Post scarcity is kind of an odd man out here. The idea predates tech broism by a solid half century, and informs a lot of contemporary leftist theory. There is nothing inherently wrong with using utopian thinking as a guiding principle for iterative policy. I’d argue that anything which doesn’t do that is cynicism.
It occurs to me that I’d argue we’re heading towards a forced scarcity society rather than post scarcity. That’s the only way they can make sure we don’t get a Star Trek type future if/when we figure out fusion power. Hell, we’ve already basically been able to feed everyone for ages.
Artificial scarcity is definitely nothing new. Look at the diamond industry, for example. Diamonds are common as hell, but they regulate the supply so severely in order to sell these cheap chunks of carbon for thousands of dollars.
If there’s no competition in a market willing to race others to the bottom in terms of price, there’s no incentive to actually produce a reasonable amount of something people want. You can just withold supply and charge way more.
Or just the fact that grocery stores throw away thousands of tons of perfectly edible food every day while there are people dying of malnutrition. They aren’t starving, they are being starved.
Diamonds
So we need cultured post-scarcity, the lab-grown stuff
forced vs post scarcity
tbh i’m happy whenever someone at least acknowledges the tension between these two facets.
anyway my actual point, imo the “too many humans” propaganda is part of the forced scarcity lobby. there’s perhaps too many humans to live as wastefully as we are, so why wouldn’t reducing waste be our #1-3 top priorities?
but waste is more ‘profitable’ (in short term), so we go all in - while pretending Us Living & Others Not-Living is a moral obligation on our part wtflol
We aren’t heading towards that. We’re already in a forced scarcity society, and have been for at least 25, if not 30 years. That’s why all these “economic bubbles” keep happening. The ultra rich worldwide have hoarded $350,000,000,000,000 at the expense of the other 8,000,000,000 people. Maybe 5000 people have more than $50,000,000 in personal wealth. Not only do they have nothing to spend it on, they keep throwing trillions of dollars into the latest dumpster fire of an “investment,” so they don’t have to pay $0.01 to anyone that isn’t them.
If we killed the obstructions to progress and innovation, who are nothing but leeches, then we may have to kill 5000 people, but everyone in the world would be able to have a $400,000 stake in The Sovereign Fund for Humanity’s Poor, paying out an average of $20,000 a year per person while reinvesting 95% of the ROI. When you’re dealing with 100’s of Trillions of dollars, I have no idea what ROI % you could reasonably maintain, but 13.5% would mean that everyone on earth doubles their fund, and therefore their yearly payout every 7.8 years.
It would take around 500 years to finally give the richest people in the world their trust fund, but that’s far faster than our ancestors thought that utopia and UBI could happen, and none of them could have more than $50,000,000 in personal wealth. The poorest get their funds first so that the economy can grow quickly enough to hit an economic singularity.
While post scarcity is excellent and I do believe it is possible in theory, it’s used as a buzzword to handwave away all the dystopian things being pushed.
There is also nothing inherently wrong with “optimization” and “automation”. It’s just that they are buzzwords and how the tech bros approach these topics.
I choose death
Depending on how serious you are:
Choose weed instead
Or the crisis line. You probably already know where to find it. Help is available. You do not have to suffer alone. I love you homie.
He’s an assassassin. He never said the death was his own…
The asses are never safe
They be assin’
Just kidding, unless given that exact choice lol. Weed has been a great help this year. Love you too fam, appreciate the thoughtful comment.
Or the crisis line.
What happens is that they “triage” you, where depending on how you answer their script you get cops at your door and a trip to hell on earth, or you are on hold for 20 minutes to speak with someone who also is reading a script and doesn’t give a rats ass about you.
Maybe states that aren’t Oklahoma have mental hospitals which are preferable to drinking yourself to sleep, but who knows.
“Everyone and everything will end in my lifetime. I’ll be here to see it all crumble just before I am incinerated in the blast.”
is another popular escapist fantasy.
No one wants to believe they’ll just have to hobble through a slow and painful decline.
we will make global anarchy by tomorrow. no more money, capitalism and suffering, trust
The thing about Anarchy is that, for many people, the cashless society where you own nothing and are fully removed from the machine of industry is already here. Its just called “poverty”.
