I don’t think you’ve thought this gold-plated sex droid thing through.
I like my gold-plated sex droids too.
What I didn’t say was that the whole rich/poor thing isn’t just that some people have more stuff than others, it’s also that some people like having power over others. And my point was that people will improvise ways of taking choices away from other people and treating them like shit.
Even in a society where everyone has all their basic needs met, someone will figure out a way of shitting on the people at the bottom. No society above the level of nomadic hunter-gatherers , anywhere, ever, has not had an underclass.
Hierarchy seems to be built in to human behaviour.
Having your basic needs met is not what makes a decent human life. The reason there’s so much misery at the bottom of the heap, even in rich countries where the poorest people are much better off than they would be in poor countries, is a lack of choices.
I know for a lot of people it’s a matter of faith that the poor are poor because they made bad choices (because they’re lazy or stupid or whatever) but I know from experience that when you are poor what you really lack are options and meaningful choices and a sense of control over your life.
That’s poverty, far more than simply not having nice stuff. Sure, that’s way better than starving or dying of exposure, but it still sucks and it still creates problems that will not go away until someone cleverer than me figures out a way of creating worthwhile lives, not just piles of shiny toys. Once we can figure out how to fabricate satisfying and worthwhile lives for everyone, then we’ll be post-scarcity. Until then, being poor will continue to suck.
That doesn’t actually seem to be the case, as far as the archaeological evidence goes. Both the Indus Valley civilization and early Anatolian towns show no evidence of that level of social hierarchy.
Even if that is true, you are just arguing about how big to make the asterisk below Shakester’s points. It looks like it is going to be pretty small.
Well yes, the gold plated does kind of imply a metal skin, which implies “ouch!” However, I HAVE thought about the sex droid issue at length, it’s kind of interesting technologically. Google bondagerotica: robobabes if you are interested, but of course, the illustrations are NSFW, and the topic is full of squick.
Come now, if the phenomenon were as widespread and intense as you seem to think it is, slavery would never have been outlawed, it would be too precious to the powerful in the world. I will grant you that there is a certain subset of people who glory in the misery of others, but I think they are in the minority among the powerful.
I think much more powerful and much more common among history’s elite has been indifference to the suffering of others. THIS has been the root cause of most of human misery, in combination with the active desire to inflict human misery on the poorer classes.
Frex, take Kim Kardassian. It was recently revealed that some of the people working in the factories that make Kardassian-brand products are pretty much slave labor. So of course the meme went out that Kim Kardassian uses slave labor, and of course, the Kardassians were shocked/horrified, etc. and so forth and would look into the matter and end the slavery if present.
Now, I don’t think the Kardassians give a crap about their slaves, I think they are supremely indifferent to them, leading their Kardassian high-priced media whore lives without a care for the kids in China, India, etc. I think the Kardassians would be perfectly indifferent to their slave laborers leading comfy, happy lives as well. The Kardassians just want what they want, and they don’t want to think about the laborers in the factories that produce the goods that are sold with their names plastered on them.
This is they way I think most of the elite feels, it is just not a concern of theirs. And they’d really rather not have all the social unrest that comes with really making the poor’s lives unbearable … so we will eventually have a post-scarcity transition. I think it’s very likely that there will be a painful transition, possibly involving millions of deaths, especially in Asia and Africa, but it’ll happen, thanks to indifference.
If people really do want to debate this seriously, can we get a real (non-academic speak) consensus on what post-scarcity really is? Some of the definitions are so generous that it sounds like it already exists in places. I am sure there are people starving in the U.S. somewhere but it isn’t because of lack of food availability. It would be because of mental issues or some other bizarre circumstances. Likewise for drinking water.
We don’t have to use the whole U.S. though. I live in Massachusetts which is a wealthy state and it has some version of socialized healthcare (RomneyCare). Everyone has food, water, clothing, and shelter of some sort unless they have underlying issues that can’t be fixed by nanobot technology and replicators. You could pick out lots of 1st world places that could say the same yet people aren’t flocking to them. Massachusetts has a lot going for it but it isn’t a utopia and would be losing population faster if it weren’t for foreign immigration. What am I missing? The fact that people have to work a whole bunch? That may be true but nobody has ever created a successful societal model where people just hang out and do something, something all day every day (bongos? drugs? random sex? what?).
