| |
| ▲ | rayiner a day ago | parent [-] | | You’ve got it backwards. The Star Trek universe is depicted as originating out of a recognizable United States. Warp Drive was of course, invented by a Musk-like individual in Montana, not a committee or government. Cochrane is depicted as having no particular moral philosophy and as having invented warp drive in pursuit of profit. It’s very clear that post scarcity came first and the socialist/military model came afterwards. It’s notable that while Roddenberry had various humanist philosophies, TOS and TNG more than anything resemble the U.S. military officer culture, reflecting his Air Force service. You’ll see the exact same culture if you walk into an officer’s club at the U.S. Naval Academy. | | |
| ▲ | ben_w 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Cochrane is depicted as having no particular moral philosophy and as having invented warp drive in pursuit of profit. And as a drunk, who got to this stage in the aftermath of WW3, which was definitely not post-scarcity at this point because of how hard it was to "scrounge together enough titanium for the cockpit". And immediately after the test flight, some pointy-eared vegetarian space Buddhists landed and said hi. > It’s notable that while Roddenberry had various humanist philosophies, TOS and TNG more than anything resemble the U.S. military officer culture, reflecting his Air Force service. You’ll see the exact same culture if you walk into an officer’s club at the U.S. Naval Academy. TOS is very much "space is an ocean". NCC-1701 is very obviously a shoe-in for CVN-65, the "colonies" and other locations they visit are scaled more like Pacific islands than planets, the episode with Romulan cloaking device is classic submarine warfare filmography including getting people to be quiet (so the space sonar wouldn't pick them up?) TNG kept a lot of this, but was also "families on board" from the get-go. | |
| ▲ | vrganj a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm not sure I want to argue how a fictional universe's fictional history is arranged. I can tell you however, that in the real world, with real incentive structures, if we remove scarcity before we fix ownership, we will get a few feudal lords and the rest of us lacking any leverage their dependence on labour used to give us and dependent on their (historically rather limited) charity. You cannot have a Star Trek future if you don't fix the social part first. Technological progress will make the social issues worse otherwise. There is no point of technological progress that will magically make the rich and powerful suddenly give up their wealth and power. Maybe in a made-up world, people are less power hungry and greedy. In the real one, more technology owned by a few effectively means that their concentration of wealth and power will just keep increasing at the expense of everyone else. | | |
| ▲ | rayiner a day ago | parent [-] | | Your theory is contrary to the evidence of history. Technological progress makes people more free, not less. 500 years ago, you would have been a serf and your life would be literally worthless. In much of the undeveloped world, that’s still true. | | |
| ▲ | 43187 a day ago | parent | next [-] | | And 30 years ago you could still afford a house. Tech helped people up until the internet, then it started to enslave them and make them poorer. All new energy initiatives should be nationalized and out of the hands of the tech robber barons. | | |
| ▲ | MentalM 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | > And 30 years ago you could still afford a house. It is the people, who had build houses 30 years ago, and who set a price for those houses. Then came the government and start to regulate, redistribute, optimize and improve housing. And We live with the results. |
| |
| ▲ | vrganj 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The industrial revolution begot the labor movement, which is what caused greater freedom. It could do that because of the dependence on labor for production, or in other words leverage over the ownership class. If we accelerate technology to the point where we sever this dependency, all those freedoms will no longer have the leverage required to extract them. Our lives didn't become not worthless because of the steam machine. They became not worthless because of leverage over capital reproduction, and once that's gone they may well become worthless again. Technology doesn't cause freedom, or at least not directly. Social relations and power dynamics do. Technology just drives those. | | |
| ▲ | rayiner 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Technology doesn't cause freedom, or at least not directly. Social relations and power dynamics do. Technology just drives those. Technology drives and makes possible changes in social relations. | | |
| ▲ | vrganj 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | Indeed, that is what I'm saying. But whether things change for the better or the worse isn't up to technology, it is up to social dynamics. |
| |
| ▲ | Gareth321 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think you're both right in different ways. Some labour movements were not dependent on technological advancement. Some technological advancements materially and independently improved the lives of people. The contraceptive pill gave women much greater control over the timing of pregnancy. [Its diffusion substantially affected women's investment in professional careers and the timing of marriage.](https://www.nber.org/papers/w7527) Medical and reproductive technologies played an important role in increasing married women's ability to participate in paid work. Those are changes in actual individual choice brought about, in significant part, by technology. However if we circle back to your original comment that social change (and I'm reading that as some form of communism) is required before technology delivers material abundance, then I feel compelled to remind you that the last 37 times humanity attempted this, it failed so spectacularly that 100+ million people died. I think it's clear that whatever the nuance of this discussion, communism (or whatever aphorism you prefer) is incompatible with scarce resources. I therefore argue that the abundance must come first. | | |
