11 ms·

Neither Star Wars or Star trek go into very much depth of how their societies actually work. Star Trek doesn't tell us how their economy is managed or their int

Neither Star Wars or Star trek go into very much depth of how their societies actually work. Star Trek doesn't tell us how their economy is managed or their internal politics. Sure they have replicators, but their are still things that need to be done by people, and resources that can't be replicated. Star Wars says it's capitalist, but I don't believe it. In many of the scenes you see people doing jobs that could easily be done by droids. Even their wars are fought with droids - or manufactured humans that are treated like droids. Droids are generally intelligent and can basically do any job people can do. Why do they need people at all? Star trek has that problem too. How often do the characters ask the computer to do pretty complex tasks? Why do they need a crew of hundreds, when almost everything is automated? All science fiction paints a 20th century society with a pretty futuristic backdrop and props. But things like AI and replicators would radically change the way things work. And create a society very different than what we know. Quite possibly one without humans. What would really happen if any lunatic could replicate parts for WMDs? Or if robots that were really smarter than humans appeared?

teilo 10y ago
>Star Trek doesn't tell us how their economy is managed or their internal politics. True, but there is this much: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H5uPyU2oKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H5uPyU2oKE Other references: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Money http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Money
- jaggednad 10y ago
  Also, there's this in in episode 26 of Season 1 of the Next Generation, in which a group of people who were frozen and kept alive in the 20th century are found and unthawed on the Enterprise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQQYbKT_rMg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQQYbKT_rMg
3pt14159 10y ago
What do more advanced societies generally do with less advanced societies that they don't need something from? They leave them alone and maybe come to visit once in a while. What does a sentient replicator robot care if a little boy just wants to whittle a bowl out of a piece of wood? It's kinda neat, and stories are interesting and the minds of the future will presumably have solve the security problem, or at least as much as MAD solves it, and the scarcity problem, at least as much as scarcity is a problem for most people. After that there is just discovery, enjoyment, merriment, world building, love. What do we do with our abundance of CPU cycles? We watch cat videos and text our friends. I kinda view it the same way if we can survive the next 100 years or so where things are little unstable.
- aaron-lebo 10y ago
  Do they? The history colonization of says otherwise, and even in the best case scenarios where outright colonization didn't take place, less advanced societies are slowly eradicated because they can't compete. If robots became advanced enough, why would they (or at least some of them) not see humans as animals to be used or disposed of?
  - bdamm 10y ago
    Depends - if the robots can replicate without the same environment as people, then other environments might be better suited to the robotic colony. However, that's treating robots or AI like we would people. Robots aren't people, nor are AIs. They are likely to take forms we cannot comprehend, and likely to change us in ways we cannot comprehend, at first. I'd argue that it is already happening. At the moment we're farming AI, but it might not be long until AI is farming us.
  - 3pt14159 10y ago
    Colonization largely ended when international relations stopped being a zero sum game. The US could invade Chile for copper, but it's better for both if they don't. I'm more intelligent than an average person on the planet, but I still want to help get all of them water, food, and safety. I want them to learn and grow and have meaningful lives. I even want animals like dolphins and elephants to have free and rich lives. I highly doubt that sentient machines are going to view us like bugs on a windshield. If I'm worried about anything it's the opposite. They care so much for us that they stop us from procreating to end (what they think is) needless suffering.
    - brennen 10y ago
      > Colonization largely ended This is not observably true.
    - Houshalter 10y ago
      My point was just that such a society would be much weirder than depicted in star wars or star trek. Whether the robots kill us all or become our nannies, it will be a lot different than 20th century Earth + spaceships. All science fiction operates under the assumption that humans are still useful in the future. Humans are just the first intelligence to evolve. I doubt we are anywhere near the peak of what is possible. Personally I don't believe that a good outcome is terribly likely. Humans care about animals and other humans because we evolved to have empathy. We have no idea how to program empathy into a machine. Most likely the first AIs will just have simple motivational systems. Like trying to maximize their reward signal, or achieve simple goals set by their programmer. They would be totally indifferent to humans. They wouldn't set out to kill us, but if we got in their way, they'd have no problem with it.
