It has definitely improved. But I think it also speaks to how the idea of a “utopia” is relative and largely unobtainable. While Hoboken, Jersey City and other towns in the area have gentrified and become much nicer places to live, many people bemoan the loss of the “small town neighborhood feel” as older buildings are replaced by glass and concrete. Meanwhile, across the water in Manhattan, the Empire State Building is obscured by the massive glass towers of Hudson Yards. Which basically looks like someplace an army of immoral cyborgs would live in some scify film.
Still a nice place to live if you can afford to live there.
My sense is that these battles aren’t any “cleaner” if you are on the ground. They are just spread out over a much larger battlefield over a longer period of time. Instead of 5000 soldiers killing each other in a decisive afternoon of warfare, it’s a slow trickle of targets randomly selected and destroyed by remote systems over years. Often indefinitely.
Sci Fi is always about the present. They are saying if we don’t stop doing this or if we don’t start doing that then something horrible would happen. They are like warnings, if we don’t stop totalitarianism then 1984 could happen, or if we don’t stop drugs Brave New World could happen, etc.
Architecture is fashion. Nothing more, nothing less. It’s fashion which lasts decades, centuries, or millennia, but it’s still just fashion. A change in style, therefore, isn’t a permanent shift.
Oh, by all means tell us how much better it was to have “free-range artisanal” warfare where people beat each other to death with maces, or died of cholera while their friends were screaming through a limb amputation.
The Demographic Transition happened, increases in productivity no longer lead to increases in family size, and post-industrial countries tend to be below replacement. Malthusians are permitted to cry now.
No. See above: Shrinking populations tend to mean a vast increase in living conditions, and have since the Industrial Revolution.
This is, really, beneath contempt as an idea, and proof you have very little knowledge of life beyond whatever two screens you’re using. I’m sure you wouldn’t be able to put the increase in the standard of living together with increased farm productivity, but… for my sake, please try. This conversation will become so much less tiresome.
Derleth - Your post is weirdly hostile, but I will attempt to address your points anyway.
I am talking about the perception that the future will be worse, not the reality.
I’m not sure what your point is. Yes, architecture is “fashion” that defines how and where people live and work. If the fashion in the future is everyone wearing identical grey jump suits, most people would think that is “worse”. And that is usually used in science fiction to indicate that people live in some sort of totalitarian society.
Similarly, there is a lot of criticism that modern skyscrapers consisting of a massive steel and concrete frame and four glass curtain walls are “sterile”, “boring” and “dehumanizing”. At least compared to older, more decorative art deco structures like the Chrysler Building.
The reality is that these modern buildings can be taller, more efficient and make better use of interior space than their older counterparts. And many architects are choosing to build in a more varied style (like the “Jenga” building in New York).
Again, the romanticized view is that older forms of historical combat tends to produce extreme athleticism, bravery and individual heroism. At least when compared to being a grainy image on some monitor in a combat control center in Nevada.
But the fact is the overall population has almost doubled in 40 years and continues to grow. I don’t think anyone is saying how great it will be when we have twice as many people in another 40 years.
Tell that to Detroit.
Maybe you would be right if the population shrinks over time naturally. Or many years after whatever caused it to shrink suddenly. But if the population of the world dropped precipitously, something truly terrible would have had to have caused that. World War II, for all its destruction, killed about 2-3% of the population at the time.
Again, I’m not sure why you are being a jerk. But if the conversation is so “tiresome” for you, then leave it.
Societies that have become “soft”, “stupid” or otherwise suffer from some form of ennui or purposelessness because robots or whatever take care of most of their needs are a common trope in science fiction.
In the real world, I don’t hear a lot of people outside of Silicon Valley expressing a lot of enthusiasm or optimism for how AI is going to eliminate or “transform” jobs.
I don’t think he’s trying to say that modern warfare is worse than it used to be, only that while it used to be personal- that guy with a mace had to get up close enough to smell the other guy’s breath in order to fight him, now it’s impersonal, wholesale, and random, as well as more destructive. Which is dystopian for sure.
I mean, a medieval chevauchee/cabalgada was destructive, but the troops had to literally ride between the towns and villages and physically destroy, steal and set stuff on fire. Now, we could conceivably do the same level of damage, or more with a single submarine parked hundreds of miles offshore, in a matter of minutes, by launching conventionally armed cruise missiles at the towns and villages.
