Your Thoughts on the Future

[Drashner1]

The transition between an economy and social structure built around human work and an Autototopia will become even more brutal as machine capabilities increase. A UBI is a stopgap measure of largely untested effectiveness, but so far it's the best idea at least that I've heard. The other suggestions all amount to band aids on bullet wounds; They may not work, and some may actually make the problems worse.

The question that arises is how much of this drama will be real and how much self-generated. With sufficiently capable automation there is really no real reason (meaning a physics based reason) that you need to pay people anything or require payment for anything. If we wanted to we could set up a technological version of the hunter-gatherer cultures of ancient times. You could simply harvest what you want/need from the 'mechosystem' and it would just automatically replace it. Or you could just tell it what you want and it would provide it.

OA pretty much runs on this in most places, since there is no task that a sophont can perform that a machine can't do better and the resource base is huge and combined with highly efficient systems for both creation and recycling.

The fears about 'what will we do when people aren't needed anymore' may be just in the short term or based in the faulty logic that we MUST have a society based on paying people and having them buy things.

Increased medical/bio tech will start to bear fruit by extending human lifetimes. What this does to an already over-burdened population growth is fairly predictable. As the effectiveness of the methods gets put to the test and results become known, I predict conflict over who gets to live and who dies.

Population growth is largely a developing nation problem. Birth rates in Europe and the US are either stablizing or actually falling below replacement levels last I heard. If the standard of living can be brought up in the rest of the world soon enough and in a sustainable way (including ready access to birth control) then the people living there will likely also shift into a mode of having fewer children.

It's not clear what life extension technology would look like. It might be more of a lifestyle choice or something provided quite easily and cheaply.

Biotech also has its dark side; the capability to make your own bioweapons will be realized, with all that this implies. Human genome manipulation will also take effect. There will be failures, too, human beings getting modified in damaging ways when trying to make them "better".

From some things I've seen here and there, homemade bioweapons are something we could do now - at least in terms of capability. Doing it without getting caught is apparently harder.

Brain/computer interfaces will come into the real world, starting in small ways and then growing in complexity and capability.

We will become an increasingly transparent/surveilled society. Everything will be online, all the time. If you want privacy, stay home and shut down every device. Windowless rooms and even Faraday cages may become popular features in new homes.

Or people may stop feeling as great of a desire for privacy. I'm not entirely sure how much the idea of privacy owes to human nature and how much is actually just a cultural artifact of Western civilization. Certainly there are plenty of cultures (past and present) where people live(d) in much closer quarters than what people in the US consider the norm. They still manage(d) reasonably well.

Does anyone have any data on the question of how much (if any) privacy humans actually need?

Todd