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This is dumb, and subtly evil too. We can have the cake and eat it too: The point is to keep the growth of scientific understanding and of technical know-how w
by nnq 7y ago
This is dumb, and subtly evil too. We can have the cake and eat it too:
The point is to keep the growth of scientific understanding and of technical know-how without producing too much physical crap that is hard to recycle and overloads the environment. We need to:
(1) move our economy to more non-physical / virtual goods and service - we're doing this, but we could do better, since there are still lots of "status goods" (with little practical survival utility) that are physical and damage the environment by their production and operation - the rich should be able to buy better VR-avatar spells or exclusive-in-game-diamonds or whatever instead of cars, yachts, expensive to maintain houses etc.!
(2) make warfare fully digital in means and virtual/economical in consequences - 99% of conflict should be cyberwarfare-with-low-environmental-impact - like in "hacking to steal coins from country X's national budget wallet", not "hacking to sabotage industrial infrastructure" (sure, people will still die when country X goes bankrupt and nobody living there has health insurance anymore, but this shouldn't happen that often...)
A solution for accelerating (1) would be increasing research into how to make virtual stuff feel real and be more and more addictive - real-world "stuff" should feel soul-crunchingly-boring to our dopamine addicted brains (why go on a cruise ship or travel to Tropifukistan, when you can ride a dragon around Hogwarts and earn $$ if you're good at it!) For (2) it probably helps that everyone getting to have WMDs makes everyone scared s`less of larger scale military conflict. Oh, and fear of communicable diseases also helps move towards (1), as we can see now, but I'd personally prefer alternative "solutions"...
So we're probably heading in the right direction, we just need to stabilize the symptoms/consequences of environmental degradation short-term, and to push-the-pedal-to-the metal to disconnecting our consumption-oriented economy from the physical world (and on a parallel track go for the space-colonization-game for actual physical action - the fans of "real war", could have it too, but outside Earth, heck they could even bring in the nuclear toys, space is large).
- BlueTemplar 7y agour dumb :p No, seriously, the "digital economy" is not new these days - have you seen any positive impact on resource consumption / pollution ? It only got worse... Warfare is about control of real resources - some people might be willing, but countries in general won't settle for fake ones !
- nnq 7y agoOfc you'll say that "it only got worse" overall bc other things got worse... The digital-virtual economy needs to grow at least 10x, and percentually to at least 95% of the actual economy (physical goods need to be comoditized, and some maybe distribute equally in a pseudo-socialistic way, outside of the economical system - the fight should be for virtual resources). You're not going to see any "things getting better" result yet, we need to go full-speed all-in in this direction, not half-heartedly... Virtual economy has a > 100x growth potential once we have better VR, AR, and later neural interfaces. "Demand" will appear or be manufactured, in the end we'll probably have too much of it. And tons of services can be created even around the negative consequences of this... all the cornucopia of new diseases mental and physical brought about by excessive virtual consumption will boom into a huge healthcare industry etc. This will also be growth! And just like "power" can't be real or fake, it either is or isn't, same with resources - as long as there are exchange mechanisms, there's no difference between "real" or "virtual", everything is as real as everything else... Entities that insist on "old fashion fighting for `real` resources" should be restructured. People rewired / reeducated. We're on the right path, but yeah, we're maybe only 0.01% of the way there... need to do things faster and harder. Let's not chicken out now and go retro/conservative instead of pushing further! The future is... amazingly incomprehensible! Heil to it!
- BlueTemplar 7y agoI concur, you'll either have the power working to make your computer/VR/network run - or not. And it's the people that have the control over that power delivery that are going to have the real power (as they always did). Who is going to restructure / rewire / reeducate Vladimir Putin (or the like), hmm ?
- nnq 7y ago> Who is going to restructure / rewire / reeducate Vladimir Putin (or the like), hmm ? "Control over physical resources" is just a means, not an end... If you want "more power for your nation" or whatever and the world stage has been restructured so you can better get that by playing a different game, you'll switch the game. And Russia seems to be good at both cyber-warfare and "mental games", they can get even better and win even more, good for them, whatever. (And the future of cheap-renewables plus mini-nuclear will mean power/energy will be available to everyone... fight would be more on "fabrication and repair capability/tech for next-gen hardware" or stuff like that - here China and SE-Asia seem to be winning the game, and they overall are pretty pro-globalistic and pro-virtual... for their own f up reasons, but whatever, if it pushes things in the right direction, fine.) Anyway, things are going fine, though slow (sometimes progress goes one casket at a time unfortunately)... let's just hope some people don't f things up because they have their own personal/national/etc. crusade to fight for and mix it up with nostalgia for the "past full of meaning" and they drag us into some messed up war. Let's try and be peaceful and keep commerce flowing, previous generations have worked too hard to get this global system going for us to f it up by, ironically, being nostalgic for some good-ol-times that never actually existed...