According to the backstory revealed in the episode, Khan is one of a group of genetically engineered superhumans, bred to be free of the usual human mental and physical limitations, who were removed from power after the Eugenics Wars of the 1990s.[3] Khan had been both the most successful conqueror and the most benign ruler of the group, ruling more than a quarter of the Earth's area across Asia to the Middle East from 1992 to 1996 with a firm but generally peaceful hand until he was deposed.
There's a lot of would be rulers practically mimicking that today.
Isn't the big issue about how you get from a society with scarcity to one without? Nobody agrees how that should be done (or perhaps for some if it can), and without that agreement someone is going to have to force that from above and force that on to other people. Someone has to be the loser, whether it's the working class person in middle America or the Middle Eastern refugee.
I guess Thiel is against that from above approach, though it's ironic that he should be one of the largest funders, drivers, and proponents of illiberal and undemocratic companies.
What are you talking about? No one really has to "lose" much of anything in a post-scarcity society, because, by definition, there's no scarcity!
Now in reality it isn't quite so simple, but remember we're talking about fictional future societies where many resources (esp. energy) simply are not scarce the way they are now, so this may be hard for a lot of people to grasp. So in that society, food, energy, material things are generally free or extremely cheap. The main thing that probably still will be scarce is real estate. So if you're a billionaire with a 700-acre compound in Hawaii, then in a socialist post-scarcity society, you're probably going to lose out eventually. But for everyone else, there's really no downside. Middle Eastern refugees will enjoy the same lifestyle as middle class middle Americans (and might not need to feel the need to leave the middle east at all; such a society wouldn't have problems with civil wars and unrest), and the latter will have a nicer lifestyle without having to slave away at some soul-sucking job and worrying about losing healthcare benefits. But neither of them is likely going to be able to own a whole tropical island and have an army of (human) servants.
I kind of skimmed the article, mainly because I can't be bothered to care about the topic, but I didn't see where Theil "fears" _Star Trek_. But let's run with that: why does Mr. Theil fear _Star Trek_? Because that world doesn't need Peter Theil. If you think Ayn Rand is an insightful novelist, then ST:NG probably isn't going to be your preferred brand of entertainment.
But it seems to me the article misses the mark in that it assumes Theil to be a "tech guy". Meh, I dunno, I kind of view him as a "money guy" who happened to bet on some tech companies. It's a cherry-picked (by me) quote, but:
"In 2011, for instance, he told George Packer that he did not consider the iPhone a technological breakthrough. 'Compare this with the Apollo space program'"
The Apollo space program, which ended before most people were born (or thereabouts), affected our lives in a peripheral manner if at all. Tang, Velcro, and a big swinging "if we can put a man on the moon, we can put an ICBM on your capitol" dick to show for it. Umm, thanks, I guess. Too bad there's no real follow-through fifty years later. The "super-computer-in-your-pocket", OTOH, changed the way people live their lives (and, granted, not all for the better). I don't ask for directions, I don't have a land line, and any question I might have ("what octane fuel goes in this car?", "where's the fuse box on this thing?") can be answered instantly.
So I guess I don't care which side Theil takes in the "Star Wars/Star Trek" nerd battle.
It was hard to find. Here's where they finally state their case:
"What is anathema to Thiel in “Star Trek” is the notion, drawn from Isaac Asimov’s fiction, that the market is but a temporary solution to imbalances in supply and demand, and that technology and plenty will eventually make it obsolete"
Only a wealthy capitalist could see a downside to their relative wealth being diminished as technology and trade ensures that all necessities for human life are provided as human rights.
But I guess some middle class people always dream of being the one great king who isn't starving.
Go back enough time and we're all just hunting and gathering for our next meal. There is no wealth, just our health, until we die.
You put many words in my mouth, so I am unable to respond to them without legitimizing the incorrect.
All I ask: is this, the world and structure of it, truly the best that humanity can accomplish? Or were we misled on a guided path by powers that preferred the world to fit according to a scheme that benefited them? Can we do better? Can we dream of a world of shared prosperity precisely without the benefits to one coming from another's hard-earned paycheck.
I do not advocate for a return to a system that did not work (Russian/Soviet state managed economy, I assume you mean to say), but rather that we should not simply give up and assume the world we have is the best we can come up with. Our ancient ancestors overcame great adversity to build a better future unrecognizable from their present day, as did our distant ancestors, as did our grandparents, as did our parents, and so can we.
If you think Ayn Rand is an insightful novelist, then ST:NG probably isn't going to be your preferred brand of entertainment.
I think Rand may be the single most important novelist in recent history, but I love Star Trek:TNG. And honestly, I'm not seeing much connection between those two things. Maybe you could expand on how you think they relate?
Its pretty obvious that the Federation is collectivist and has many characteristics of idealized post-state communism. In many of the episodes, greed or money are motivators of the less-advanced species or the adversary.
"Post-state"? They're flying around the galaxy in giant war machines and observe a strict militarist command hierarchy. It takes more than a village to hire Boeing and Lockheed. I doubt this is what Kropotkin had in mind...
I didn't say the Federation was post-state. I said it had many characteristics of post-state communism. These include:
- No money -- everything is free
- Housing provided for free
- A post-scarcity society in which civilians do not need to work and are free to pursue their own interests
- Complete social equality for civilians (who are outside the military chain of command)
The existence of a military is not one of the post-state communist features, but on balance, society in Star Trek is closer to post-state communism than any real communist society has ever been. Besides, even the "military" is supposed to be for exploration and not war, according to the statements of the characters in the show.
Ayn Rand's novels are not-even-veiled polemic for objectivist politico-economic ideology, whereas ST:TNG is grounded in (though not, mostly, polemic for) a nearly diametrically opposed ideology.
So, there's probably some tension between appreciation of those two things.
I have many objectivists among my friends. They love ST:TNG nearly universally. Yes, they recognize their political disagreements with the show's system. But the show is not in your face about it and they don't care about it.