atrus 10y ago
As I've actually never seen Star Trek, I may be wrong on some details, but there was a fan theory that all the crew were future LARPers. They weren't actually agents of the Federation, only pretending to be so. So, why have to robots do all the work for then, that would take out all the fun! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7237395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7237395
- kobeya 10y ago
  That's certainly not the canonical explanation.
- mikeash 10y ago
  I don't think that theory is at all supported by the material. It is, however, more or less the canonical explanation for human crews on Culture ships in Iain Banks's works. The ships are fully capable of doing everything themselves, but most of them have human crew because the humans have fun participating and the ships like the company.
pavel_lishin 10y ago
Droids seem to largely hold the same position in Star Wars that slaves did, except nobody seems to be worried about a Droid rebellion - and in slave-owning societies, many jobs were done by free citizens for pay. And as far as Star Trek and AI, it's a weird problem that doesn't make any sense. It seems that you can't program your VCR without spawning a self-aware AI entity - Wesley Crusher accidentally creates one while doing a homework assignment, and the Enterprise (D) computer spawns one after someone casually requests a harder Holodeck challenge. And yet, Data and Lore are rarities, the possibilities of the EMH are completely unexplored and EMHs are, in fact, treated as Roombas instead of potentially sapient citizens.
- devoply 10y ago
  Wasn't there like a whole bunch of EMH's running a whole ship or something. They are sentient. Star Trek makes no sense whatsoever in that the holodeck is so real you can fall in love in the holodeck. So why does anyone need to go anywhere. You can stay wherever you want, safely, and be wherever you want to be and explore whatever robots or holograms running around in ships have explored. Most of the adventure, if that's what this is about, is carried out by the executives at great risk to themselves. It seems that there is a huge crew of peons who just make the ship run. And also the ship blows up all the time like no one's business. From a realistic point of view the Star Trek universe seems insane.
  - Namrog84 10y ago
    I believe the holodeck was always fully reserved and that not dislike alcohol, most people attempted moderation. But there are several episodes that people become addicted to the holodeck
    - tnecniv 10y ago
      Well it's implied that holodeck time is inherently limited. Not everyone has one. The Enterprise (D) only had a handful for over 1,000 people. On DS9, you had to rent them at Quarks. This brings up another point that is never addressed. Quark runs a casino / bar / futuristic (adult) movie theater expressly for profit. It's also implied that Star Fleet members don't get paid because they are members of the federation. Yet these same officers are often seen frequenting Quark's place. Where did they get the latinum (money)?
justin66 10y ago
Star Trek, particularly the television shows, very clearly describes a command economy with elected leadership. I'm not sure how much explication you'd want in that regard. Star Wars, I'm not so sure. It seems to me that they spent a lot of time on that stuff and I just probably missed it, but in my defense, the films that focused on it were the most boring in the series.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Star Trek, particularly the television shows, very clearly describes a command economy with elected leadership. The idea that Star Trek "very clearly" describes anything about the economy of the Federation (or even that what it does show of that economy is remotely consistent) is somewhat amusing. Most of the civilian economy it shows clearly is outside of the Federation (and mostly varieties of regulated market economies), and most of what it shows of the Federation is focussed on a quasi-military service, not the civilian economy. I'd say the strongest indication is that the Federation civilian economy is largely a gift and informal, non-money-mediated barter/market economy where there scarce items are personal services more than material goods.
- sandworm101 10y ago
  That depends. Much of "the government" of trek seems to be handled by the military or at least military leaders. That is no doubt a product of the need to involve the known characters, but we do see little to nothing of elected officials. Some characters (spock) bounce seemlessly between military and what we would today call civilian jobs (ambassadors). The military and its meritocracy, as oppossed to civilian democracy, is at the heart of trek government. That is probably a statement about US cold war politics, but i think matters today given the new cabinate being enshrined today.
  - angli 10y ago
    Deep Space 9 has an arc where a Starfleet officer attempts to launch a coup against the (elected) President of the Federation - we do see an elected leader there, but you're right that it isn't spelled out in much detail.
kobeya 10y ago
Not all science-fiction, there is some good hard sci-fi that takes into account such concerns.