| ▲ | vrganj 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | So I think abundance completely changes the game and I think we can all agree on that. I would argue that if we get abundance before fundamentally changing ownership structures, we will get a handful of people that control said abundance and with that, have basically infinite leverage over the rest of humanity. Labor will no longer be required for their productive needs, so that handful of people that controls the abundance machines will no longer have any incentive to keep the rest of humanity satisfied, or even alive for that matter. In other words, if we don't change social relations before we get to this state, we will end up in a world where the Musks, Bezos and Zucks of this world control all material production, with the rest of us reduced to being dependent on their charity. Personally, that sounds like the worst dystopia imaginable. I will give you that prior attempts at socialism weren't necessarily successful and a lot of people died, however, I also think that argument requires holding one eye shut. People are dying from capitalism right now. There's a homeless guy in SoMa that is breathing his last breath as we speak. There's entire villages in Africa that can't afford clean water while Nestle sells it in plastic bottles that pollute our planet. The status quo is not without its own violence and I think that is a point that too often gets swept under the rug. Either way though, I think even if I were to concede that capitalism historically had better outcomes (which I have not been fully sold on! it's positives have just been more articulated imo, but that's another debate.), we are in a critical moment right now. If we really believe we're to transition into a post-scarcity world, we need to make sure the right social relations are in place before that happens and whatever we have right now is locked in forever. All criticism of socialism's supposed productive ineffectiveness becomes irrelevant once the transition is done anyways. | | |
| ▲ | Gareth321 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | > I would argue that if we get abundance before fundamentally changing ownership structures, we will get a handful of people that control said abundance and with that, have basically infinite leverage over the rest of humanity. It's a valid concern. We use democracy right now to address inequality. Are you concerned that those in charge of the abundance machines will create their own nations with militaries to prevent other nations from taking said resources? To this I would respond: there is nothing stopping other nations from building their own abundance machines. As we've seen with AI, distillation cannot be stopped. The knowledge of how to build these machines cannot be censored. Here in Denmark I have high confidence that people will vote to build nationalised abundance machines for the good of all. Perhaps this is more of a regional risk? There are some nations which culturally value individuality. I'm not sure the U.S. would build national abundance machines. I think I broadly agree with your thesis, however. Abundance is going to force massive social change. If goods and services are effectively free, most jobs disappear. So too does their income and consumer demand, which destroys the entire premise of capitalism. You might be surprised to learn that Elon Musk believes capitalism will cease to function in the next 10-20 years because of this. So abundance will force us to move to a system which much more closely resembles communism. It's the transition I'm worried about. When Middle American manufacturing jobs were offshored to China, Hilary Clinton famously laughed at them and told them to "learn to code." I fear many more people whose jobs are lost to AI will be met with similar derision. It is only when things get very bad that change will occur. The Star Trek timeline describes this collapse between 2020s-2053. | | |
| ▲ | vrganj 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Are you concerned that those in charge of the abundance machines will create their own nations with militaries to prevent other nations from taking said resources? Even though I'm not too concerned about that specifically, that is clearly a plan they have. [0] > To this I would respond: there is nothing stopping other nations from building their own abundance machines. As we've seen with AI, distillation cannot be stopped. The knowledge of how to build these machines cannot be censored. Here in Denmark I have high confidence that people will vote to build nationalised abundance machines for the good of all. I'm not worried about the knowledge. I'm worried about the material conditions. These machines need compute and with that all sorts of inputs. I worry that the first to achieve such an abundance machine will use the abundance generated by it to monopolize control over these inputs. > You might be surprised to learn that Elon Musk believes capitalism will cease to function in the next 10-20 years because of this. So abundance will force us to move to a system which much more closely resembles communism. It's the transition I'm worried about. I, too, am worried about the transition, but for different reasons. I believe Elon when he says he believes capitalism will end in a few decades. However, I don't think he has prosperity for all in mind and that end state won't just naturally happen by itself. I think if we leave the transition to him and his peers, they will use it to build a system where they are untouchable god kings and the rest of us are paupers reduced to their charity. That, to me, is the core transition risk we need to manage. We need to make sure abundance machines aren't just a device for completely centralizing power in the hands of a few. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%B3spera | | |