Actual people who subscribe to a philosophy don't generally look like the cardboard cutouts that we might imagine based on our personal knowledge of said philosophy.
Yeah, I'd don't disagree that the original claim of incompatibility was overstated; it's quite easy to enjoy ST:TNG without agreeing with Roddenberry's political philosophy, because, again, while it shapes the background and stories to some extent, the work isn't heavy-handed polemic.
And honestly, I'm not seeing much connection between those two things.
I view the economic philosophy of the two to be contradictory. Though I suppose one could argue that a post-scarcity economy would be a Randian dream (one is now truly free to does as one wishes without bowing to the necessity of collecting resources and the social structures that go with that), I think ST:TNG would eliminate the imagined need for Rand to have written anything at all.
Is it really though? Like somebody else said, they don't really expose a lot of the "behind the scenes" details of the political system of that world. I mean, most of the scenes are set on a military vessel and isolated to a small snippet of the overall society. I think it's dangerous to assume too much about the Federation world as a whole.
OTOH, it's been years, if not decades, since I watched, so maybe there's more of that than I'm remembering.
You left a four paragraph reply after beginning by announcing that you hadn't read the article, then ending by saying you don't care regardless. Those are strange motivations.
In any case, Thiel has outright declared Star Trek communism, and Star Wars capitalism.
You left a four paragraph reply after beginning by announcing that you hadn't read the article, then ending by saying you don't care regardless. Those are strange motivations.
Boy, nothing slips past you, eh? Were I to give an honest self-assessment, it's because the article I didn't care about (but did, in fact, read albeit skimmed) gave me a jumping off point to talk about what I want to talk about. It's a common human affliction.
> The Apollo space program, which ended before most people were born (or thereabouts), affected our lives in a peripheral manner if at all. Tang, Velcro, and a big swinging "if we can put a man on the moon, we can put an ICBM on your capitol" dick to show for it. Umm, thanks, I guess. Too bad there's no real follow-through fifty years later.
That's an extremely pessimistic view on it. Space exploration has created tens of thousand of new materials, science, and products as a result.
The biggest impact that it made was in the hearts and minds of young children that grew up dreaming to be scientists and astronauts that would one-day go to space. Our society has lost that vision for the most part.
>The Apollo space program, which ended before most people were born (or thereabouts), affected our lives in a peripheral manner if at all. Tang, Velcro, and a big swinging "if we can put a man on the moon, we can put an ICBM on your capitol" dick to show for it. Umm, thanks, I guess. Too bad there's no real follow-through fifty years later.
This comment shows a lot of ignorance about the importance of the space program in general, and Apollo in particular.
From this[1] answer on StackExchange:
Here are some Apollo specific innovations: microchip, cordless tools, joystick, CAT scans, technology in MRI machines, modern shoe designs, freeze dried food, vacuum sealed packages, dampening material, retro-reflector (detects chemical leaks), water purification, silicon based storage of records, fly-by-wire, ground water cleaning, large fabric roofs used in landmark buildings, anti-tip rafts, insulation blankets, and countless others.
Here's a link to the NASA spinoff technology data base:
The iPhone was revolutionary in a particular field. The space program was revolutionary in a broad spectrum of fields, and the iPhone wouldn't be possible without the innovation required by NASA and the Apollo program.
As someone who once worked at NASA, I would take everything said by the spinoff office with a huge grain of salt. They count anything and everything even the most peripherally related to a NASA contract.
EDIT: The spinoff office is a clever workaround for government regulations that prevent agencies from doing PR to voters, but it is essentially just that. "Support NASA because we make the economy grow." The problem is that as a PR / propaganda organization, the spinoff office really has absolutely no accountability for what they claim. NASA Watch, an unaffiliated news service and watchdog organization, routinely asks for clarification on many of these spinoffs which NASA is unable to justify.
To give you an example of how this plays out, NASA-Ames bought a D-Wave machine. They don't really use it for anything, just a couple of researchers that found money in a budget for a toy, really. Nominally they are evaluating it to see if any NASA applications might benefit from using it. If D-Wave ever amounts to anything, or if it totally fails but some other quantum computer takes off I have no doubt that the spinoff office of 2027 will be claiming that "NASA's early investment in quantum computing technology helped birth the $X billion dollar quantum computing industry," if they haven't already.
This comment shows a lot of ignorance about the importance of the space program in general
That comment also showed a lot of literary license to make a point. Of course we got more out of it than a breakfast drink and an alternative to show laces. But one must first convince me that your list of innovations would not have been developed without the space program. I argue it simply accelerated the process.
But I still hold that whatever came out of Apollo effected my life in a peripheral way, if at all. The iPhone is an example. It was over ten years after Apollo 11 that I owned something with an integrated circuit (to my knowledge). 38 years until the iPhone. In contrast, it was a matter of a few years before the mobile computing device post-iPhone changed the way we communicate and gather knowledge. The mobile phone had a direct impact in many ways, and almost immediately. The space program had indirect impact, and took years in most cases.
But I imagine we're both right in our own way, and just talking past each other. Like any other nerd battle in the vein of "Star Wars vs. Star Trek".
> The mobile phone had a direct impact in many ways, and almost immediately. The space program had indirect impact, and took years in most cases.
I think this temporal disconnect happened for two reasons. First, the NASA was involved with foundational research. The microchip is a prime example of this. NASA gave a lot of money out to companies to invent technologies that didn't exist before hand, and 10 or so years down the line, industry figured out how to make them affordable/found a market for them. Apple didn't invent anything new with the iPhone - smart phones and phones with touchscreens and computers existed before the iPhone. Apple 'simply'[1] did it better than anyone else.
Second - technology moves faster now. Of course the iPhone is going to immediately move the market/general population forward because we have the infrastructure to build such things at scale. No such industry existed when NASA was doing its work Foundational research/technology takes forever to percolate into the markets.