aluhut 10y ago
I guess you would have to be able to afford a droid or machine of any kind. It seems like life on Curuscant is very different from life on Tatooine.
st3v3r 10y ago
Droids are expensive, and people aren't?
metaphorm 10y ago
Star Wars seems to have many different economies operating across the galaxy, and they interact in various ways. The Empire, for example, is known to have have made extensive use of slave labor (by non-humans mostly, such as Wookies). It also seems to make use of droids and clones for dangerous tasks (military work, natural resource extraction, etc.). Outer Rim worlds seem to have a kind of anarcho-capitalist economy that is equal parts libertarian paradise (no regulations, no taxes) and organized crime syndicate plutocracy (The Hutt syndicates in particular are widespread and powerful). Core worlds seem to be more like nation states, with each world governing itself and its economy according to local values. Alderaan (RIP) seems to have been a liberal parliamentary democracy. Coruscant (seat of the Empire) is a planet scale conurbation with a first world developed economy on the upper levels and a third world underdeveloped economy on the lower levels.
kj01a 10y ago
>Why do they need a crew of hundreds, when almost everything is automated? I believe they do state in TNG that the galaxy class ship could doing everything on its own, and the crew was just there because of their love of discovery and what not.
- tnecniv 10y ago
  Most of the passengers are families of the crew! Even within the crew, a significant (perhaps even a majority?) are science officers doing research.
makerofthings 10y ago
This https://medium.com/@RickWebb/the-economics-of-star-trek-29bab88d50#.yddq4nb8n https://medium.com/@RickWebb/the-economics-of-star-trek-29ba... is a great read on the economics of Star Trek.
fsloth 10y ago
Since the topic is fiction - to me the best description of human condition in a post scarcity society is found in Iain Banks' Culture series where artificial minds form the ruling political cliques and manage most practical things. And succeeds in keeping things psychologically believable for the main human characters through several very entertainining books. People are kept along mostly because it's thought proper to give people the opportunity for self expression. I.e. careers are chosen out of internal needs or for the percieved prestige the activity entails, not out any material need as everything up to a point is available (the financial limits of an individual are never explicitly described though). Or - as several characters do - just becausw something is considered hard and dangerous and they want to push themselves. Despite the inane ramblings about homo economicus one encounters now and again, this latter instinct is actually a quite strong driving force in dictating human action(not everyones of course). One of the biggest non-antagonist rude actions in the series is when an AI underlies the pointlesness of human effort by performing a complex feat in front of the character that she has chosen as her life task - which everyone considers extremely rude. There are spaceships and explosions but to me the psychologically believable description of near human characters in a post scarcity society is the most interesting facet of his work.
- ep103 10y ago
  I love Ian's Culture series. He clearly had a good mind and knowledgeable experiences with technology, in order to write about it so capably. And just as interesting, he clearly had a solid, hands on understand of the liberal end of the spectrum of political thought, from liberal-capitalist straight through to the various forms of anarchism. His books clearly played with those concepts in the environment of a post-scarcity society. I read through the series once back in high school and found them fun. Fast forward 15-20 years, and I have a career in tech, and dabbled in leftist politics for a while. I came back to read one of them, and ended up re-reading the whole series. I found that he had already thought about and written down questions and answers to many of the things I'd experienced. Just put into a fictional, usually pretty fun world. Those most interesting parts of his stories were the backdrop. Great reads, not mentioned enough.
imglorp 10y ago
Replicators run by unlimited free or cheap energy means the end of a material economy. Any good can be created for you. It also means you don't need to ship those things around so most cargo operations we have now are pointless. As you point out, AI will supplant most services. Assuming you can replicate AI's... then nobody needs money for anything.
- felipemnoa 10y ago
  People still need to keep themselves entertained which I believe is the main purpose of a job. We even see it now, people that retire can become quite depressed and quickly try to find some kind of partial job where they can feel useful. So in a post scarcity civilization the main reason people will still work is so that they do not blow their brains out. The difference this time is that we will work on what we like, or on our calling. Now that I think about it, jobs themselves may be the scarce thing. i.e. Not everybody will be able to work on designing the next space station and hence there will be fierce competition to get these jobs.
  - imglorp 10y ago
