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Kurzweil and other olds like him believe in the Star Trek future. They believe in a beautiful utopia future that is unlockable by abundance. That's why 3d print
by alaskamiller 13y ago
Kurzweil and other olds like him believe in the Star Trek future. They believe in a beautiful utopia future that is unlockable by abundance. That's why 3d printing and virtual reality are so exciting for them.
A meme back then was from Buckminster Fuller, renowned architect, thinking, and systems analyst--what they used to call hackers back then. Fuller made a proclamation that in the future we will reach a point in society where a person will only need to work 1 full work to generate enough value that lets them live for the rest of the year.
How crazy is that?
Well when you have replicators and automation to do all the work, you have more time to focus on other things.
For example say you want to be an artist. To do so you endeavor on the artist path, living the artist lifestyle. You don't work a 9 to 5 so that you can focus on your art, because of that you don't have a lot of money, and thus you live the hipster way. In the cheaper edges of a big city, you work entry level retail jobs, and you're constantly at the edge of failure.
Many of us like to create art, but because we don't want to live that kind of poor lifestyle we don't pursue what our passions are. We're misfit, square pegs in round holes of society.
You absolve people of toil and now you have no fear. Without fear you create more. When you try more you do more.
J. K. Rowling credits her completion of Harry Potter based on England's welfare system. They removed her anxiety and fear by helping her out when she had no job. Because of that she took the plunge to write Harry Potter.
Imagine if all 7 billion of us are free to try, really try, at art. Think of the industrial revolution. Think of the internet revolution. None of that will compare to the next wave and all that new activities will bring.
That's how the world is enriched by removing work.
Or, we can all end up reverting back to living in caves.
Who knows.
- amerika_blog 13y agoI hear the sound of 7 billion people writing terrible fanfic, while breeding profligately, as the mounds of landfill grow higher, and finally global war breaks out from total boredom and frustration.
- AsymetricCom 13y agoOpen your eyes and maybe you'll see why art can stop that.
- andrewflnr 13y agoArt is powerful, but it's not that powerful. War is in our blood. You're asking wild-born wolves to behave like domesticated dogs just because they have enough food. Heck, even domestic dogs can be pretty vicious.
- scarmig 13y agoMore food, more trade, and more cosmopolitanism have decreased per capita violence by an order of magnitude compared to hunter gatherer societies and the first agricultural civilizations.
- AsymetricCom 13y agoAn interesting property of art is that is doesn't enforce anything. You have to be willing to accept its message. War is pretty much the exact opposite end of the same line of distributing power.
- igravious 13y agoI've long since thought that the relation of peace to war is that of the absence and presence of violence. Whereas the relation of art to war is also one of opposition but along a different axis, that of creativity and destruction. Looked at this way war has at least two 'opposites'. I put opposites in quotes because I think there are far fewer actual binary dichotomies than people make out. While I'm on the topic. Same for love. They say the opposite of love is hate. But whereas love draws people together fear keeps keeps them apart so you could also say that fear is the opposite of love. Looked at in this way love has at least two 'opposites'. I wonder how many other traditional binaries could be broken?
- AsymetricCom 13y agoThings where all strategies are fair: war, love
- 13y ago
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoThat's a pretty shitty future. It's also still definitely better than the current-day society you support.
- vidarh 13y ago> while breeding profligately Except, of course, that all our experience indicates that once education levels, healthcare and general prosperity increases, reproduction rates drop. If anything, if this effect continues, we'll reach a point soon enough where a shrinking population starts to become one of the things for us to worry about. Some countries already do worry about aging populations partially as a result of this, and it already is a major aspect of immigration debates in many European countries.
- jgreen10 13y agoThat's partly because women have careers in developed countries, which they won't if there's no work.
- specialist 13y agoFinancial independence != careers
- AndrewKemendo 13y agoGreat exposition. I don't know if there is a growing number of "us" but I do know that the ideas of basic income, automated industry etc...are seeming to become more pervasive. Especially as we are actually seeing the automation of driving (see: Rio Tinto/Google) and other goods I hope the ideas will start permeating beyond technologists and singulitarians.
- prawn 13y agoI see a basic income as basically a mechanism by which the elite pay off the rest to stop them rioting.
- jmarin 13y ago>Well when you have replicators and automation to do all the work, you have more time to focus on other things. The problem is, business models will probably bill you for time of use while you rent-out your replication. Technology is great, but as long as their implementers seek profit over ideals, there's a pretty big obstacle to your utopia.
- saraid216 13y agoThat's fine, though. Put down a basic income. People can live reasonably as they like, and then work on top of that because people get bored. Putting down a BI isn't going to stop people from having money; you're still going to have venture funding. Let someone take a risk on your idea. You deal with all the snafus and shenanigans of today, except neither of you are risking life itself. Worst case scenario, you live comfortably without having achieved anything.
- tcbawo 13y agoInterestingly, we seem to be preparing longer and longer for our careers. Perhaps we'll eventually work a handful of days in our lifetimes, but spend 30 years preparing for that moment.