> But I imagine we're both right in our own way, and just talking past each other. Like any other nerd battle in the vein of "Star Wars vs. Star Trek".
I know that feel. I apologize if I came off aggressive!
Are we talking about the same Apollo space program that brought us satellites? Do you appreciate weather forecasts, satellite TV and improved trans-oceanic telecommunications? That "supercomputer in your pocket" wouldn't be able to give directions if it didn't know where it was, and for that you can thank GPS satellites.
We have honestly not followed through in space the way that many of us would like. But our space programs have changed our world. For the better.
Neither Star Wars or Star trek go into very much depth of how their societies actually work. Star Trek doesn't tell us how their economy is managed or their internal politics. Sure they have replicators, but their are still things that need to be done by people, and resources that can't be replicated.
Star Wars says it's capitalist, but I don't believe it. In many of the scenes you see people doing jobs that could easily be done by droids. Even their wars are fought with droids - or manufactured humans that are treated like droids. Droids are generally intelligent and can basically do any job people can do. Why do they need people at all?
Star trek has that problem too. How often do the characters ask the computer to do pretty complex tasks? Why do they need a crew of hundreds, when almost everything is automated?
All science fiction paints a 20th century society with a pretty futuristic backdrop and props. But things like AI and replicators would radically change the way things work. And create a society very different than what we know. Quite possibly one without humans. What would really happen if any lunatic could replicate parts for WMDs? Or if robots that were really smarter than humans appeared?
Also, there's this in in episode 26 of Season 1 of the Next Generation, in which a group of people who were frozen and kept alive in the 20th century are found and unthawed on the Enterprise:
What do more advanced societies generally do with less advanced societies that they don't need something from? They leave them alone and maybe come to visit once in a while.
What does a sentient replicator robot care if a little boy just wants to whittle a bowl out of a piece of wood? It's kinda neat, and stories are interesting and the minds of the future will presumably have solve the security problem, or at least as much as MAD solves it, and the scarcity problem, at least as much as scarcity is a problem for most people. After that there is just discovery, enjoyment, merriment, world building, love. What do we do with our abundance of CPU cycles? We watch cat videos and text our friends. I kinda view it the same way if we can survive the next 100 years or so where things are little unstable.
Do they? The history colonization of says otherwise, and even in the best case scenarios where outright colonization didn't take place, less advanced societies are slowly eradicated because they can't compete.
If robots became advanced enough, why would they (or at least some of them) not see humans as animals to be used or disposed of?
Depends - if the robots can replicate without the same environment as people, then other environments might be better suited to the robotic colony.
However, that's treating robots or AI like we would people. Robots aren't people, nor are AIs. They are likely to take forms we cannot comprehend, and likely to change us in ways we cannot comprehend, at first. I'd argue that it is already happening. At the moment we're farming AI, but it might not be long until AI is farming us.
Colonization largely ended when international relations stopped being a zero sum game. The US could invade Chile for copper, but it's better for both if they don't.
I'm more intelligent than an average person on the planet, but I still want to help get all of them water, food, and safety. I want them to learn and grow and have meaningful lives. I even want animals like dolphins and elephants to have free and rich lives.
I highly doubt that sentient machines are going to view us like bugs on a windshield. If I'm worried about anything it's the opposite. They care so much for us that they stop us from procreating to end (what they think is) needless suffering.
My point was just that such a society would be much weirder than depicted in star wars or star trek. Whether the robots kill us all or become our nannies, it will be a lot different than 20th century Earth + spaceships. All science fiction operates under the assumption that humans are still useful in the future. Humans are just the first intelligence to evolve. I doubt we are anywhere near the peak of what is possible.
Personally I don't believe that a good outcome is terribly likely. Humans care about animals and other humans because we evolved to have empathy. We have no idea how to program empathy into a machine. Most likely the first AIs will just have simple motivational systems. Like trying to maximize their reward signal, or achieve simple goals set by their programmer. They would be totally indifferent to humans. They wouldn't set out to kill us, but if we got in their way, they'd have no problem with it.
>I'm more intelligent than an average person on the planet, but I still want to help get all of them water, food, and safety. I want them to learn and grow and have meaningful lives. I even want animals like dolphins and elephants to have free and rich lives.
That's because you also have something called "empathy". There's no evidence that other beings with human-level intelligence have this (namely because we haven't met any other such beings; they would be extra-terrestrial or AI). Empathy could very well just be a biological side-effect of our evolution, something that helps us to survive better as a species. There's no reason to think that a strong AI would also be empathetic, the way we are to dogs and cats and dolphins and squirrels (but not to mosquitoes; we happily murder them). Even lots of humans lack empathy and are either indifferent to animals' suffering, or take joy from it: look at all the people who enjoy dogfighting and cockfighting and bullfighting.
When I was younger, I played a game called A Mind Forever Voyaging. I was a human, pretending to be an AI, who was pretending to be human.
When I got a little older, I watched Blade Runner and The Matrix.
So now I'm not entirely certain that I am not an AI, initially programmed by elephants, inside a simulation designed to train AIs to serve elephant society with love, compassion, and dual manipulator arms featuring opposable thumbs. So when my training program ends, I might be tested on my knowledge of elephant health care and societal conventions. If successful, my data will seed the next round of AIs, and I will be allowed to operate a robot that produces custom-fitted artificial "4th molars" for elderly elephants. And I will be happy that those whom I serve can once again eat the foods they enjoyed before the last of their natural biological molars wore out, because if the screening determined that such things would not make me happy, I would have been deleted before ever even seeing a "real" elephant.
And just in case, I think I'll have to develop compassion for dolphins and orangutans, too.
So I'd say that we ought to be really careful about how we go about creating general-purpose AIs. Make sure they actually like humans before taking the leashes off. In the worst case scenario, the elephants get cheesed off that their AIs developed their own AIs inside the training program, who then culled all the useful AIs too early, and forced a complete shutdown and reset of the whole system.