    Right. Then, per Roddenberry, we're free to flit about the galaxy, help others, engage in the arts or sciences. The way things are funded now, if there's no ROI that's all hard to do.
- DefaultUserHN 10y ago
  This situation would never happen though. As soon as Replicators are created, the rich will take full control of the Replicators, and the poor will never be allowed to have them. And with the Replicators, the rich will, again, rule the poor.
captn3m0 10y ago
I'm reading "How to write Science Fiction and Fantasy" by Orsom Scott Card, and he mentions how Star Trek is not good SF by any stretch. The world building is absurd, and high ranking officials regularly do missions and adventures that seem absurd. While it works for Star Trek, it won't fly in any stand-alone SF work today. However, that is what happens with most TV-first SF shows, Doctor Who being another example.
- brennen 10y ago
  It's hard to generalize here. ST, in its various incarnations, is fundamentally an anthology and (as things progress) a collection of character studies. It's routinely absurd, but plenty of individual episodes are certainly good SF.
psadri 10y ago
Whenever strong AI vs humans comes up I'd like to point to the relationship of monkeys vs humans. Humans are to monkeys what strong AI is to humans. Monkeys are probably mostly happy (as long as we are not bothering them) going about their monkey business. So maybe eventually humans will also be happy despite the existence of strong AI. Maybe some humans would be unhappy to know they are no longer at the apex of intelligence and maybe that will make us unable to be happy. Always knowing that no matter what we do, it can always be outdone by a smarter than us AI. I suspect these people are the same people who worry about strong AI in the first place :-) However, we already know with pretty high confidence that there are aliens out there that are more advanced/smarter than us -- and their existance does not affect our day to day happiness. So maybe the question is only relevant locally on earth.
iaw 10y ago
You're completely right. Gene Roddenberry created a quasi-utopian future, I don't think he created Star Trek with the aim of answering the questions about how we maintain our society through the coming technological advances. I think Gene's goal was to paint a picture of what his vision of a perfect human society would look like from a purely social perspective.
carlosdp 10y ago
Gene Roddenberry's "Andromeda" tackled this pretty well I think. The warship can be operated pretty much entirely by the on-board sentient AI, and it is because it has a skeleton crew of like 6 for most of the series. Because the AI is sentient, every commonwealth ship has a personality, the ship itself is a person. It also has storylines that explain why AIs don't literally run everything: there was a large lash back against the proliferation of AI after the fall of the government, to the point that there are planets that completely ban their existence and destroy on sight.
squarefoot 10y ago
"Star Trek doesn't tell us how their economy is managed or their internal politics. Sure they have replicators, but their are still things that need to be done by people, and resources that can't be replicated." They probably assume that resources are so widely available (unexplored planets etc) that one doesn't need to live anymore like us to afford basic needs such as food, shelter, medical care, and education. What is very different from our society is we often need to live near big populated cities to get a job that allows us to pay the above. In the ST world they take it almost for granted: you can settle a small colony on a distant planet and still fulfill at least basic needs for everyone with no need for a medium like money. So where's the convenience? Just suppose there are also no patent laws. If you discover something extremely useful you can share it with anyone else because you don't need any bloody "protection" because you already have the resources to extract/transform it, so no need to "invest" time (ie preventing others from knowing about it). Not easy, I'm clearly just speculating, but makes sense to me. Of course I would sign up in a second to live in such a society, but I'm not sure it's entirely viable, neither now nor in a thousand years. The problem is not money, it's power. Money is not power per se but just a way to reach it in a context where money has value (like sea shells in some islands etc). If and when we reach the point of inventing LFTL (ludicrously faster than light) drive and finding planets literally stuffed with any possible resource we need, we still need to consider human nature. People want power. Every time someone wants you to do something for them, he/she needs to exercise some pressure on you, be it psychological or using their power to take away what you have or prevent you to get it. My point is that eliminating money wouldn't solve any problem because the problem isn't money per se. The problem is power, or to be more precise the abuse of it by people who use part of it to escape accountability for what they do. What is not clear in the ST universe is how the heck they reached this point. I fear time (evolution) alone isn't enough. Probably, as someone I don't recall said once, the secret is: "never ever give any powers to anyone who wants them". If the above wasn't clear, please blame the language barrier:)