- benohear 13y agoThat sounds like a great plot for a sci-fi movie. Not sure if it would be a utopia or dystopia though ...
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoWeirdtopia, obviously.
- ojbyrne 13y agoAs a 53 year old, I somewhat resented "other olds," because I mostly think Kurzweil is a huckster peddling nonsense. Then at the mention of Star Trek, I accepted that you were making an allusion to an original series episode, and all made sense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miri_(TOS_episode) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miri_(TOS_episode) Kudos! Michael J Pollard (who is 74 and still with us, was awesome in this episode).
- nodata 13y ago"A Point of View: Should the baby boomers leave the stage?" -- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24765974 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24765974
- alaskamiller 13y agoOh, Owen, you'll always be the young and dashing Digg guy in my heart.
- ojbyrne 13y agoI'm about 40 lbs lighter and ran a half marathon this year. Less beer than in the digg days. But thanks!
- homosaur 13y agoSo the entirety of English society helped pay to make Rowling incredibly wealthy. That seems like a pretty massive concentration of wealth for little benefit to society as a whole aside from some nice pablum to digest.
- lostlogin 13y agoI don't know what she and her creations have since paid in taxes in the UK, but I'll wager a dollar that it exceeds the monetary cost to the country. Hell, compared to some uses of the tax payers money, I'd say that a lot of value was gained.
- pjc50 13y agoYou're absolutely right. Rowling has explicitly stated in the past that she hasn't and won't use tax avoidance structures, so she will have paid 40% income tax on most of her income from the books. Plenty of UK bands from the 60s to the 90s have mentioned unemployment benefits as being an important factor in allowing them to exist before they got famous.
- digitalengineer 13y agoThe 'the entirety of English society' didn't do squad exept keeping her and her kids from becoming homeless and living on the street. She helped herself become incredibly wealthy. Do you think it's easy to find a pubisher? Try finding one when you're an unemployed, uneducated mum.
- vidarh 13y agoIt is quite amusing to see attempts at discounting the welfare systems impact on her ability to attain her wealth, when she herself has frequently described it as important, and one of the reasons why she has happily continued to pay substantial amount of taxes on her earnings. Noone is to my knowledge saying she did not also have a substantial impact on it herself - after all, we're not swimming in people who have achieved the same. But there can very well be more than one contributing factor. To grasp onto your last statement: Try writing a book when you're an unemployed, uneducated mum if she did not have a working welfare system to "break my fall" as she herself put it. It was her effort, but the welfare system made it possible for her to put in that effort. EDIT: Though just for the record, as rich people go she is definitively one of the most sympathetic, not least for the way she has made it exceedingly clear that she believes it is fair for her to pay her taxes in the UK without complaint, given what she believes she owes to the system in the first place - and to the extent that she explicitly hit out at the conservatives for wanting to cut taxes for the rich.
- vidarh 13y agoThis idea is way older than Buckminster Fuller. A key aspect of the rise of socialist ideologies from the mid 1800's was the view that technology would eventually render poverty "obsolete" by making production so efficient that redistribution would leave everyone able to do largely what they want. E.g. in the German Ideology (1845), Marx wrote: " In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. " But this was not to my knowledge an idea that originated with Marx, but was a general driver behind a range of socialist and proto-socialist ideologies dating back to well before the term socialism came into use. Though to Marx it was one of the reasons for why he saw the fall of capitalism as inevitable: It will, according to him, chase efficiencies due to competition to the point where it will eventually saturate markets at the same time as it seeks to minimize labour and minimize labour costs. Since capitalism is geared towards continuous expansion, he believed this would lead simultaneously to eventual increases in poverty and overproduction as society tries to reconcile a situation where labour becomes less and less necessary while capitalist companies depends on more and more spending. So to Marx, the crisis of increasing economic output coupled with reduced need for labour is what eventually pushes society to a tipping point where Marx argued socialist revolutions becomes not only viable, but necessary (you'll note that noe of the countries where people tried to force through revolutions in the name of socialism have been anywhere near this level of development; starting with Lenin, a number of people went through any number of contortions to try to make excuses for how socialist revolutions would be viable in countries that did not meet the criteria set out by Marx, and every one of them have been proven wrong; though of course that does not prove Marx right), and that they will eventually happen with or without help. Marx tacitly admitted that capitalism would be more efficient at growing manufacturing etc., for the very reason that capitalism diverts far fewer resources to welfare. And this is one of the reasons why a well developed capitalist society according to Marx is a pre-requisite for socialism.
- alaskamiller 13y agoWhat's funny to me is that if we're gonna go hunt down the source, we can even make Jesus a data point when he pointed out you treat each other with love and love will free us all.
- api 13y agoIt's technically and physically possible once the energy problem is more behind us. But it would also require radical changes to the way financial assets are distributed and to the entire capitalist system itself. Otherwise 99% of that increase in productivity will go to less than a fraction of 1% and everyone else will live in slums.