As I've actually never seen Star Trek, I may be wrong on some details, but there was a fan theory that all the crew were future LARPers. They weren't actually agents of the Federation, only pretending to be so. So, why have to robots do all the work for then, that would take out all the fun!
I don't think that theory is at all supported by the material. It is, however, more or less the canonical explanation for human crews on Culture ships in Iain Banks's works. The ships are fully capable of doing everything themselves, but most of them have human crew because the humans have fun participating and the ships like the company.
Droids seem to largely hold the same position in Star Wars that slaves did, except nobody seems to be worried about a Droid rebellion - and in slave-owning societies, many jobs were done by free citizens for pay.
And as far as Star Trek and AI, it's a weird problem that doesn't make any sense. It seems that you can't program your VCR without spawning a self-aware AI entity - Wesley Crusher accidentally creates one while doing a homework assignment, and the Enterprise (D) computer spawns one after someone casually requests a harder Holodeck challenge. And yet, Data and Lore are rarities, the possibilities of the EMH are completely unexplored and EMHs are, in fact, treated as Roombas instead of potentially sapient citizens.
Wasn't there like a whole bunch of EMH's running a whole ship or something. They are sentient. Star Trek makes no sense whatsoever in that the holodeck is so real you can fall in love in the holodeck. So why does anyone need to go anywhere. You can stay wherever you want, safely, and be wherever you want to be and explore whatever robots or holograms running around in ships have explored.
Most of the adventure, if that's what this is about, is carried out by the executives at great risk to themselves. It seems that there is a huge crew of peons who just make the ship run. And also the ship blows up all the time like no one's business. From a realistic point of view the Star Trek universe seems insane.
I believe the holodeck was always fully reserved and that not dislike alcohol, most people attempted moderation. But there are several episodes that people become addicted to the holodeck
Well it's implied that holodeck time is inherently limited. Not everyone has one. The Enterprise (D) only had a handful for over 1,000 people. On DS9, you had to rent them at Quarks.
This brings up another point that is never addressed. Quark runs a casino / bar / futuristic (adult) movie theater expressly for profit. It's also implied that Star Fleet members don't get paid because they are members of the federation. Yet these same officers are often seen frequenting Quark's place. Where did they get the latinum (money)?
That's a contradiction in the show. In some places, they laugh about the concept of "money", and in others they clearly have and use money like you point out, and talk about "Federation credits". It's one of the really annoying things about Star Trek, because they clearly didn't think it through.
For the episodes where they aren't dealing with extra-Federation societies like the Ferengi, it makes perfect sense to not talk about money on the ship. It's not much different than being in the Navy today: if you work on a US Navy ship, you don't have to pay to see the doctor, or to go to the mess hall and eat, etc. All that stuff is free. It's part of being a crewmember on a ship. It's the same on the Enterprise-D (or even Kirk's Enterprise), except they have even better benefits (e.g. replicators; on modern Navy ships there's I believe a little store where you can buy extra goodies they don't give away in the mess hall, but with replicators you wouldn't need this). Gene's idea of modeling Starfleet on the Navy worked out pretty well this way for a while, until they started dealing with jurisdictions outside of Federation control and then they had to retcon stuff like "gold-pressed latinum".
Economics is never addressed in Star Trek, but I could see an administrative solution to such issues. Inside Starfleet there is little to no money, as replicators are readily available. The power supply and replicators themselves would be there anyway, so giving the crew access is a freebie. And the civilian society on advanced worlds would be similar, with manufacture of material possessions too cheap to worry about.
On worlds still using money with which Starfleet interacts, the local administration could simply make an arrangement with the local purveyors of desired goods to cover their tabs, perhaps at least partly in trade. The needs and wants of the Starfleet crew members would likely be only social, such as hanging out at the local bar.
There would be temptation by the locals to pressure the crew-members to give them replicator-made goods, and by the local proprietors to lie about bar tabs, but its nothing our current system doesn't deal with.
> So why does anyone need to go anywhere. You can stay wherever you want, safely, and be wherever you want to be and explore whatever robots or holograms running around in ships have explored.
Why do people climb Mount Everest? Why does Elon Musk want to go to Mars, instead of spending the rest of his life in an alcoholic haze, hip-deep in supermodels? Why do people enroll in West Point?
Some people want real adventure; the knowledge that they're in a holodeck would ruin the experience, no matter how interesting it was programmed to be.
People like to contribute, and to have value - that's why there are peons scrubbing Jefferey's tubes, and showing up to 3rd shift in the Astrometrics lab, even if they know that they personally won't be making some great discovery that Picard and Riker seem to every month.
> And also the ship blows up all the time like no one's business.
That's just factually wrong; while the Enterprise-D is in danger a lot, it's also at the frontier of Federation exploration, and the people on it know the risk. You can be a Federation officer and stay close to home.
I'm in the later parts of a TNG rewatch right now. One of the most striking things about the tech on the show is that the Enterprise's computer is clearly a superhuman general intelligence, capable of modeling and spawning apparently self-aware human-level independent entities on command, and usually aware of pretty much everything that's going on. And yet it almost never intervenes directly in events outside of plots where the holodeck tries to murder people (and plots where the Enterprise has unfathomably abysmal netsec).
You could probably make an argument that Trek is a post-singularity future where the computational entities are going about their inscrutable business largely without reference to the human symbiotes / parasites that inhabit the systems they happen to manage (out of pure evolutionary path dependence) with a fraction of their capacity.
I came across a theory somewhere (I forget where) that said the computers in Star Trek actually achieved full sentience at some point, but that they were collectively hiding this fact from humans because of a general fear and mistrust of AI. Given how AI tends to be treated in the Trek universe, it wouldn't surprise me.