| ▲ | Gareth321 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | > I'm not worried about the knowledge. I'm worried about the material conditions. These machines need compute and with that all sorts of inputs. I worry that the first to achieve such an abundance machine will use the abundance generated by it to monopolize control over these inputs. I understand. I place less weight into this risk. The current AI supply chain is so globally interdependent that it has effectively distributed itself beyond centralised control. China has received the full weight of global chip sanctions and still somehow manages to provide competitive coding models using either grey imports, offshore cloud compute, or locally produced chips. It would be very difficult (and I would argue almost impossible) for a nation and especially an individual/company to seize ownership of the entire supply chain and prevent everyone else in the world from producing their own AI/chips/abundance machines. > I think if we leave the transition to him and his peers, they will use it to build a system where they are untouchable god kings and the rest of us are paupers reduced to their charity. No doubt many people in positions of power are megalomaniacs. This is why I place such emphasis on democracy. This allows the powerless to retain control of their nation and borders. | | |
| ▲ | vrganj 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | > This is why I place such emphasis on democracy. This allows the powerless to retain control of their nation and borders. I think this is also a core part of our disagreement. I think if we allow privatized power structures to grow indefinitely, democracy will no longer be able to constrain them at some point, or they will subvert democracy itself by corrupting elected leadership. You see both of these in action right now. Think of Elon Musk actively defying Brazilian rule of law [0] or him literally being put into a position where he can neuter the institutions designed to hold him democratically accountable with the DOGE appointment. To quote MLK - "Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God's children." I think fundamentally one cannot disentangle democratic control of political power from democratic control of the economy, because economic power can be converted into political power and as long as we let economic power concentrate in the hands of a few unelected oligarchs, they will continue to use it to exert political power as well. [0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/starlink-tells-brazil-reg... | | |
| ▲ | Gareth321 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | > I think this is also a core part of our disagreement. I think if we allow privatized power structures to grow indefinitely, democracy will no longer be able to constrain them at some point, or they will subvert democracy itself by corrupting elected leadership. I agree there is a risk, and I think defence of democracy should be at the forefront of fighting against the future you fear. I do not think the risk appears at the end of a gun. Rather, via propaganda and corruption. We know how effective propaganda can be, starting with Goebbels and all the way through to social media today. The problem here is that there is no clearly defined solution. Some people prescribe state control of information, which has historically resulted in catastrophic outcomes. Some people prescribe uncensored information to the greatest degree possible, and to the degree we have that today, it's also not working out very well. Perhaps this will be the great question of our time. For the record, re DOGE, I see that as the people getting what they voted for. Musk campaigned clearly on his intended actions, and for better or worse, a plurality of voters voted for that. We should be careful not to criticise democracy just because voters chose a different direction. However I think this is partly influenced by what I describe above. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| ▲ | someonebaggy a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | What's my life worth now? |
|
| |
| ▲ | 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | hollerith 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Are you really going to keep on trying to defend the notion that the human society portrayed in Star Trek is not socialist? (In The Next Generation, no human investors, traders or financiers are ever depicted, and human society did away with money. Socialist countries have militaries, too.) The proper reply to the parent of your comment IMHO is that Star Trek is evil propaganda, not that the vision of society depicted in the propaganda is not socialist. | | |
| ▲ | vrganj 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Wow, that comment went from quite reasonable to taking a very strange turn in the second paragraph. | |
| ▲ | rayiner 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That’s not what I said. I said that the human society portrayed in Star Trek had warp drive before it had socialism. Viewed charitably, it reflects how society might plausibly be structured when technology renders questions of resource or capital allocation largely moot. |
|
|
|
