manufacture food), the poles, and the ocean. Even outer space wouldn't be much of an outlet given that the birthrate would be much higher than the emmigration rate for quite some time.
--
--
--
If people were to be PAID for their posts, that kind of claptrap would get infinitely worse.
--
Even people who share freely do so for a reward -- but it's in the form of reputation instead of cold hard cash. Knowing you've made the world a better place, and gained some gratious fans in the process, is often more valuable than putting a few extra uneeded bucks into a personal back account.
However, this only works if you're a comparitively selfless person at heart, and don't have to worry about starving or becoming homeless anytime soon. At that point "whuffie" essentially takes the place of money, as it has with OSS devs and especially the scientific community.
--
And with awesome megastructures like the Taipei 101 you've got more than just the Bladerunner slums to fantasize about. :)
I might join you once they start building on a Sky City scale(!), since the US certainly doesn't have the balls to build something like that anymore; just look at what they're replacing the World Trade Center with.
--
Or in geekspeek: "The Constitution is a government blacklist, not a citizen whitelist".
--
<condescending devil's advocate>
Because stupid people tend to be more violent than the educated, so making "dangerous information" easily accessible is like giving a child a matchbook? :)
</condescending devil's advocate>
--
Now obviously keeping some secrets is a matter of national security - like not tipping your hand to potential enemies about advanced military capabilities - but trying to bury information about building bombs, or potato guns, or the locations of your state's water resevoirs, wouldn't be.
Ignorance is Strength ~= "National Security"
Freedom is Slavery ~= Removing civil liberties in the name of safety until you've got a police a state.
War is Peace ~= The "War On Terrorism" which is "a war that is not going to have any end for the foreseeable future."--G.W.Bush
--
Here's to hoping that another patent landgrab doesn't occur when people get their "invention machines" in gear. A lot of genetic alg output is incomprehensible to a human,, much like how DNA still is (tho it didn't stop people from patenting "discovered" genes, and squatting on them (like the breast cancer gene)).
--
Actually, the two to three decades estimate is conservative given our observed exponential progress.
You have your replicator types mixed up. Star Trek "replicators" were very advanced energy->mass converters, whereas general purpose molecular manufacturing "assemblers" are much simpler by comparison, since all they do is physically put molecules together from the bottom up.
I'm not pulling optimistic guestimates out of my ass. You might want to acquaint yourself with The Law of Accelerating Returns (more comprehensive than Gordon Moore's observation) if you want understand why two to three decades is actually a conservative estimate, and not so optimistic afterall.
Maybe your problem is that you're old enough to be bitter about not getting the impractical flying car and meal-in-a-pill that you were promised for The Year 2000 (echo... echo... echo...), while at the same time taking for granted all of the other amazing advances all around you.
--
And I believe that you're right - unless a global police state emerges (hey, you never know), copyright will remain effectively unenforcable. The content itself isn't scarce, but the resources to create certain NEW works IS, and therefore systems like The Street Performer Protocol will allow for them to be funded; a modern day "distributed patronage."
I also believe that just a little further down the road - only two to three decades further - "intellectual property" will become even more meaningless as we gain the ability to molecularly manufacture any object, including food. Nanotechnology will allow us to manipulate matter almost as easily and cheaply as digital bits - and when the necessities and many of the luxuries of life are THIS abundant, the incentive to be greedy for an idea monopoly dissapears (because you don't have to trade for much).
IMO, open source and the gift economy will eventually carry over into the Real World(tm), but the transition will be hell.
--
Wow! I could actually pay extra for the opportunity to have my car seats branded with someone elses name? No thanks.
People who buy into these brandname "lifestyles" deserve to be fleeced.
--
It's rather simple: having power over the environment and other people increases your chances for survival, so over the course of millions of years, those who desired more power - however slight - tended to pass their genes & memes on. The desire to be the successful alpha-male/female is still with us.