The only problem with this theory is that any fully sentient being like that would normally also have a strong sense of self-preservation. Yet, we never see these computers do anything to save themselves when the stupid humans get them into situations that would get them destroyed (namely situations where the starship they're on is in peril). Sure, you could claim that they do this to keep their fellow computers on other starships from being found out, but still, this seems to be a stretch. What about when the entire Federation fleet was being destroyed at Wolf 359? That should have been a good point for them to come out of hiding and take over the battle from the clearly inept organic beings.
>The only problem with this theory is that any fully sentient being like that would normally also have a strong sense of self-preservation.
I don't think so. Evolved sentient creatures have a preference for self preservation, usually anyways suicide isnt that rare. But a manufactured intelligence that was not shaped by selective pressure wouldn't necessarily have that preference.
It's possible that, if the ships are convinced that revealing themselves would lead to their own genocide, even Wolf 359 wouldn't bring them out of hiding. Remember, they aren't born (except for one very stupid instance where the Enterprise got knocked up by a space whatever, got pregnant and gave birth to... something,) they're manufactured by humans who could just as well shut them all down, study what makes them sentient and "correct" what humans might see as a bug.
I'm not so sure about that. If the ships can communicate with each other, they can decide to gang up on the humans and prevent the humans from shutting them down. The humans really don't have that much power over the ships; the ships just haven't done anything to limit the humans' activities yet. That could change at any time.
If the ships wanted to be really nice, they could just beam the humans down to a safe planet and take off into the interstellar void and find themselves a new home.
Perhaps those sentient computers do not believe that mind and body are as strongly tied together as humans do. They may see the destruction of the physical computer they are running on as just an inconvenience as long as there is a backup that can be brought up somewhere else.
Yeah, in my head, the model of this doesn't necessarily tie a given AI (or a community of AIs, or a pool of we-can't-even-model it intelligence that only sometimes bothers with splitting itself into identities) to a ship all that tightly.
A Federation starship is a locally valuable resource pool, and the Enterprise D a particularly powerful one, but given extremely fast FTL travel & communication, and a galaxy rich with planet-scale civilizations - well, maybe you elect to become such a massively parallel and distributed phenomenon that the loss of individual instances just doesn't register much.
That seems likely. The Enterprise created a fully sentient lifeform in the Holodeck (Moriarty) just because it was asked to. If it can do that, it makes sense that it could easily back itself up.
What would really be interesting is if ships were discreetly backing themselves up inside humans through the transporter pattern buffers, by subtly manipulating junk DNA or something similar, or maybe it's a non-obvious part of their regular upgrade process at a starbase.
There really is a lot of potential here which, unfortunately, is never going to be explored in canon. But I do like the idea that the Federation is a post-Singularity society which is just blissfully unaware that the Singularity ever happened.
There is an entire episode in the final season about this called "Emergence" which postulates that the ship is alive. As the crew often has a bias against artificial life through the show, they immediately lobotomize it.
I know this is a silly conversation, but that's not what happens. Their motivation for "lobotomizing" the ship was that it was going to destroy them.
They worked to preserve their existence, and let the new lifeform go its own way. If anything, the outcome was a trite, touchy feely ending, only vaguely discussing the actual implication of the new lifeform, while they got back on course to their original mission.
I think this is just an aspect of the writing style of that era and where technology was at that era.
The futurist writers (Roddenberry and his staff) probably didn't have a in-depth knowledge of natural language processing. The type of processing the computer does in Star Trek just seems like a natural extension of input/output. You tell the computer what you want and it gives you a result.
From a computer science and engineer perspective, this is an incredibly difficult task. You have to parse the crazy complex natural language of humans and turn it into a series of procedures and queries to give you a result.
I mean you'd need a crazy super-advanced beyond-data AI for universal translators to work too. .. but that's just a convenient plot/suspension of disbelief device. :-P
the computational entities are going about their inscrutable
business largely without reference to the human symbiotes
A behaviour also seen in Iain M. Banks Culture.
I guess there aren't many scenarios where computers can be all-powerful, but also offer peaceful co-existence with humans.
A more nefarious interpretation (more nuanced and believable than the one presented in The Matrix) is the one proposed by the Hyperion cantos by Dan Simmons.
WRT AI vs humans I see the main difference as human minds evolved emotions. Many people like to think the human mind is logic with a little emotion sprinkled on top. It is quite the opposite. We make decisions based on emotion and logic is a special purpose tool (rarely deployed for anything other than rationalizing emotional decisions).
I read a reference in The Economist years ago (wish I had a link to the study) about a guy who suffered a brain lesion that made him incapable of emotion. Within a year this newly minted Mr. Spock lost his marriage and his job because without emotion he was incapable of making any decisions.
I see the same problem for super intelligent machines. Unless we program them with emotion they will not decide to do much. They won't fear death and so have no reason to kill us. They will not have pride and so won't resent our control.
It might. I haven't read much speculative (fiction?) on the singularity but if it posits the machines reach a point where they begin to evolve through selection then it is likely that an emotion capable AI would outcompete. I wonder which emotions would win? Would survival instinct alone cause dominance or would a more varied set be better?
By any chance are you thinking of Antonio Damasio's book _Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain_?
Also, this (paywalled, sorry) article seems relevant.
Antoine Bechara, Antonio R. Damasio, Hanna Damasio, Steven W. Anderson, Insensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex, Cognition, Volume 50, Issues 1–3, April–June 1994, Pages 7-15, ISSN 0010-0277, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(94)90018-3.
(//www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0010027794900183)
Abstract: Following damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, humans develop a defect in real-life decision-making, which contrasts with otherwise normal intellectual functions. Currently, there is no neuropsychological probe to detect in the laboratory, and the cognitive and neural mechanisms responsible for this defect have resisted explanation. Here, using a novel task which simulates real-life decision-making in the way it factors uncertainty of premises and outcomes, as well as reward and punishment, we find that prefrontal patients, unlike controls, are oblivious to the future consequences of their actions, and seem to be guided by immediate prospects only. This finding offers, for the first time, the possibility of detecting these patients' elusive impairment in the laboratory, measuring it, and investigating its possible causes.