The problem is that this kind of poverty isn’t equally distributed. You’ve still got this large, heavily armed occupying force that preserves money, capital, and the painful prodding of induced productivity for everyone else.
We are all stardust though. Billion-year-old carbon.
yes but do you consider that important in any way? if you do you are closer to the person on the left
I would say it is a neutral fact.
Imo there is no meaning to life, everyone decides for themselves what to live for.
If someone likes the fact that we are made from starstuff, why yuck that yum specifically? It is kind of a nice perspective to take sometimes when life gets stressful.
It is also a part of a nice song by Joni Mitchell and a nice speech by Carl Sagan, both people I admire, but not something I think about a lot…
And we got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
I mean scientifically speaking, we are all made of stardust. Everything in the universe is. Including the existential crisis your trying to forget by disassociating.
And blue light does keep you awake. Are we team Esotheria?
Stellaris players: How it feels to have a Spiritualist empire on one side of your border and a Materialist empire on the other.
My Pacifist Egalitarian Xenophile space elves: “Just be nice guys!”
You know… there’s a Space Hippies AI Personality mod on Steam. It’s actually really funny.
I have met the guy on the right irl. He was unbearable
Basically the dark shadows of the Hippy Age Of Aquarius and sandal-wearing tech Utopianism corrupted Into evil by the baby boomers ageing into the dominant political class in the West.
At this point they basically have all the money and all the votes that they need, not to mention the cognitive dissonance they are capable of withstanding is absolutely INSANE
I choose neither, and instead day dream about fully automated luxury gay space communism, knowing I’m gonna die before such a thing could ever come to fruition.
That’s just the guy on the right but with less hope and no capitalism.
No capitalism = more hope.
Works for me
What’s option 3?
Getting really into sleight of hand magic and smoking a lot of pot.
Really? Are people out there that thinks that death is a design flaw? I know it’s shitpost, but it’s based on something after all
Depends on how literally you mean it, in general, those most likely to say it wont think that humans are literally designed not to die and only do so because someone made a mistake, but more that humans might be redesigned or modified not to (or at least not from biological aging). Not a hard to find sentiment if you hang out in spaces with transhumanists, but I find the ones that overlap with AI bros, that tend to have an attitude like “this will totally happen in my lifetime and with no effort because the AI singularity is going to come and give us everything in a few years” impossible to talk to, because all too often they will cite even the tiniest listed improvement in any AI system as proof that literally everything possible or impossible is about to happen and then insist you arent paying attention when you give them skeptcism.
Yes, there are people who believe we will find a way to transcend death via technology. I personally think a world ruled by immortal omniwealthy methusalas that will never let even death release their boot from the necks of the common man is a bad thing, but…
Once I read a creepypasta where the wealthy spent a lot of money paying research and development of immortality, only achieving a worse version of cancer. The wealthy obviously went dead.
That’s the good ending. Bad ending is it works and the dictators of the world crush everyone else, tantalizing just enough people with the immortality carrot to make the system eternal.
I believe this is an idea most legitimately championed by Nick Bostrom. Here is a video explaining his perspective.
I feel like, at least from the stance of abstract philosophy, he makes some good points. And I’m not enough of a philosopher to refute them (though I’m sure some have). Personally, my stance is “I’ll cross that bridge when I arrive at it” - I expect to die before that happens.
I’m also hung up on “Crypto is UBI”. Surely this is a one off crackpot quote and not a thing, right?
This one is empirically falsified. I never heard it before, and even though I can believe somebody is saying it somewhere, it’s an incredibly stupid thing to say.
Oh almost forgot
More than three years ago we founded Worldcoin with the ambition of creating a new identity and financial network owned by everyone; the rollout begins today. If successful, we believe Worldcoin could drastically increase economic opportunity, scale a reliable solution for distinguishing humans from AI online while preserving privacy, enable global democratic processes, and eventually show a potential path to AI-funded UBI.
https://world.org/cofounder-letter
It’s the iris scan one
Oh, so a con-man, not a stupid man.
