twirls moustache
Great post Der Trihs. I agree with your projections. The post capitalist society will be something like what Stephenson describes in The Diamond Age: fabricators in every household that can create whatever you wish.
As people in this future scenario are free from actually making stuff, I imagine the arts - particularly those involving live performance, like plays and sports - will become more and more important. The public will want to see people engaged in contests of strength and speed, or productions of human drama. Handmade objects will also be of great value. Entertaining ourselves will be the most popular occupation, next to servicing the fabricators of course.
I am uncertain about the underdeveloped (or insert whatever PC term is most appropriate here ______) world. I can’t see the kinds of technological revolution necessary for a post capitalist, post-scarcity economy to emerge there, at least as quickly as it would in the developed world. Would the populations in those countries be left further and further behind, as we in the West fabricate away? What would happen to the political structure in those places? Now that I think of it, what would happen to the political structure here, in the US?
There’s glory for you!
You know, substituting technological for political progress as the change agent, that is more or less the same as the individualistic-creative utopia that Oscar Wilde foretold in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (1891). His idea was, in essence, that socialism would make it possible for every person to live like an idle-rich gentleman amateur of his time. It’s a nice vision, possible or not.
Interestingly enough, the book I’m currently reading makes a good argument that the rise and fall of oil prices caused the 2008 recession, not subprime mortgages. He says the subprime bubble was a symptom of low inflation caused by low oil prices, and that the cause of the recession was triple digit oil prices.
Technologically, I expect that they’ll actually get a leg up. A fabber that can build most anything - including more fabbers - means you don’t need the same kind of infrastructure to go high tech. Their social/political problems won’t necessary go away though, and that’s really much of their problem; having shinier toys won’t do you much good if your neighbors or your government are trying to kill you.
I see the opposite problem occuring: having shiner toys does do you a lot of good if your neighbours or your government are trying to kill you (if they are sufficiently shiny, at least), but if your neighbours or your government are the ones with the shiny toys, you’re even more screwed than you were to start with.
The residue of capitalism is social unrest .Eventually a few, grasping all the wealth, results in a revolution. Then we can remake America into the government the founding fathers wanted.
By the way ,a few countries have had the people rise up and boot out their corporate overlords.
- Capitalism
- ???
- Profit
Thing is when everyone has shinier toys, you just have the same situation you used to, with more firepower.
BTW, to put this all in perspective – really long perspective – see the Kardashev Scale:
Of course, maybe we’ll never even get to Type I civilization, and why should we, if we can somehow manage to achieve universal abundance and leisure without using all of Earth’s available energy?
That’s what Marx predicted – but as a result of fully-developed capitalism, and he predicted the Revolution therefore would come first in the most advanced capitalist countries of his time, Germany and Britain and the U.S. So far, however, successful Marxist revolutions have happened only in backward, agrarian countries like Russia and China and Cuba. (East Germany was Communist only because the system was imposed by force of Soviet arms. There was a brief localized Communist revolution in Germany after WWI, but it was quickly put down.) Clearly, Marx was missing something.
Or, rather, sufficiently lethal.
Because Earth is small, cramped, crowded, and fragile. And an interstellar civilization that achieved no more than the equivalent of Type 1 would be impoverished.
Time.
I’d be willing to entertain the possibility that Marx was merely premature in expecting Revolution in his lifetime, and the events he predicted are simply things that have not come to pass yet – except that, in the decades since Marx’ death, so many things have changed about technology and industrial processes as to render his whole set of premises suspect.
Well, some have speculated that it is technically possible (whether it is sociopolitically possible is another question entirely) for Earth to support a population of up to 9 billion, and at the standard of living now enjoyed by the middle classes of the industrialized nations, and environmentally sustainably. See this article, discussed in this old GD thread.
Of course, I would agree with you this far: The only way to ensure the long-term survival of the human race – that is, to ensure that we can even outlive Earth’s biosphere, regardless of natural extinction-level events such as asteroid collisions or the Sun going nova – is for us to establish a permanent self-sustaining presence in outer space; and an “interstellar civilization” of Type I or higher is worth having for that reason alone.
It wasn’t just a subprime bubble, it was a general real estate/commercial real estate bubble, and it grew because of low rates but mainly because lending standards/securities ratings standards/various other forms of regulation were scrapped. Want to prevent a housing bubble? Mandate 20% down only mortgages, scrap Option ARM, no document mortgages, subprime etc. The bubble was fed by a huge wave of capital, a lot of it coming from Asia, some from the Arabian Gulf. If we’d had high oil prices in the 1990s/early 2000s then that huge wave of capital would have been less Asian/more Arabian, but it’d still have been exactly the same amount looking to be invested.
A bipedal robot could replace much of human labor though. Current robotics are good at replacing human labor on assembly lines, but to my knowledge they cannot perform many service sector jobs. A bipedal robot would improve productivity since they could perform a wide range of service and manufacturing labor.
Just in fiber optics alone we have gone from copper twisted pair to a single fiber optic to cables carrying 48 fibers. Probably more since I left. We literally could not keep test equipment more then a year before we had to upgrade everything. It was baffling to me to watch technology change by the day that used to be good for a decade or more. I may have noticed it more because I was in the middle of it. I watched analog go to digital.
Still without natural resources to power all this technology we can only go so far.