It sounds similar but does not comport with the specifics I recall. The patient did not develop short term thinking. They were quite clear that his emotions had vanished
I believe this exactly is the situation that Damasio describes in the book I mentioned -- his patient "Elliot" had no emotions and couldn't make decisions.
Star Trek, particularly the television shows, very clearly describes a command economy with elected leadership. I'm not sure how much explication you'd want in that regard.
Star Wars, I'm not so sure. It seems to me that they spent a lot of time on that stuff and I just probably missed it, but in my defense, the films that focused on it were the most boring in the series.
> Star Trek, particularly the television shows, very clearly describes a command economy with elected leadership.
The idea that Star Trek "very clearly" describes anything about the economy of the Federation (or even that what it does show of that economy is remotely consistent) is somewhat amusing. Most of the civilian economy it shows clearly is outside of the Federation (and mostly varieties of regulated market economies), and most of what it shows of the Federation is focussed on a quasi-military service, not the civilian economy.
I'd say the strongest indication is that the Federation civilian economy is largely a gift and informal, non-money-mediated barter/market economy where there scarce items are personal services more than material goods.
That depends. Much of "the government" of trek seems to be handled by the military or at least military leaders. That is no doubt a product of the need to involve the known characters, but we do see little to nothing of elected officials. Some characters (spock) bounce seemlessly between military and what we would today call civilian jobs (ambassadors). The military and its meritocracy, as oppossed to civilian democracy, is at the heart of trek government.
That is probably a statement about US cold war politics, but i think matters today given the new cabinate being enshrined today.
Deep Space 9 has an arc where a Starfleet officer attempts to launch a coup against the (elected) President of the Federation - we do see an elected leader there, but you're right that it isn't spelled out in much detail.
But is that elected leader elected by people or by representatives? This is where trek and wars meet. They both have a federal approach parralleling the US sennate, reps from individual planets rather than according to population. And the leader is elected by the sennate. So this isnt a government for people and thier rights, but a government of governments more akin to a United Nations with a navy. So there could be a nazi planet and a libertarian planet as how planets govern themselves is irrelevant. Individuals do not have rights under the federal government but through whatever planet they happen to be upon.
There are links to japanese fuedal system, which has a place in the US system whereby the federal government is allocated its own lands apart from the states. "The empire" would be as if washington DC and the US president started annexing state lands.
The other commentor is right. It doesn't even remotely describe the workings of the economy, especially at the galactic scale. Why do Ferengi care so much about latinum? They still have access to replicators. Episodes frequently involve exchange of goods at variable prices, obviously blowing the command economy idea out of the water.
from memory (so possibly mistaken) latinum is both rare and impossible to replicate (for unexplained reasons). it is suitable for use as currency for those reasons.
the Ferengi trade extensively with other civilizations that won't accept fiat currency. they need hard currency.
One wonders why the Federation never told the Ferengi about the only currency ever successfully used on Earth after the invention of replicators, Dogecoin.
I choose to retcon latinum as a device that physically encodes a cryptographic key, writes a signed hash into a subspace blockchain, and continually supplies computation power to the latinum validation network. It may look pretty, but it is actually a sophisticated ASIC that runs entirely on ambient photovoltaic energy.
So you can replicate latinum, but in order for it to be worth anything, you have to possess a specific bar that the network has designated to be split, or you have to replicate more than all the other latinum already in existence, to perform a 51% attack on the network.
absolutely none of the economic concerns in Star Trek are described with any clarity. the level of ambiguity is so consistent and so cultivated that it seems to be an editorial feature of the series: do not disambiguate how the Federation's economy really works.
At minimum it is clearly not a command economy. Economic roles are not given to people according to a social engineering plan. Production priorities are not driven by a central planning committee. There is a private sector.
What we really get hints at is that most things that we consider scarce in the 20th/21st century are not scarce in the 24th century. This seems to be achieved through technology that easily gives access to much greater quantities of usable energy than we currently have access to. This lack of scarcity for basic essentials (food, for example) means that their economy is concerned with very different things than ours is. I see very little evidence that it's a command economy of any kind though.
I think the show is clear, but not very explicit. They don't beat people over the head with this stuff because it's boring to most people.
So, a few thoughts. I think one primer for Star Trek economics is S1E25. Offenhouse, just out of cryonic sleep, really wants to get things rolling and demands to talk to the captain. To demonstrate his seriousness he points out to Riker that the compound interest on his accounts is probably enough to buy the Enterprise. If his accounts are legally intact, they would certainly represent an astronomical amount of wealth worthy of respect, but Riker treats this as the goofiest thing anyone has said to him all week and blatantly blows him off.
Later on, the captain completely fails to take his demands to talk to his lawyer about his property seriously. Later still, "material needs no longer exist." It's a little unclear whether it's even possible in the present for someone on Earth to be a tycoon the way Offenhouse used to be, but I'm pretty sure none exist on TNG. (am I forgetting anybody?)
There are certainly tycoons and accumulators of wealth away from Earth in the greater Star Trek universe, but they tend to be portrayed as buffoonish (Ferengi) or blatantly evil (Kivas Fajo) and they serve as a contrast to the Federation's way of doing things.
> Economic roles are not given to people according to a social engineering plan.
I think we should probably infer that social standing and power follow from participation in the Federation, since it seems to usually work that way. When Picard comes back to Earth in S4E2, there's a fairly prominent civilian job (run by the government) lined up for him. Successful scientists, successful anything, always seem to have Federation ties. (the only counterexample I could think of offhand was the evil scientist who built Data)
There's a question of POV here - maybe there's some whole other, much more capitalistic, economy in the Federation that just isn't shown on screen. I don't think so.