This fictional society would be a nightmare within a generation. Why would anyone even go to school or learn how to do anything well even if it did work? Some people like going to school and learning new things in their free time. Most people don’t. They just stagnate into ever growing blobs which hints at a couple of problems we are already seeing in parts of the world where basic survival isn’t an issue anymore.
In some aspects, we do live in a post-scarcity world. A good percentage of the “new economy” is based on free/libre software written by people who don’t expect to be paid directly for their work. Google runs on Linux. The freely distributable Android OS is now the most popular telephone OS.
It is a fairly simple thing to configure a computer that uses no commercial software to create a product and sell it to customers. You’ll only pay for the computer hardware and access to the Internet - and it was only the lobbying of the telecom companies that killed free municipal wi-fi.
I think a reasonable definition for an individual is that, if they were to suddenly receive an extra X million dollars tomorrow, their lifestyle would not change appreciably, then they live a post-scarcity life. A post-scarcity economy would be one where an appreciably number of people in the economy live a post-scarcity life. I contend that there are parts of Silicon Valley where this is already the case.
Because we don’t really have “plenty of resources to produce more than enough food to feed everyone in the world today” in an exploitable sense. We’re fishing every sea we have and wiping out all fish stocks everywhere.
This is basic environmental biology. Resources are vast but finite. Populations explode to their level of environmental resistance. You’ll only be free of scarcity if something else is killing you off.
That is a whole different debate though. It is a completely different topic and one that can branch off in lots of directions which makes me think this is all weed speak. Please keep on topic. Random unfocused rants are the killer of idealists everywhere.
We do have enough capacity to feed the whole world now as long as it is managed correctly. Not everyone can have lobsters or shrimp for dinner every day but somehow I don’t think nanotechnology could ever fix that. We do have enough capacity to make enough fortified grains and proteins for the whole world. The U.S. alone sits on massive excess capacity of that. For the most naive ones out there, the answer to why there are people starving in the world isn’t because we can’t grow or produce enough food, it is a political and distribution distributional problem. Fix that in today’s world and then we can talk about gadgets and philosophical ideals.
Futurism is the astrology of idealists and has the same track record since the 1920’s.
Wait, what did I say?
-
This is basic environmental biology.
Oh, yeah, I actually studied this in school, there are classes. They are called Environmental Biology. I did not make this up. -
Resources are vast but finite.
Is it your contention that there is infinite water in the solar system? Because there’s not. -
Populations explode to their level of environmental resistance.
Environmental resistance is a fancy term for* everything that stops a population from growing infinitely.* I learned it in Environmental Biology. That could be disease, water shortage, predation, whatever. -
You’ll only be free of scarcity if something else is killing you off.
Human populations grow until we hit something, or we self-limit. There is no post-scarcity society, only societies that have a lot of room to grow following die-back or having pushed their environmental resistance out some through technological advancement. They will eventually hit the wall again. If you have ten times the resources you need, the population will grow to ten times its present size and boom, scarcity again. Very fast.
I don’t think it will happen without the extinction of human beings. Which I hope does not come to pass.
I don’t think that there will ever be an end to competition for resources, no. I think that’s a silly idea.
Though, it’s amazing how little effort we put into getting stuff that most species spend their entire lives getting, so we can play. I mean, of course, compared to other apes, or dolphins, for example. In that respect we are very close to post-scarcity, because we work together.
I apologize if I misunderstood you foolsguinea. I thought you saying that we have to whip that pesky all you can eat seafood on demand problem. We both agree that it can’t be done. My point is that there are enough raw calories in the world to keep everyone fed today but that isn’t as important as simplistic thinking would suggest. I thought we were disagreeing when it was just the opposite.
But content, well-fed populations reproduce less. A post-scarcity society would tend to self-limit.
This is the answer to the notion that no matter how many resources we have it will not be enough because population will expand past available resources. See Japan, various European countries, which are actually experiencing negative population growth.
“No X, anywhere, ever” is not a statement that admits to footnotes and exceptions, no? That needed correcting. And no, it does matter - even one exception proves that the “greed is inherent to humanity” argument is so much bullshit.