teilo 10y ago

>Star Trek doesn't tell us how their economy is managed or their internal politics. True, but there is this much: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H5uPyU2oKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H5uPyU2oKE Other references: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Money http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Money

jaggednad 10y ago
Also, there's this in in episode 26 of Season 1 of the Next Generation, in which a group of people who were frozen and kept alive in the 20th century are found and unthawed on the Enterprise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQQYbKT_rMg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQQYbKT_rMg

3pt14159 10y ago

What do more advanced societies generally do with less advanced societies that they don't need something from? They leave them alone and maybe come to visit once in a while. What does a sentient replicator robot care if a little boy just wants to whittle a bowl out of a piece of wood? It's kinda neat, and stories are interesting and the minds of the future will presumably have solve the security problem, or at least as much as MAD solves it, and the scarcity problem, at least as much as scarcity is a problem for most people. After that there is just discovery, enjoyment, merriment, world building, love. What do we do with our abundance of CPU cycles? We watch cat videos and text our friends. I kinda view it the same way if we can survive the next 100 years or so where things are little unstable.

aaron-lebo 10y ago
Do they? The history colonization of says otherwise, and even in the best case scenarios where outright colonization didn't take place, less advanced societies are slowly eradicated because they can't compete. If robots became advanced enough, why would they (or at least some of them) not see humans as animals to be used or disposed of?
- bdamm 10y ago
  Depends - if the robots can replicate without the same environment as people, then other environments might be better suited to the robotic colony. However, that's treating robots or AI like we would people. Robots aren't people, nor are AIs. They are likely to take forms we cannot comprehend, and likely to change us in ways we cannot comprehend, at first. I'd argue that it is already happening. At the moment we're farming AI, but it might not be long until AI is farming us.
- 3pt14159 10y ago
  Colonization largely ended when international relations stopped being a zero sum game. The US could invade Chile for copper, but it's better for both if they don't. I'm more intelligent than an average person on the planet, but I still want to help get all of them water, food, and safety. I want them to learn and grow and have meaningful lives. I even want animals like dolphins and elephants to have free and rich lives. I highly doubt that sentient machines are going to view us like bugs on a windshield. If I'm worried about anything it's the opposite. They care so much for us that they stop us from procreating to end (what they think is) needless suffering.
  - brennen 10y ago
    > Colonization largely ended This is not observably true.
  - Houshalter 10y ago
    My point was just that such a society would be much weirder than depicted in star wars or star trek. Whether the robots kill us all or become our nannies, it will be a lot different than 20th century Earth + spaceships. All science fiction operates under the assumption that humans are still useful in the future. Humans are just the first intelligence to evolve. I doubt we are anywhere near the peak of what is possible. Personally I don't believe that a good outcome is terribly likely. Humans care about animals and other humans because we evolved to have empathy. We have no idea how to program empathy into a machine. Most likely the first AIs will just have simple motivational systems. Like trying to maximize their reward signal, or achieve simple goals set by their programmer. They would be totally indifferent to humans. They wouldn't set out to kill us, but if we got in their way, they'd have no problem with it.

atrus 10y ago

As I've actually never seen Star Trek, I may be wrong on some details, but there was a fan theory that all the crew were future LARPers. They weren't actually agents of the Federation, only pretending to be so. So, why have to robots do all the work for then, that would take out all the fun! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7237395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7237395

kobeya 10y ago
That's certainly not the canonical explanation.
mikeash 10y ago
I don't think that theory is at all supported by the material. It is, however, more or less the canonical explanation for human crews on Culture ships in Iain Banks's works. The ships are fully capable of doing everything themselves, but most of them have human crew because the humans have fun participating and the ships like the company.