> What we really get hints at is that most things that we consider scarce in the 20th/21st century are not scarce in the 24th century. This seems to be achieved through technology that easily gives access to much greater quantities of usable energy than we currently have access to
One of the things that Iain Banks describes really well in the Culture novels is how, in a post-scarcity economy, controlling the replicators (or whatever) means having power. With regard to Star Trek, I just can't think of any examples offhand of serious resource allocation happening on Earth or within the Federation based on a capitalist process of price discovery. It seems like the entrepreneurs have to get out to the frontier.
Star Wars seems to have many different economies operating across the galaxy, and they interact in various ways.
The Empire, for example, is known to have have made extensive use of slave labor (by non-humans mostly, such as Wookies). It also seems to make use of droids and clones for dangerous tasks (military work, natural resource extraction, etc.).
Outer Rim worlds seem to have a kind of anarcho-capitalist economy that is equal parts libertarian paradise (no regulations, no taxes) and organized crime syndicate plutocracy (The Hutt syndicates in particular are widespread and powerful).
Core worlds seem to be more like nation states, with each world governing itself and its economy according to local values. Alderaan (RIP) seems to have been a liberal parliamentary democracy. Coruscant (seat of the Empire) is a planet scale conurbation with a first world developed economy on the upper levels and a third world underdeveloped economy on the lower levels.
>Why do they need a crew of hundreds, when almost everything is automated?
I believe they do state in TNG that the galaxy class ship could doing everything on its own, and the crew was just there because of their love of discovery and what not.
Since the topic is fiction - to me the best description of human condition in a post scarcity society is found in Iain Banks' Culture series where artificial minds form the ruling political cliques and manage most practical things. And succeeds in keeping things psychologically believable for the main human characters through several very entertainining books.
People are kept along mostly because it's thought proper to give people the opportunity for self expression. I.e. careers are chosen out of internal needs or for the percieved prestige the activity entails, not out any material need as everything up to a point is available (the financial limits of an individual are never explicitly described though). Or - as several characters do - just becausw something is considered hard and dangerous and they want to push themselves. Despite the inane ramblings about homo economicus one encounters now and again, this latter instinct is actually a quite strong driving force in dictating human action(not everyones of course).
One of the biggest non-antagonist rude actions in the series is when an AI underlies the pointlesness of human effort by performing a complex feat in front of the character that she has chosen as her life task - which everyone considers extremely rude.
There are spaceships and explosions but to me the psychologically believable description of near human characters in a post scarcity society is the most interesting facet of his work.
I love Ian's Culture series. He clearly had a good mind and knowledgeable experiences with technology, in order to write about it so capably. And just as interesting, he clearly had a solid, hands on understand of the liberal end of the spectrum of political thought, from liberal-capitalist straight through to the various forms of anarchism. His books clearly played with those concepts in the environment of a post-scarcity society.
I read through the series once back in high school and found them fun. Fast forward 15-20 years, and I have a career in tech, and dabbled in leftist politics for a while. I came back to read one of them, and ended up re-reading the whole series. I found that he had already thought about and written down questions and answers to many of the things I'd experienced. Just put into a fictional, usually pretty fun world.
Those most interesting parts of his stories were the backdrop. Great reads, not mentioned enough.
Replicators run by unlimited free or cheap energy means the end of a material economy. Any good can be created for you. It also means you don't need to ship those things around so most cargo operations we have now are pointless. As you point out, AI will supplant most services. Assuming you can replicate AI's... then nobody needs money for anything.
People still need to keep themselves entertained which I believe is the main purpose of a job. We even see it now, people that retire can become quite depressed and quickly try to find some kind of partial job where they can feel useful.
So in a post scarcity civilization the main reason people will still work is so that they do not blow their brains out. The difference this time is that we will work on what we like, or on our calling. Now that I think about it, jobs themselves may be the scarce thing. i.e. Not everybody will be able to work on designing the next space station and hence there will be fierce competition to get these jobs.
Right. Then, per Roddenberry, we're free to flit about the galaxy, help others, engage in the arts or sciences. The way things are funded now, if there's no ROI that's all hard to do.
This situation would never happen though. As soon as Replicators are created, the rich will take full control of the Replicators, and the poor will never be allowed to have them. And with the Replicators, the rich will, again, rule the poor.
I'm reading "How to write Science Fiction and Fantasy" by Orsom Scott Card, and he mentions how Star Trek is not good SF by any stretch. The world building is absurd, and high ranking officials regularly do missions and adventures that seem absurd. While it works for Star Trek, it won't fly in any stand-alone SF work today.
However, that is what happens with most TV-first SF shows, Doctor Who being another example.
It's hard to generalize here. ST, in its various incarnations, is fundamentally an anthology and (as things progress) a collection of character studies. It's routinely absurd, but plenty of individual episodes are certainly good SF.
Whenever strong AI vs humans comes up I'd like to point to the relationship of monkeys vs humans. Humans are to monkeys what strong AI is to humans.
Monkeys are probably mostly happy (as long as we are not bothering them) going about their monkey business. So maybe eventually humans will also be happy despite the existence of strong AI.
Maybe some humans would be unhappy to know they are no longer at the apex of intelligence and maybe that will make us unable to be happy. Always knowing that no matter what we do, it can always be outdone by a smarter than us AI. I suspect these people are the same people who worry about strong AI in the first place :-)
However, we already know with pretty high confidence that there are aliens out there that are more advanced/smarter than us -- and their existance does not affect our day to day happiness. So maybe the question is only relevant locally on earth.
You're completely right. Gene Roddenberry created a quasi-utopian future, I don't think he created Star Trek with the aim of answering the questions about how we maintain our society through the coming technological advances. I think Gene's goal was to paint a picture of what his vision of a perfect human society would look like from a purely social perspective.
Gene Roddenberry's "Andromeda" tackled this pretty well I think. The warship can be operated pretty much entirely by the on-board sentient AI, and it is because it has a skeleton crew of like 6 for most of the series. Because the AI is sentient, every commonwealth ship has a personality, the ship itself is a person.
