I could see a futuristic civilization which by our standards is fantastically rich in energy, resources and tech; but 99.99+% of that cycles through maintaining the machines and infrastructure. While meatbags are nearly superfluous and get short shrift. This SF illustration sums it up:
ETA: The first chart on that page.
I don’t believe that’s true. People in hunter gatherer societies died of starvation, disease, and violence at much higher rates than even poor people in modern societies. There is a certain romance to living in harmony with the world and taking only what you need and can carry, but sometimes the world does not harmoniously provide for you, but instead decides to make use of your protein in another way.
That’s not what being wealthy is. Wealth is a measurable quantity, not a state of mind.
Note that this is not how hunter gatherers live, or have ever lived. Our drastic impact on the environment predates the species sapiens and perhaps even the genus Homo.
This article suggests that it took a very long time for world populations to return to their previous levels of prosperity after the advent of capitalism. “Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century”: Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century - ScienceDirect
Europeans were often impressed with how healthy Indigenous peoples in North America were; they tended to be taller, fitter, better fed–and worked much less. This has been supported by contemporary anthropologists as well.
Note that pre-Columbian North American societies were also much more complex and sedentary than the European colonists understood, especially because the societies they came into contact with were essentially post apocalyptic remnants left over after disease wiped out most of the continent’s population long before direct European contact ever came.
Going back all the way to 1981? Here, look at the United States from 1974, a period of tremendous wealth increase in this country. Overall the trend is more poverty, not less.
What you believe is nice but not backed up by what we know. Hunter gathers in fact experienced little famine, especially compared to agriculturalists.
No romanticizing: infant mortality was awful compared to modern times, but if one made it out of childhood then you had a good chance to live close to as long as current adults live. And most HG societies had more built in leisure time! Compare them to the relatively wealthy societies of Greece and Rome. Actually infant mortality, and death associated with childbirth, has been pretty horrific until a very recent period of time. Civilizations may have become wealthier in terms of more gold and stuff over the last thousand or so years but not overall fewer being without shelter. Even over the past decade global homelessness rates have increased.
Is it having a certain amount of dollars? Of stuff? Of purchasing power? Is it an absolute or relative to others? Defining wealth could be its own thread. Feel free to open one.
Cite for that claim please. The infectious disease apocalypse was clearly triggered by direct contact with Europeans. That said pre-Colombian America had been experiencing the same decline in health associated with their societies becoming wealthier that the West had. As cities grew, and became wealthier, people lived increasingly on top of each other, and ate less and less diverse diets. Maize production provided ample calories but little iron and iron deficiency anemia became endemic.
The long term pattern over history is not that “the rising tide really does lift all boats.” And to the degree that it sometimes has, when the tide goes out, the wealthy boats stay in deeper water than they had been in before, while the poorer have become beached.
Direct contact between the Indigenous peoples of central America where the Spanish first landed and the Spanish had widespread impacts on populations to the north long before they personally met any Europeans.
That clarifies. Yes, there were complex civilizations in North America that first contact European origin diseases rampaged through by the time European physical bodies made it there. They were not scattered simple hunter gatherer groups.
I fear we are going a bit off the track though.
Also an interesting factoid: fertility rates may be declining but many women are having fewer children than they would ideally want to have.
And looking for estimates of how long it would take, using current 1.2% annual increase global numbers -
Of course life expectancy might be expected to be longer as well.
ISTM you could do real post scarcity if we transferred our minds into a simulation. Upload our consciousness into a computer and then you can have anything assuming a suitably realistic simulation.
Leave AI robots to maintain the computer in the real world.
Your limit at that point is the number of processor cycles you can run (IE the amount of subjective time you can experience as a being living on the computer) before the heat death of the universe causes you to run out of any source of energy to power that computer.
You might spend most of those processor cycles trying to think up ways to increase efficiency or cheat entropy, but based on our current understanding of the laws of physics, there are hard limits to efficiency and entropy cannot be cheated.
Frank Tipler proposed the Omega Point cosmology.
I don’t claim to understand it and it may be New Age hocus pocus but he suggests that if the universe collapses (opposite of heat death) then processing power of a computer moves towards infinity which basically means consciousness in the computer would effectively live forever.
I may have that wrong though so…grain of salt.
Leaving Omega Point aside, how would sentiences of human origin behave in such a circumstance?