This is so overwhelmingly hyperbolic I’m not sure what to take from it
I just want to drop in and call out “death is a design flaw” specifically. It is not. Without death, there can be no evolution, and any change to the environment is extinction.
The mountains seem eternal, but there were forests before many of them, and though the trees will be different in the distant eons when the mountains are worn to nothing, the forests will live on.
That’s pretty cool in nature, especially with plants and fungi that don’t think. But applying it to people is kinda eugenics-y. “Billions should die so that our genes can improve”
Oh, giving ourselves endless lifespans is a fine endeavor. We’ve got plenty of ways to adapt to changing environments without changing our bodies, and we’re pretty close to being able to do that without dying and evolving anyway. Shit might get weird, but it always does with us.
Based. I always think stories about “immortality is bad actually” are weird because people are fundamentally capable of change. Lots of people choose not to change, but I think that’s because the boredom in their life is smaller than other forces like poverty, oppression, trauma, and culture. Give people infinite time to heal from their traumas and I think they eventually will. I think enlightenment is a more stable state than ignorance.
People often confuse being contrarian for being deep. If you don’t want to live forever, you don’t want to live right now.
This is interesting because you propose that eugenics is inherently bad because it requires a lot of sacrifice, is that right? Because it doesn’t have to. This line from Gattaca always stuck with me:
[Vincent’s parents are planning a second child, and are shown four candidate embryos] Geneticist: We want to give your child the best possible start. Believe me, we have enough imperfection built in already. Your child doesn’t need any more additional burdens. Keep in mind, this child is still you. Simply, the best, of you. You could conceive naturally a thousand times and never get such a result.
I could argue, could, that not doing eugenics on this level would be immoral. If we can use science to make people less prone to disease, to make them stronger and smarter, why wouldn’t we? I’m not a fucking nazi here, I’m looking for a serious debate. We are already doing this in a different categorical scope with modern medicine. If we claim that all births must be “natural”, then perhaps disease and death are also “natural” and we shouldn’t intervene, and do without medical science and just have nature run its natural course.
I don’t want parents to be able to choose whether their kids are autistic, because there’s nothing wrong with us, but society would rather change us than change the world so it can accommodate us.
We’re not just talking about autism here though. We’re talking about hereditary diseases, maybe a bad back, extreme allergies, etc. Their point is that if we had the technology to prevent our future child from carrying all sorts of genetic burdens (exposure to cancer, compromised immune system, terrible eyesight…) wouldn’t it be immoral to not use that technology?
We’re not just talking about autism here though.
We’re not, no. Sexual preference is genetic.
I’m not saying that this kind of thing cannot be used for bad purposes. I’m asking the philosophical question of where our moral obligation to do everything we can to give our children the best possible life begins.
Should we let them be born “as is”, and then have a moral obligation to do everything we can to make the best of whatever genetic baggage they have, or should we do whatever is in our power even before they’re born to give them a better shot at a good life?
Explosives have caused enormous amounts of death, but also allowed enormous amounts of people to live in safer, more affordable houses, and have been critical for mineral extraction that essentially makes modern society possible, as well as modern transportation infrastructure. Explosives, like most technology, aren’t an inherently “evil” thing, even though they’re used for bad purposes.
I’m not saying that this kind of thing cannot be used for bad purposes.
And I’m saying it will be.
Hmm, why can’t there be evolution without death? As long as organisms reproduce, genes are passed on, and some reproduce more successfully than others, why would it matter if existing individuals stay around or not? I don’t see how it makes evolution fundamentally impossible.
Without death you can’t have reproduction, you’d get way too many organisms to be sustainable in any way.
So we could go visit our great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents and they’d look like Jabba the Hutt. Holidays would be a beast.
death is what paves the way for change. Old ideas literally die out, since the dawn of time. The passing of strategy and technique happens in even single celled organisms
That is indeed what happens, and it is helpful. But I disagree evolution wouldn’t happen without it.
the laws of thermodynamics though, you eventually die. You eventually spend resources, you eventually have to obtain more, etc. Unless you are perfect, you may be killed unless you know your environment perfectly, no?
Yeah, but that’s an argument against being able to live forever, not an argument against evolution being able to happen, if you did.
