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A really interesting read. I have always wondered how in the so called Start Trek sci-fi future which allegedly awaits us will we overcome the issue of there be

A really interesting read. I have always wondered how in the so called Start Trek sci-fi future which allegedly awaits us will we overcome the issue of there being only one ship captain on the whole humongous ship. The whole "infinite resources" only really works if literally any resource is infinite, even the captain positions. Otherwise we are just back to politics

jjk166 6y ago
Build an arbitrarily large fleet of ships to captain. More realistically, between ceremony and bureaucracy you can just keep creating positions and titles until everyone at least feels like they're the king of something.
- s1artibartfast 6y ago
  I think there is no amount of ceremony that will make a janitor feel like a king while he "captains" his mop around at the bottom of an enormous bureaucracy.
  - dragonsky 6y ago
    Then you make sure that the person who is the janitor actually wants to be doing that and is given the resources to be able to be the best janitor he can be. There seems to be an assumption that everybody wants to be the captain of the ship. Nothing could be further from the case. Most people just want a job they can grow in and be allowed to manage to do their best at. I know a lot of technical people who die inside when they have to make the shift to management path just to get a little more money. Almost inevitably they make fairly poor managers because what they really want to be doing is the technical work and they see their subordinates having all the fun.
    - setr 6y ago
      As a general rule, there are usually more shitty jobs that need doing, than people who actively want to do those shitty jobs. In your scheme, you need one person to want to be captain, to support a thousand-crew ship. You'll probably need fifty people to specifically want to be janitors to support that one person. Five hundred to be generic crewmen. A few to CxO. Fifty to be middle managers. And so on. I'm not sure the ratios work out the way you'd expect. For every person who wants to be a captain, you need an army to support him, and I'm not sure you have so few people who want to be in charge (take any high school group activity: someone always pops out at the "leader" -- by choice or necessity -- even in groups as small as 3. Those groups that don't gain a leader inevitably fail, due to disorder and chaos). And if such a population ratio does not exist, and the man who wants to be captain cannot be captain, then you have scarcity, and politic. Even among the "hardcore engineers", who revel in their non-leadership roles, that only holds as long as the system itself does; a bad manager, captain, etc, can completely kill the joy of such engineering, at which point, you find a new leader, or an engineer attempts to become a leader by (perceived) necessity.
      - dragonwriter 6y ago
        > As a general rule, there are usually more shitty jobs that need doing, than people who actively want to do those shitty jobs. I'd argue that's true by definition: a "shitty" job is one where the value of the job to others induces recruitment not only beyond people who actively want to do the job, but so far beyond as include people who strongly prefer to avoid the job but who can't (or, at least, perceive that they can't) afford to turn down the money. And not just to include the last group, but to include them as a sizable fraction of the people employed in the job.
        setr 6y ago
        You're right; it can be shortened to: as a general rule, there are usually shitty jobs that need doing. or alternatively, there are usually more jobs that need doing, than people wanting to do them.
      - dragonsky 6y ago
        But the job needs to be done, so supply and demand comes into play. In a resource rich world Why should somebody doing a shitty job be paid low wages. If you need the job done and because we are not resource constrained you are going to have to do something to make that job attractive. Maybe even address the things that make the job shitty or even do the work to automate it so the janitor can become a dancer like he always dreamed of.
        setr 6y ago
        In a resource rich world, the trade-able resource will change, to something that is scarce (why would you do work for something next to worthless, due to abundance?). Reputation, artisan skill-based product, mechanically induced scarce resource (ala Bitcoin), etc You’ll just be paid low wages in the new resource. But regardless, we’re still far and away from “let everyone do only what they wish”; sure everyone might survive (due to presumed abundance of survival resources ), but to do as you wish for any job reliant on others, you’ll need to coerce others to do things they don’t strictly want to do. And so we have scarcity, and politic. The resource-abundance means the janitor can also optionally do nothing — he doesn’t necessarily need to janitor against his will — but it doesn’t mean he can become a dancer (that anyone will watch). He can become a dancer only so far as one might do alone, in their room, but to be trained, or to do it in the professional arenas, or to be watched, etc requires the coercion of others, with requires him to be sufficiently wealthy in something valuable, which must be scarce, and naturally unevenly distributed. And he might janitor to save up to be a dancer. Of course, you could always pretend to have an audience in a VR simulation, or an army of robots, but that’s perhaps a fairly pathetic fulfillment of his dream.
  - jjk166 6y ago
    Well in a post scarcity society, the janitor is a roomba. When nothing needs to be done, you can spend all your time working on things you want to work on, or just sit back and relax if you don't feel like working on anything at all. The only way you become king of the mops is if you are weirdly into that sort of thing.
trianglem 6y ago
Everyone is a king with AI subjects?
- Koshkin 6y ago
  Who needs subjects. “You're king: live lonesome.” (Pushkin)
  - trianglem 6y ago
    Might work for some people but most would want company.
trianglem 6y ago
How are you guys reading this? Does everyone have a ~$70 subscription to ft?
- kungito 6y ago
  There's a twitter link to the unwalled article on the website
timoth3y 6y ago
> overcome the issue of there being only one ship captain on the whole humongous ship I always figured that would be balanced out by the fact that there would be very few who large numbers of people would follow as captain. Even if you have all of your physical needs met, you would still need to prove yourself competent to lead others and for them to allow them to make decisions on their behalf.
- john4532452 6y ago
  Good Point. In the democracy too some chosen leader is making decision for others, the change in the startrek world would be the individual has an option to not follow the leader, simply because it would be possible.