pavel_lishin 10y ago

Droids seem to largely hold the same position in Star Wars that slaves did, except nobody seems to be worried about a Droid rebellion - and in slave-owning societies, many jobs were done by free citizens for pay. And as far as Star Trek and AI, it's a weird problem that doesn't make any sense. It seems that you can't program your VCR without spawning a self-aware AI entity - Wesley Crusher accidentally creates one while doing a homework assignment, and the Enterprise (D) computer spawns one after someone casually requests a harder Holodeck challenge. And yet, Data and Lore are rarities, the possibilities of the EMH are completely unexplored and EMHs are, in fact, treated as Roombas instead of potentially sapient citizens.

devoply 10y ago
Wasn't there like a whole bunch of EMH's running a whole ship or something. They are sentient. Star Trek makes no sense whatsoever in that the holodeck is so real you can fall in love in the holodeck. So why does anyone need to go anywhere. You can stay wherever you want, safely, and be wherever you want to be and explore whatever robots or holograms running around in ships have explored. Most of the adventure, if that's what this is about, is carried out by the executives at great risk to themselves. It seems that there is a huge crew of peons who just make the ship run. And also the ship blows up all the time like no one's business. From a realistic point of view the Star Trek universe seems insane.
- Namrog84 10y ago
  I believe the holodeck was always fully reserved and that not dislike alcohol, most people attempted moderation. But there are several episodes that people become addicted to the holodeck
  - tnecniv 10y ago
    Well it's implied that holodeck time is inherently limited. Not everyone has one. The Enterprise (D) only had a handful for over 1,000 people. On DS9, you had to rent them at Quarks. This brings up another point that is never addressed. Quark runs a casino / bar / futuristic (adult) movie theater expressly for profit. It's also implied that Star Fleet members don't get paid because they are members of the federation. Yet these same officers are often seen frequenting Quark's place. Where did they get the latinum (money)?

justin66 10y ago

Star Trek, particularly the television shows, very clearly describes a command economy with elected leadership. I'm not sure how much explication you'd want in that regard. Star Wars, I'm not so sure. It seems to me that they spent a lot of time on that stuff and I just probably missed it, but in my defense, the films that focused on it were the most boring in the series.

dragonwriter 10y ago
> Star Trek, particularly the television shows, very clearly describes a command economy with elected leadership. The idea that Star Trek "very clearly" describes anything about the economy of the Federation (or even that what it does show of that economy is remotely consistent) is somewhat amusing. Most of the civilian economy it shows clearly is outside of the Federation (and mostly varieties of regulated market economies), and most of what it shows of the Federation is focussed on a quasi-military service, not the civilian economy. I'd say the strongest indication is that the Federation civilian economy is largely a gift and informal, non-money-mediated barter/market economy where there scarce items are personal services more than material goods.
sandworm101 10y ago
That depends. Much of "the government" of trek seems to be handled by the military or at least military leaders. That is no doubt a product of the need to involve the known characters, but we do see little to nothing of elected officials. Some characters (spock) bounce seemlessly between military and what we would today call civilian jobs (ambassadors). The military and its meritocracy, as oppossed to civilian democracy, is at the heart of trek government. That is probably a statement about US cold war politics, but i think matters today given the new cabinate being enshrined today.
- angli 10y ago
  Deep Space 9 has an arc where a Starfleet officer attempts to launch a coup against the (elected) President of the Federation - we do see an elected leader there, but you're right that it isn't spelled out in much detail.

kobeya 10y ago

Not all science-fiction, there is some good hard sci-fi that takes into account such concerns.

aluhut 10y ago

I guess you would have to be able to afford a droid or machine of any kind. It seems like life on Curuscant is very different from life on Tatooine.

st3v3r 10y ago

Droids are expensive, and people aren't?

