What's a sci-fi thing you feel is achievable with our current level of technology that you'd love to see become a thing?
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the end of scarcity. that's a totally bogus concept that capitalism uses to keep the rich in power. we produce far more than the whole of humanity would need to feed and cloth themselves, and we have more houses empty than there are families. we could end poverty right now, we just choose not to.
Well more accurately, some of us did chose that for the whole of us
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Terraforming.
The formerly-water deserts can be terraformed by just digging holes at specific angles so the shadow protects plants from drying up.
It's sci-fi not like a "future robot" thing but more of a "hey we know the math we can do this reliably well" type of thing.
Also those expensive EEG headbands that track your brain during sleep and give you stats can be modified to change TV channel at specific brainwave values.
I've got good news for you! We've been terraforming the planet to be more like Arrakis for a couple decades already!
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Why not just distribute the resources themselves, rather than tokens to exchange for resources? If we have post scarcity, we won't need money
There's a few reasons. Firstly greed is a motivator, and people work hard if they believe they'll receive more for more effort. This gets people to go out and generate the resources that need to be distributed. Second, fungible tokens allow people to trade on the open market instead of having to find a particular person who is willing to trade say, a worm gear for a bale or two of cotton. The token is the middle man that allows someone trying to sell something sell to someone who doesn't have what the seller plans to finally trade for. That's why money started to exist in the first place.
Even in a communist system, there needs to be a way to transfer the results of labor into the things a person needs. Money is that way. Even if it means everyone gets the same amount of money to buy what they need. Everyone's resource needs are different. You can't just say everyone gets the exact same everything.
Finally, we're not post-scarcity. Not really. Until resource manufacture is so automated that it doesn't require people to do labor to acquire it, we either pay people to do the labor or we force them to via slavery. For that reason alone, we need money.
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Sure, but have you considered that this would loosen the hold capitalism has on the wage slaves? Won't someone think of the shareholders‽
At best it would prop up capitalism until we can replace it with something better.
It's literally just giving people more money to shove into the capitalist system. You don't change a system by feeding it.
I won't say it's a bad thing... but it's not a solution. It's a stop gap.
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And this thing will either need extremely heavy batteries, or carefully protected tanks of fuel onboard - or both. So that’s going to massively add to the weight.
This is the sole reason we can't have mechs until we develop high energy portable nuclear power, or discover something equally as capable.
A rocket launching satellites is like 90% fuel, the structure is remarkably similar to the thickness of a tin can, and it only carriers a few thousand pounds of payload, all while only running for a minute or so before being empty. We simply don't have the power capability for anything approaching a large mech without it having to be wired to a power grid.
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Because distributing resources equally is a bad idea since people are individuals. You're giving 1 chicken to the guy that loves chicken and the same amount to the vegetarian. If instead you give h both the money for 1 chicken they can decide whether they want the chicken or something else.
Yes, but if you do it in the form of currency without changing the system in which the currency is used, it's just feeding that system. Are capitalists suddenly going to be less greedy, and more likely to care about their compatriots instead of eager to exploit them because we give them more power and more money?
No. They won't. They'll just find better ways to exploit this sudden surge of basically free money.
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I'm going to go against the trend here and say that libertarian corporate city-states actually sound pretty cool. They're generally not portrayed positively in fiction but I think they might work well in practice. I'm a lot less optimistic about cooperating with all my fellow Americans in order to govern the whole country democratically than I used to be. Choosing to move to an independent city-state with a government that I agree with (albeit one I don't elect) might work better.
You'll get more interest in an anarcho-syndicalist zone.
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We already know what a president with a robot body is like.
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I'm confident that we could set up permanent human habitation on the Moon or on Mars with our current level of technology, and that's featured pretty prominently in sci-fi.
I don't know if it would actually provide a cost-effective return, but I do think that it'd be interesting to see happen in my lifetime.
We could have been doing this since the 70s. Nothing sci-fi about it. The plans to do it are outlined in:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Frontier:_Human_Colonies_in_Space
When humanity turned it's back on this project, we sealed our fate as a failed planet.
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Mech suits.
We have them IRL... Kinda. They're just hydraulic powered limb-augmentation things but there's absolutely no reason they couldn't be like an Alice from Aliens. Shit; we could probably do MechWarrior mechs just not the same scale right now, or even an Iron Man like suit if time was spent trying.
The most fictional thing about a lot of these is mostly the power source. How do you power it? But a tank with legs could just be powered by a normal engine.
I'm an engineer in R&D and have briefly worked on an exoskeleton project. The reason we don't have mech suits is that the capitalist market doesn't demand them much, at least with our current technology.
There are two primary markets for them: medical, and manufacturing. I worked on the medical side--the big challenge there is making devices that are light enough that the mech helps more than it hinders. The biggest challenge is power: batteries are heavy. As we continue to figure out more efficient power storage and efficiency techniques, you could see more of these devices out in the wild.
The manufacturing market is growing, though most applications there are less "mech suit" and more "assistive arm" type of things.
