3 ms·
I believe the parent is thinking of a hypothetical reality trending toward one where technology is capable of solving nearly any arbitrary problem at no materia
by wcarss 13y ago
I believe the parent is thinking of a hypothetical reality trending toward one where technology is capable of solving nearly any arbitrary problem at no material cost.
Imagine, say, a world where clouds of von Neumann self-replicating builder robots fly around and plant seeds, tend trees, harvest, and deliver food. They also charge and repair and modify themselves, take material from mined asteroids, and are so plentiful that they may respond to every nonviolent human whim.
That world may have problems (which I don't care to discuss, I am just throwing out a possibility), and it's nowhere near reality. Not close. But I think such a pie-in-the-sky scenario is the one under discussion, where assumptions like 'nobody will feed you voluntarily' are not as bedrock as they are for us.
- muuh-gnu 13y agoLets set aside the fact that somebody has to build those robots and wants to profit for building them... Once we have that hypothetical robot slave army feeding everyone of us, the discussion would be over by itself because there would be nothing left to discuss. Everyone would have all he needs and that would be it. The only reason we do have the discussion already now, long before the star-trekian replicator utopia has been realized is because a lot of people are so impatient to stop working, that they want to engineer a system where not robots, but _other people_ are working for them, of course involuntarily.