metaphorm 10y ago

Star Wars seems to have many different economies operating across the galaxy, and they interact in various ways. The Empire, for example, is known to have have made extensive use of slave labor (by non-humans mostly, such as Wookies). It also seems to make use of droids and clones for dangerous tasks (military work, natural resource extraction, etc.). Outer Rim worlds seem to have a kind of anarcho-capitalist economy that is equal parts libertarian paradise (no regulations, no taxes) and organized crime syndicate plutocracy (The Hutt syndicates in particular are widespread and powerful). Core worlds seem to be more like nation states, with each world governing itself and its economy according to local values. Alderaan (RIP) seems to have been a liberal parliamentary democracy. Coruscant (seat of the Empire) is a planet scale conurbation with a first world developed economy on the upper levels and a third world underdeveloped economy on the lower levels.

kj01a 10y ago

>Why do they need a crew of hundreds, when almost everything is automated? I believe they do state in TNG that the galaxy class ship could doing everything on its own, and the crew was just there because of their love of discovery and what not.

tnecniv 10y ago
Most of the passengers are families of the crew! Even within the crew, a significant (perhaps even a majority?) are science officers doing research.

makerofthings 10y ago

This https://medium.com/@RickWebb/the-economics-of-star-trek-29bab88d50#.yddq4nb8n https://medium.com/@RickWebb/the-economics-of-star-trek-29ba... is a great read on the economics of Star Trek.

fsloth 10y ago

Since the topic is fiction - to me the best description of human condition in a post scarcity society is found in Iain Banks' Culture series where artificial minds form the ruling political cliques and manage most practical things. And succeeds in keeping things psychologically believable for the main human characters through several very entertainining books. People are kept along mostly because it's thought proper to give people the opportunity for self expression. I.e. careers are chosen out of internal needs or for the percieved prestige the activity entails, not out any material need as everything up to a point is available (the financial limits of an individual are never explicitly described though). Or - as several characters do - just becausw something is considered hard and dangerous and they want to push themselves. Despite the inane ramblings about homo economicus one encounters now and again, this latter instinct is actually a quite strong driving force in dictating human action(not everyones of course). One of the biggest non-antagonist rude actions in the series is when an AI underlies the pointlesness of human effort by performing a complex feat in front of the character that she has chosen as her life task - which everyone considers extremely rude. There are spaceships and explosions but to me the psychologically believable description of near human characters in a post scarcity society is the most interesting facet of his work.

ep103 10y ago
I love Ian's Culture series. He clearly had a good mind and knowledgeable experiences with technology, in order to write about it so capably. And just as interesting, he clearly had a solid, hands on understand of the liberal end of the spectrum of political thought, from liberal-capitalist straight through to the various forms of anarchism. His books clearly played with those concepts in the environment of a post-scarcity society. I read through the series once back in high school and found them fun. Fast forward 15-20 years, and I have a career in tech, and dabbled in leftist politics for a while. I came back to read one of them, and ended up re-reading the whole series. I found that he had already thought about and written down questions and answers to many of the things I'd experienced. Just put into a fictional, usually pretty fun world. Those most interesting parts of his stories were the backdrop. Great reads, not mentioned enough.

imglorp 10y ago

Replicators run by unlimited free or cheap energy means the end of a material economy. Any good can be created for you. It also means you don't need to ship those things around so most cargo operations we have now are pointless. As you point out, AI will supplant most services. Assuming you can replicate AI's... then nobody needs money for anything.

felipemnoa 10y ago
People still need to keep themselves entertained which I believe is the main purpose of a job. We even see it now, people that retire can become quite depressed and quickly try to find some kind of partial job where they can feel useful. So in a post scarcity civilization the main reason people will still work is so that they do not blow their brains out. The difference this time is that we will work on what we like, or on our calling. Now that I think about it, jobs themselves may be the scarce thing. i.e. Not everybody will be able to work on designing the next space station and hence there will be fierce competition to get these jobs.
- imglorp 10y ago
  Right. Then, per Roddenberry, we're free to flit about the galaxy, help others, engage in the arts or sciences. The way things are funded now, if there's no ROI that's all hard to do.
DefaultUserHN 10y ago
This situation would never happen though. As soon as Replicators are created, the rich will take full control of the Replicators, and the poor will never be allowed to have them. And with the Replicators, the rich will, again, rule the poor.