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We have the technology to do this. What we lack is the economic willingness to actually do it. We are literally letting people starve to death because they don't have the money to buy food. The USA literally pays farmers not to grow food to keep prices artificially high.
wrote last edited by [email protected]On Nov. 15, 2021 the WFP published a spending plan showing how $6.6 billion would be used to provide food assistance to 42 million people in 43 countries. The plan included $3.5 billion for food procurement and delivery, $2 billion for cash and food vouchers, $700 million to develop country-specific programs, and $400 million for administration, oversight, and logistics. Beasley tweeted the link directly to Musk, adding, "You asked for a clear plan & open books. Here it is!"
If 6.6 Billion could end starvation in 43 countries than I don't see what is stopping us from making food free other than greed.
The Golden Temple in India has fed >50,000 people for free (Langar) every single day for fucking centuries.
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We have flying cars. They're called helicopters. And the limits to us having post scarcity are all societal/political, not technological.
The limit is skill and discipline.
Most people can’t even drive a car that is held on the ground by gravity. You want them to…fly?
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Whether big or small. We all have that one thing from Scifi we wished were real. I'd love to see a cool underground city with like a SkyDome or a space hotel for instance.
Not yet, but I think we might see age reversal drugs in the not so far future.
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I'm going to go against the trend here and say that libertarian corporate city-states actually sound pretty cool. They're generally not portrayed positively in fiction but I think they might work well in practice. I'm a lot less optimistic about cooperating with all my fellow Americans in order to govern the whole country democratically than I used to be. Choosing to move to an independent city-state with a government that I agree with (albeit one I don't elect) might work better.
Gonna be hard to move to Amazonia if all you've got in terms of money are Zuckbucks.
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Whether big or small. We all have that one thing from Scifi we wished were real. I'd love to see a cool underground city with like a SkyDome or a space hotel for instance.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Downloadable internet. You stick a pendrive in your PC with internet connection, fill it with internet and then go wherever you want, you have a usb router with data available to use and surf the net.
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Because distributing resources equally is a bad idea since people are individuals. You're giving 1 chicken to the guy that loves chicken and the same amount to the vegetarian. If instead you give h both the money for 1 chicken they can decide whether they want the chicken or something else.
You don't need currency for that. You just need a request system. And ideally some form of moral rejection mechanism that refuses to distribute sentient beings as resources. I didn't say it had to be distributed equally just because there's no money.
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Yes, but if you do it in the form of currency without changing the system in which the currency is used, it's just feeding that system. Are capitalists suddenly going to be less greedy, and more likely to care about their compatriots instead of eager to exploit them because we give them more power and more money?
No. They won't. They'll just find better ways to exploit this sudden surge of basically free money.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I find it funny who ubi proponents say we need UBI because capitalism failed to have wages match cost of living and simultaneously say UBI will fix it with capitalism.
Housing is expensive because there isn't enough. If capitalism could fix it, then housing would have at a minimum matched inflation and should have decreased in price because of technology improvements. So giving people more money absolutely cannot fix the housing crisis. UBI would be a handout for landlords.
When demand is the problem in a supply/demand economy, you can't fix it with more demand (cash).
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There's a few reasons. Firstly greed is a motivator, and people work hard if they believe they'll receive more for more effort. This gets people to go out and generate the resources that need to be distributed. Second, fungible tokens allow people to trade on the open market instead of having to find a particular person who is willing to trade say, a worm gear for a bale or two of cotton. The token is the middle man that allows someone trying to sell something sell to someone who doesn't have what the seller plans to finally trade for. That's why money started to exist in the first place.
Even in a communist system, there needs to be a way to transfer the results of labor into the things a person needs. Money is that way. Even if it means everyone gets the same amount of money to buy what they need. Everyone's resource needs are different. You can't just say everyone gets the exact same everything.
Finally, we're not post-scarcity. Not really. Until resource manufacture is so automated that it doesn't require people to do labor to acquire it, we either pay people to do the labor or we force them to via slavery. For that reason alone, we need money.
As I said to the other person, there can be a donation and request system to make sure everyone gets what they need, without tying money into it and having this weird limit of the amount of stuff people can get, and tying the idea of value to it all.
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I'm going to go against the trend here and say that libertarian corporate city-states actually sound pretty cool. They're generally not portrayed positively in fiction but I think they might work well in practice. I'm a lot less optimistic about cooperating with all my fellow Americans in order to govern the whole country democratically than I used to be. Choosing to move to an independent city-state with a government that I agree with (albeit one I don't elect) might work better.
yeah, being blacklisted and exiled from modern society all because I called great leader "Fuckerberg" in 2010.
so fucking cool /s
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We have flying cars. They're called helicopters. And the limits to us having post scarcity are all societal/political, not technological.
Helicopters aren't exactly convenient personal transport. We could definitely make smaller maybe autopiloted transports.
Regarding post scarcity, that was the point, we could do it now with enough motivation.