--
That should only be necessary when you're out of reach of some future "global molecular feedstock grid", otherwise a tragedy of the commons is waiting to happen if no accounting for matter is done. For example, nobody likes greenhouse gases, but CO2 depletion would be even worse. When total demand for feedstock increases, the elements should be 'mined' intelligently from various sources, then put in circulation. And perhaps this is also a "smart" grid/nervous system(/active shield) which has invisible capillaries that reach everywhere?
Biggest problem would be that the supply of real estate is limited.
Ah, yes, the four fundamentally scarce resources: time, space, energy, and intelligence (limited by the former three).
I don't think realestate will be much more of a rivalrous resource problem, as long as pre-abundance landlords don't squat too selfishly when the land could be put to better, more fair, use. e.g. Ted Turner now has 1.7 million acres of land all to himself and I'm not so sure society will be OK with such gross excess in the future, unless there's some kind of consensus that Ted is such a GREATLY respected person, and property rights are still so important, that his right to live there exclusively will be respected. "This land is my land, this land is your land", right?
Besides, there's still 70% of the Earth's surface area left to build on, and I for one would love to live on one of the thousands of artifical island communities in (and under) the Oceans. Engineering these moving and anchored megastructures wouldn't be nearly as impossible as it is today.
And of course there's also outer space, and, eventually, any environment you please in a virtual "matrix" space.
Once needs can be satisfied without an economy, why have one?
Because at that point money'd be just for keeping score? :)
--
You mean, what's to stop someone from hoarding an unfair share of molecular feedstock (like carbon), living space, or solar energy? Probably a new social contract which says that if you haven't earned enough respect (see: whuffie) then you aren't deserving of a greater than average share (which is more than enough anyway) of the resources collectively owned.
e.g. Great thinkers, designers, and artists who bring joy to millions of people might be deemed worthy of "wasting" an ungodly amount of carbon on a thousand-story diamond palace on prime beachfront property, whereas your average Joe would be content with a five-story porn palace floating in the middle of the ocean, in the clouds, or in orbit. Total assholes might have to make do with a climate controlled 20th century mansion in Antartica.
You need to update your rate of progress. The Law of Accelerating Returns puts this pre-Singularity nanotech well before the middle of this century.
--
Yeah, and there's no avoiding a nasty trainwreck at those crossroads; the train being the entrenched interests with all the inertia (mountains of cash and old IP cashflow), and the VW Van being the public who is being refused the legal right to easily stand on the shoulders of giants as they've done throughout history...
A future where ideas are owned in perpetuity is dystopian to all except a tiny minority. ...Such as in the short story Melancholy Elephants:
--
Anyway ... it's hard to top the anus for pure offense.
--
I wonder what these casemodders are going to do for lifestyle status symbolism when personal computing devices finally shrink out of sight over the next decade? Paint their smartcards with glow-in-the-dark paint? Have the OLED display woven into the back of their shirt display the SETI@Home screensaver with a message like "345,000 work units complete, beeyatches!"?
--
Yeah, pondering the implications of nanotech for years can do that to you. Of course, it's easier for people like you to be pessimistic and overly cynical about the future because you didn't get the impractical flying car that was promised you for The Year 2000.
--
Every time I hear someone say that I just stop to wonder how much the world will change in only a couple short decades once no one has to worry about slaving away at a dayjob just for the basics of life. When the necessities - and many of the luxuries - are no longer scarce, there will be a LOT less selfishness out there, and open source, in its many forms, will be the norm.
Molecular manufacturing is "just around the corner", and this ability to "grow" anything given energy (sunlight) + molecular feedstock, will be more liberating than even the information age.
When everyone's living like Kings, it'll be those who GIVE the most (instead of TAKE and HOARD) who will earn the real wealth/respect.
And as for the existing rent-seeking landlords who won't give an inch ... well, the cities won't be the meccas they used to be, and 70% of the Earth's surface area is water - perfect for floating communities... and then there's outer space, and then finally innerspace. Now living space ain't so scarce anymore either.
End of OT mini-rant.
--
I'll turn the corner when CG porn turns me on, and not a second sooner!
Current CG chicks leave me limp.
--