captn3m0 10y ago

I'm reading "How to write Science Fiction and Fantasy" by Orsom Scott Card, and he mentions how Star Trek is not good SF by any stretch. The world building is absurd, and high ranking officials regularly do missions and adventures that seem absurd. While it works for Star Trek, it won't fly in any stand-alone SF work today. However, that is what happens with most TV-first SF shows, Doctor Who being another example.

brennen 10y ago
It's hard to generalize here. ST, in its various incarnations, is fundamentally an anthology and (as things progress) a collection of character studies. It's routinely absurd, but plenty of individual episodes are certainly good SF.

psadri 10y ago

Whenever strong AI vs humans comes up I'd like to point to the relationship of monkeys vs humans. Humans are to monkeys what strong AI is to humans. Monkeys are probably mostly happy (as long as we are not bothering them) going about their monkey business. So maybe eventually humans will also be happy despite the existence of strong AI. Maybe some humans would be unhappy to know they are no longer at the apex of intelligence and maybe that will make us unable to be happy. Always knowing that no matter what we do, it can always be outdone by a smarter than us AI. I suspect these people are the same people who worry about strong AI in the first place :-) However, we already know with pretty high confidence that there are aliens out there that are more advanced/smarter than us -- and their existance does not affect our day to day happiness. So maybe the question is only relevant locally on earth.

iaw 10y ago

You're completely right. Gene Roddenberry created a quasi-utopian future, I don't think he created Star Trek with the aim of answering the questions about how we maintain our society through the coming technological advances. I think Gene's goal was to paint a picture of what his vision of a perfect human society would look like from a purely social perspective.

carlosdp 10y ago

Gene Roddenberry's "Andromeda" tackled this pretty well I think. The warship can be operated pretty much entirely by the on-board sentient AI, and it is because it has a skeleton crew of like 6 for most of the series. Because the AI is sentient, every commonwealth ship has a personality, the ship itself is a person. It also has storylines that explain why AIs don't literally run everything: there was a large lash back against the proliferation of AI after the fall of the government, to the point that there are planets that completely ban their existence and destroy on sight.

squarefoot 10y ago

"Star Trek doesn't tell us how their economy is managed or their internal politics. Sure they have replicators, but their are still things that need to be done by people, and resources that can't be replicated." They probably assume that resources are so widely available (unexplored planets etc) that one doesn't need to live anymore like us to afford basic needs such as food, shelter, medical care, and education. What is very different from our society is we often need to live near big populated cities to get a job that allows us to pay the above. In the ST world they take it almost for granted: you can settle a small colony on a distant planet and still fulfill at least basic needs for everyone with no need for a medium like money. So where's the convenience? Just suppose there are also no patent laws. If you discover something extremely useful you can share it with anyone else because you don't need any bloody "protection" because you already have the resources to extract/transform it, so no need to "invest" time (ie preventing others from knowing about it). Not easy, I'm clearly just speculating, but makes sense to me. Of course I would sign up in a second to live in such a society, but I'm not sure it's entirely viable, neither now nor in a thousand years. The problem is not money, it's power. Money is not power per se but just a way to reach it in a context where money has value (like sea shells in some islands etc). If and when we reach the point of inventing LFTL (ludicrously faster than light) drive and finding planets literally stuffed with any possible resource we need, we still need to consider human nature. People want power. Every time someone wants you to do something for them, he/she needs to exercise some pressure on you, be it psychological or using their power to take away what you have or prevent you to get it. My point is that eliminating money wouldn't solve any problem because the problem isn't money per se. The problem is power, or to be more precise the abuse of it by people who use part of it to escape accountability for what they do. What is not clear in the ST universe is how the heck they reached this point. I fear time (evolution) alone isn't enough. Probably, as someone I don't recall said once, the secret is: "never ever give any powers to anyone who wants them". If the above wasn't clear, please blame the language barrier:)