jjk166 6y ago

Build an arbitrarily large fleet of ships to captain. More realistically, between ceremony and bureaucracy you can just keep creating positions and titles until everyone at least feels like they're the king of something.

s1artibartfast 6y ago
I think there is no amount of ceremony that will make a janitor feel like a king while he "captains" his mop around at the bottom of an enormous bureaucracy.
- dragonsky 6y ago
  Then you make sure that the person who is the janitor actually wants to be doing that and is given the resources to be able to be the best janitor he can be. There seems to be an assumption that everybody wants to be the captain of the ship. Nothing could be further from the case. Most people just want a job they can grow in and be allowed to manage to do their best at. I know a lot of technical people who die inside when they have to make the shift to management path just to get a little more money. Almost inevitably they make fairly poor managers because what they really want to be doing is the technical work and they see their subordinates having all the fun.
  - setr 6y ago
    As a general rule, there are usually more shitty jobs that need doing, than people who actively want to do those shitty jobs. In your scheme, you need one person to want to be captain, to support a thousand-crew ship. You'll probably need fifty people to specifically want to be janitors to support that one person. Five hundred to be generic crewmen. A few to CxO. Fifty to be middle managers. And so on. I'm not sure the ratios work out the way you'd expect. For every person who wants to be a captain, you need an army to support him, and I'm not sure you have so few people who want to be in charge (take any high school group activity: someone always pops out at the "leader" -- by choice or necessity -- even in groups as small as 3. Those groups that don't gain a leader inevitably fail, due to disorder and chaos). And if such a population ratio does not exist, and the man who wants to be captain cannot be captain, then you have scarcity, and politic. Even among the "hardcore engineers", who revel in their non-leadership roles, that only holds as long as the system itself does; a bad manager, captain, etc, can completely kill the joy of such engineering, at which point, you find a new leader, or an engineer attempts to become a leader by (perceived) necessity.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > As a general rule, there are usually more shitty jobs that need doing, than people who actively want to do those shitty jobs. I'd argue that's true by definition: a "shitty" job is one where the value of the job to others induces recruitment not only beyond people who actively want to do the job, but so far beyond as include people who strongly prefer to avoid the job but who can't (or, at least, perceive that they can't) afford to turn down the money. And not just to include the last group, but to include them as a sizable fraction of the people employed in the job.
      - setr 6y ago
        You're right; it can be shortened to: as a general rule, there are usually shitty jobs that need doing. or alternatively, there are usually more jobs that need doing, than people wanting to do them.
    - dragonsky 6y ago
      But the job needs to be done, so supply and demand comes into play. In a resource rich world Why should somebody doing a shitty job be paid low wages. If you need the job done and because we are not resource constrained you are going to have to do something to make that job attractive. Maybe even address the things that make the job shitty or even do the work to automate it so the janitor can become a dancer like he always dreamed of.
      - setr 6y ago
        In a resource rich world, the trade-able resource will change, to something that is scarce (why would you do work for something next to worthless, due to abundance?). Reputation, artisan skill-based product, mechanically induced scarce resource (ala Bitcoin), etc You’ll just be paid low wages in the new resource. But regardless, we’re still far and away from “let everyone do only what they wish”; sure everyone might survive (due to presumed abundance of survival resources ), but to do as you wish for any job reliant on others, you’ll need to coerce others to do things they don’t strictly want to do. And so we have scarcity, and politic. The resource-abundance means the janitor can also optionally do nothing — he doesn’t necessarily need to janitor against his will — but it doesn’t mean he can become a dancer (that anyone will watch). He can become a dancer only so far as one might do alone, in their room, but to be trained, or to do it in the professional arenas, or to be watched, etc requires the coercion of others, with requires him to be sufficiently wealthy in something valuable, which must be scarce, and naturally unevenly distributed. And he might janitor to save up to be a dancer. Of course, you could always pretend to have an audience in a VR simulation, or an army of robots, but that’s perhaps a fairly pathetic fulfillment of his dream.
- jjk166 6y ago
  Well in a post scarcity society, the janitor is a roomba. When nothing needs to be done, you can spend all your time working on things you want to work on, or just sit back and relax if you don't feel like working on anything at all. The only way you become king of the mops is if you are weirdly into that sort of thing.

trianglem 6y ago

Everyone is a king with AI subjects?

Koshkin 6y ago
Who needs subjects. “You're king: live lonesome.” (Pushkin)
- trianglem 6y ago
  Might work for some people but most would want company.

trianglem 6y ago

How are you guys reading this? Does everyone have a ~$70 subscription to ft?

kungito 6y ago
There's a twitter link to the unwalled article on the website

timoth3y 6y ago

> overcome the issue of there being only one ship captain on the whole humongous ship I always figured that would be balanced out by the fact that there would be very few who large numbers of people would follow as captain. Even if you have all of your physical needs met, you would still need to prove yourself competent to lead others and for them to allow them to make decisions on their behalf.

john4532452 6y ago
Good Point. In the democracy too some chosen leader is making decision for others, the change in the startrek world would be the individual has an option to not follow the leader, simply because it would be possible.