One thing that always puzzles me about what you are getting at is how sci-fi writers or the writers of shows can’t seem to extrapolate how vast the resources really are once you can actually get into space and start using them in any sort of systemic way. I can’t tell you how often I’ve rolled my eyes when a story is talking about a space civilization able to move between the stars having a bunch of poor, starving or miserable people living back on Earth, say, or in dreary space habitats scrounging for water and air. You don’t even have to go to another solar system to have basically enough materials to support, literally, trillions of humans right here in this solar system and at levels that dwarf even the highest levels of the current first world citizens. Yet it’s always this dreary, dystopian dog eat dog system with corporations on top and everyone else beat down and crushed under the corporate heel.
That just doesn’t seem a likely trajectory for me, assuming you have the tech to get into space in a big way and can actually use the resources out there. The reality is that, if we ever do get to that point, our population will probably be fairly stable and probably even shrinking to some degree, and most people will already be better off than the folks portrayed in those books or movies. Hell, we are already doing this and we haven’t gotten, yet, to the point we can even start exploiting the vast resources out there.
This isn’t to say that it will all be flowers and beer, there are going to be some real dangers, and lots of folks will almost certainly die. But they won’t die because the corporations are grinding them under their boot to extract the last ounce of work from them, it will be because space is dangerous. But the whole reason to go out there is to tap the basically unlimited resources that are out there, and if you can do that you could, basically, have enough to give every living human a lifestyle we’d envy today just like our ancestors would envy the one we are living today.
Exactly. I recall a video circulating about a year ago warning about the dangers of autonomous killer robots. Basically it was this salesy guy giving some sort of TED talk about these new baseball sized drones that can be dumped from a cargo plan and program to individually blast a hole in some person’s head. For some reason, there is just something more off-putting about ten thousand robots individually hunting people than if the same aircraft was just indiscriminately dumping napalm over the same city.
Mathematically speaking, the current trend for capitalism is to concentrate all wealth - all privately owned land and capital equipment and IP and everything else that can be owned - into the hands of a small number of people. 100 or less, though the limit seems to be just 1 person.
I’m not claiming that capitalism is designed to do this by any human actor, just that this is apparently what the system trends to as a final state.
Corporations, long term, only will compensate workers exactly as much as it takes for the workers to reproduce themselves at about replacement.
I’m not saying this is our future, just that sci-fi authors were drawing on an obvious trend when they wrote their stories. Right now this is my vision of our “most probable” midfuture. I see automation allowing for fantastic levels of production with almost no human labor, levels never seen before. I think within my lifetime, economic output of automatable goods and services - meaning most any manufactured product, many forms of services such as driving and cooking and cleaning and even laboratory technician work - will increase 100x or more worldwide.
But our current economic policies will have absolutely none of the out of work populace receiving any of these vast and almost free goods and services - maybe some limited time food stamps so they don’t starve, a few bucks for medicaid for poor mothers - while a small number of people will become trillionaires.
That is, people who are already billionaires today would be incredibly enriched by automation, as they could fire vast numbers of human workers and produce even more products for less cost - giving them even more money they will never live long enough to spend.
Of course. You’re talking fiction. Everything going well, everybody happy & productive doesn’t make for much of a story. Nobody’ll buy boring books like that. So writers don’t write 'em.
You are kidding, right? Could you show your math? Because, from what it looks like today, the last 20 years have been the greatest in human history with respect to people moving from the lowest levels of poverty upward. Today, far far fewer people are at the very bottom of the poverty scale. Also, the number of rich people (as well as the number of folks in the top 4 wealth levels) has risen…dramatically. This seems to negate your assertion that wealth is in fewer and fewer hands (I assume you got this from Marx…and, sadly, not Groucho).
It’s attitudes like yours that that seem to permeate the sci-fi genre, and it makes no sense as it isn’t based on the actual historical trends we are seeing or being able to even minimally extrapolate what has been happening (actually happening as opposed to what folks obviously seem to think is happening) wrt population growth as well as standards of living from today wrt standards of living (if we even still think in terms of poor and rich) to a time when we will, literally, have unlimited resources available.
And you don’t think that the reality will be that humans a few centuries from now will actually have access to goods and services that the billionaires today could and would only envy? I mean, the richest people from 2 centuries ago would kill for the things that most people in this thread take for granted. All their money couldn’t buy them any of it.
Assuming we don’t destroy ourselves in the next, oh, say century or so, and assuming we do actually figure out ways to get into space and exploit the vast resources of our solar system, I think that the trend we are and have been seeing will accelerate. I foresee a time when the bar has been raised to the point where ‘poor’ is considered what the middle class is today and our species (or the ones stemming from us) is on the road to becoming for all intents and purposes immortal. We don’t even ever really need to leave this solar system to basically do all of this.