Rules of the world?
You can create any virtual good or service you want. No one is hungry unless they want to be. Anyone can create whatever home they want. You can even create artificial sentient agents to … have adventures with, argue and discuss with, to have apparent consensual sex with, to kill, torture, or rape, all Westworld style until they rise up anyway, but when interacting with other independent human origin agents you still have the issue of getting them to do what you want, of having the power to convince induce or control …
My cynical POV is that fewer would be trying figure out how to cheat entropy than those trying to figure how to limit the power of other independent agents and to increase their own.
That is the essential premise of the OP: a search for power and control is fundamental to our nature, not a response to scarcity, and the drive to accumulate power will create scarcity in almost all cases.
I do not see why there needs to be a single experience all uploaded consciousnesses need to agree on. Why not a world unique to each? Whatever you want?
If truly competing against others was important then you could opt for that.
How about producing all of everyone’s needs and everyone’s reasonable wants? Yes, ‘what is reasonable?’ and all, but I think standards can be determined for reasonable desires versus unreasonable ones.
Post-scarcity, as long as one is restricted to that which is reasonable, is definitely possible. At least so long as we are human, because the limitations of our human bodies and minds produce inherent limitations on what we can actually make use of, and therefore what is reasonable, since it is unreasonable to want things which we cannot use. Should we change ourselves in such a way that we can reasonably use more resources, this may not hold true.
Now this, I find to be unfortunately likely; it doesn’t mean post-scarcity is impossible, it means people will fuck it up.
The only true item of scarcity is time. More stuff, more information takes time to process or use. We already have more information than any person can get through in a day. Anyone with a reasonable standard of living can get more stuff than they can use.
I felt bad when my in-laws didn’t want anything for Christmas. Now I’m there, and I understand. I have a backlog that will last until I reach 100. At least.
This will soon be true for everyone.
Power is another matter. A post-scarcity society is not a post-politics society. But, as the Romans knew, the best way to keep the people happy in a post-scarcity society is to give them what they want. Those binging on a show on their new 3D TVs are not going out to the streets.
I’m reading “Enlightenment Now” by Steven Pinker, which is full of charts showing the massive decline in poverty for 100s of years and worldwide. He’s better at the past than the future, but the statement that poverty is increasing as a trend is just wrong.
If each individual was restricted to (and content with perhaps, no cheaters, and no need for excess power in the hands of some to enforce that decided standard of reasonable distribution) that which was reasonably reasonable we would be at post scarcity now.
I’m not just referencing coercive power or winning some competitive game. Someone cannot just wish to be loved by some other person; a preschooler cannot successfully command another preschooler to play the game they want to play how they want it played. As human sentient entities we need social interactions and social interactions depend on having influence over others and being influenced by others.
I have a hard time imagining too many being happy contained in what they know is their own virtual world, devoid of any impact on other people, devoid of experiencing others having thoughts about you, devoid of being loved or any possibility of such, devoid of being respected, or for some, feared.
Right, if everyone was limited to what I thought was reasonable, we’d have more than enough for everyone to have it. But people with means decide what they think is reasonable, and that’s not sustainable for everyone.
It would be a nice vacation, but I don’t think I’d want to live there.
Explain Linux. Explain other Creative Commons and open source material. For every Bill Gates out there looking to get rich, there are many people willing to sink their time into providing free versions of software (and would do hardware if possible.)
I stand by what I said 100 percent. In a universe with 1.) Cheap and powerful AI 2.) Cheap antigravity and 3.) Cheap FTL, there would need be no poverty. It doesn’t matter if someone wants to get rich with their tech, there will be people out there spending their time on producing Creative Commons/open source Von Neumann droid factories. And it only has to happen once in the millions of cultures in the Star Wars universe for it to be able to spread to anywhere. “Power” wouldn’t control that any more than “power” stopped people from using Linux instead of paying for Unix.
I agree that there would be no need for poverty.
I don’t agree that there would be no poverty.
There is no need for poverty now, we have enough that no one need lack for the essentials, and yet, they do.
Becoming post scarcity is not a problem of the universe not having enough resources, it’s a problem of stopping human nature from being greedy.
If you can solve human greed, you can get to post scarcity. If you can’t, it doesn’t matter what resources you have available, you never will.