5 ms·
I really hope I get to live long enough to see society have to tackle the "oh fuck, currency as a concept is useless" problem, aka the steps leading up to post-
by stcredzero 9y ago
I really hope I get to live long enough to see society have to tackle the "oh fuck, currency as a concept is useless" problem, aka the steps leading up to post-scarcity...Highly highly unlikely...
Is there ever going to be a post-scarcity era, or is scarcity contextual? Perhaps it is just going to be a moving target, like AI seems to be? Once a chess playing program that could beat the world champion was a pipe dream. The same goes for Go playing programs. Once a pen was a specialized instrument that had to be handcrafted for certain professionals. Now, they are practically free. Once, getting water involved significant personal effort for almost everyone. Now almost everyone one in the industrialized world thinks of it as something practically free.
One of the things which might throw a monkey wrench into the futurist/sci-fi idea of a post scarcity society is the Pareto Principle combined with the perception of relative poverty. Across all of history, productivity has been unevenly distributed. Even people who are wealthy on global/historical scales will feel poor if confronted with wealthier neighbors. Psychologists have concluded that the feelings of relative poverty are very real, and it's this relative poverty which is most strongly correlated with criminality, not absolute poverty.
- thaumasiotes 9y ago> Is there ever going to be a post-scarcity era, or is scarcity contextual? There cannot be a post-scarcity era as long as one man is able to impregnate more than one woman.
- theGimp 9y agoHow does this tie into post-scarcity?
- posterboy 9y ago> what is population control
- ZeroGravitas 9y agoThe more usual idea with population control is that one married couple will have multiple children. If they have more than 2.1 on average then the population will expand. This particular comment seemed to focus on the man impregnating more than one woman, while saying nothing about the total number of children born per capita. I thought they might have been talking about access to mates as a scarce resource, but to be honest that's just a wild guess as it's not clear to me what they intended.
- jpatokal 9y agoMost industrialized societies already have birth rates well below replacement level.
- komali2 9y agoWhat if several men choose not to impregnate any women? Woops there goes your one-liner dismissal of an entire concept?
- thaumasiotes 9y agoHow so? If you have 10 men and 10 women, and 8 of the men kill themselves, the remaining two can still fight over all 10 women.
- xg15 9y agoSo why not give it a try? Why not let the libraries lend an unlimited number of digital copies and see what happens? Some constraints are real, but if scihub is any indication then some of those eternal truths might actually be mostly groupthink, fear and vested interests.
- stcredzero 9y agoIn the case of publishing scientific research, there is already funding in place. It's definitely vested interest there.