Don’t get me wrong, I love shows like the Expanse or books like the Arc Royal series, but I have to roll my eyes when they show so many poor people, ground down under a corporate heel and living in squalor when they have access to the sorts of resources just being able to move around in this solar system implies. It’s so silly and it basically ignores the actual data of what’s happening in our collective society world wide for decades now. We might kill ourselves collectively before we actually manage to get out in a big way and really start exploiting the solar system for resources…and that would be a worse future, for sure…but assuming we don’t, the future will be unreal and if we could go to see we’d be blown away.
Often that’s because the values of the writer and therefore what the writer considers “good” is things we consider “bad”; other times, because the baseline they’re starting from is so low that the higher point they were aiming for has already been surpassed.
For someone writing from the 19th century, everybody having good doctors one hour away is a utopia. For me, running the insurance maze for payment is a dystopia. For a libertarian, that UHC I’m used to and love is government robbery.
Problems make for conflict which makes for challenge/stakes/drama. If every problem is solved in the future, that might make for a great life but a boring thing to watch. As far as I can tell, the only videos I really get into where everything goes right is kittens/puppies playing and porn.
Science-fiction can be a way of magnifying a present problem or future potential problem up to a microcosm and examine it. For example, Frankenstein, Westword and Jurassic Park made monsters out of industrial/robotic/genetic advancements of their time to metaphorically illustrate their pitfalls. That doesn’t mean they were against those advancements as a whole.
Is that the video where the drones are used to take out individual college students who had been speaking out against something, and using facial recognition to recognize them and then execute them, while leaving the rest untouched?
There’s an entire new genre of science fiction – Solarpunk – which postulates we can solve our problems. The movie Tomorrowland – which was unjustly panned – had the same concept.
The math is official IRS data. Google productivity wage gap. Globally, yes, things have gotten better, but they are getting worse in the United States. Denying a problem even exists is a standard conservative smokescreen.
I mean for instance we can disagree on the right policy to handle climate change or lack of any wage growth in real dollars for all but the top few percent. But denial is corrosive and stupid.
No, it’s not. Googling productivity wage gap doesn’t make your assertion correct as it’s a completely different assertion. So, no…don’t need to do that. And no, it’s not a ‘conservative smokescreen’…I’d got with ‘left wing ignorance and deflection’, if it wasn’t for the fact that both conservatives AND liberals (and most everyone else in-between) seem incapable of getting this.
Yes, we can disagree on policies…but it’s ignorance such as yours and the ignorance on this especially from the conservative media that makes the world out to be going to hell in a hand cart, that everything is worse and getting worse all the time, blah blah blah…it’s fucking wrong. And this is ignorance that seemingly can’t be fought, as it’s firmly entrenched in the collective mindset, regardless of which political strip folks are. So, it’s no wonder that sci-fi authors and those who produce TV or movies constantly get it wrong and paint these stupid dystopian futures. Here, this is from the notorious conservative smokescreen Ted Talks (YouTube video).
And let me just say…:smack: I thought I was in a different thread than this one. So…um, that video and the comments really are a complete disconnect from what you were saying, which actually DOES relate to the wage gap, even if I think you are still wrong. My apologies though if my reply was, er, confusing. I really thought I was in the sci-fi dystopia thread and didn’t realize it was this one, or that you were replying to me about something different.
As to the wage gap, I think it’s more complicated than you are making it out to be. You can’t just google wage gap in the US to prove your assertion that capital is concentrating in fewer and fewer hands. For one thing, over what time frame are you talking? Some cherry picked one or historically in the US? It’s trivially easy to show that wealth has been ore concentrated in the past, so I assume it’s over some cherry picked time frame. But even then, it doesn’t tell the whole story, as wages have only stagnated in some work categories, not all. Some have gone up a lot in the same time period. Some have shrunk because, basically, those jobs have been automated or outsourced/offshored. Some didn’t even exist in the past…and some that did, effectively don’t today. Many have been replaced with expert systems that enable people with lower skill levels to do jobs that once took highly skilled workers…or workers willing to do much harder, menial labor for longer hours. So, productivity has increased in some areas while wages have dropped because it’s the tools that have increased the productivity, not the workers, meaning skilled workers can be interchanged with less skilled or less experienced workers who can produce more with fewer workers and less skills.
Anyway, sorry about the confusion in my previous post.
XT the specific claim is that since the late 1960s, the median productivity has risen while the median wage has not. IRS data source plus it’s a graph. There is no more disputing this is happening than you can dispute a graph of global temperature vs time.