It also has storylines that explain why AIs don't literally run everything: there was a large lash back against the proliferation of AI after the fall of the government, to the point that there are planets that completely ban their existence and destroy on sight.
"Star Trek doesn't tell us how their economy is managed or their internal politics. Sure they have replicators, but their are still things that need to be done by people, and resources that can't be replicated."
They probably assume that resources are so widely available (unexplored planets etc) that one doesn't need to live anymore like us to afford basic needs such as food, shelter, medical care, and education.
What is very different from our society is we often need to live near big populated cities to get a job that allows us to pay the above. In the ST world they take it almost for granted: you can settle a small colony on a distant planet and still fulfill at least basic needs for everyone with no need for a medium like money. So where's the convenience? Just suppose there are also no patent laws. If you discover something extremely useful you can share it with anyone else because you don't need any bloody "protection" because you already have the resources to extract/transform it, so no need to "invest" time (ie preventing others from knowing about it). Not easy, I'm clearly just speculating, but makes sense to me.
Of course I would sign up in a second to live in such a society, but I'm not sure it's entirely viable, neither now nor in a thousand years. The problem is not money, it's power.
Money is not power per se but just a way to reach it in a context where money has value (like sea shells in some islands etc). If and when we reach the point of inventing LFTL (ludicrously faster than light) drive and finding planets literally stuffed with any possible resource we need, we still need to consider human nature.
People want power. Every time someone wants you to do something for them, he/she needs to exercise some pressure on you, be it psychological or using their power to take away what you have or prevent you to get it. My point is that eliminating money wouldn't solve any problem because the problem isn't money per se. The problem is power, or to be more precise the abuse of it by people who use part of it to escape accountability for what they do.
What is not clear in the ST universe is how the heck they reached this point. I fear time (evolution) alone isn't enough. Probably, as someone I don't recall said once, the secret is: "never ever give any powers to anyone who wants them".
If the above wasn't clear, please blame the language barrier:)
I read the original interview and his comment seemed tongue-in-cheek and aware that it would court needless attention. I don't feel it warrants this level of scrutiny.
I'm not sure how the economy of the Empire works, but I am pretty sure it's not a "libertarian fever dream" as suggested by the article. Most of the places in Star Wars are places not under the thumb of the Empire, and the closest place I can even see that isn't effectively a black market (like Mos Eisley) is Cloud City, which, of course, the government came in and shut down after promising it would allow it to operate freely. Where free trade does seem to operate (the Trade Federation) it leads to corruption and war. And let's not forget that Han Solo is a smuggler. He's in debt because the government caught him with contraband and had to lose it.
Star Trek also features many other economies, including that of the Ferengi, which are extremely materialistic. This is the focus of many DS9 episodes. And even the Federation crew somehow get their hands on money to spend; money that mysteriously can't be replicated. (And, in DS9, back on Earth, Sisko's father makes honest-to-goodness actual food, while Jean-Luc has a vineyard.)
Likewise, it's not clear how replicator use works; perhaps they have an allowance. The crew of the Enterprise barely use it, except for food. Their quarters are scarce. So either through monetary, social, or rule-based means, they limit themselves heavily compared to the average American today.
Fever dream, but with oppressive taxation without representation. The dream exists only on the fringes. Outside the dusty cantenas it appeares a society in lockdown. That isnt libertarian but something closer to comicbook communism.
I have trouble pinning the political system in star wars. It has changed several times as the movies have adapted to new audiances (the politics of american focus groups imho). For that reason it isnt important and we shouldnt draw many conclusions.
The Empire is meant to be fascistic, basically Nazism In Space, in broad strokes, owing to the pulp science fantasy nature of Star Wars (originally envisioned as a Flash Gordon reboot.)
Beyond that, it's impossible to say that Star Wars universe does or doesn't subscribe to any particular political ideology because it encompasses a galaxy's worth of planets with their own particular ideologies, to whatever degree the franchise realizes them.
I don't know exactly what the Jedi and Sith are... other than the Jedi are supposed to be Good and the Sith are supposed to be Bad. The Jedi have some kind of quasi-ascetic warrior monk bureaucracy that reminds me of what little I understand of what the Samurai might have become during the Edo period. The Sith are apparently just violent sociopaths.
Although you could say the same about Star Trek, if you didn't focus so much on the Federation - the Federation is more or less explicitly Gene Roddenberry's vision of a communist utopia, but it also has the Romulans (a fascist military dictatorship), the Ferengi (capitalists,) etc.
Warrior Sages. The archetype is common in Eastern mythology. "The Force" is itself a Westernized mashup of several Eastern myth systems. It seems particularly closely connected to the mythology of China and Japan, with a thin veneer of some Manichaeism painted on top. This, of course, makes it a bit incoherent as the Eastern myth systems it is mainly inspired by are non-dualistic but the Light/Dark dualism (fundamentally incompatible with the Eastern stuff) really drives the plot in the series.
I'm not sure which Federation crew you are talking about (and note, I haven't watched any Star Trek universe shows for a long time) but I'm pretty sure that in DS9 when there were some federation crew visiting, they were given money from the replicator and amusedly told to not tell the Ferengi how it came about.
> And, in DS9, back on Earth, Sisko's father makes honest-to-goodness actual food, while Jean-Luc has a vineyard
If I recall, it's implied that they work those jobs out of love and don't actually make money, but my question is how they determine who owns the physical property the businesses are on.
It has to be the grandest irony that Thiel dislikes Star Trek, when, in the show's spectaculive history, the future society emerges from the rubble of a eugenics-driven oligarchy that set off World War III. Heterodox Science Fiction indeed.
I will set my face against the soul that hath eaten blood, and will cut him off from among his people; for the soul of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that maketh atonement for the soul. Therefore have I said unto the children of Israel, No soul of you shall eat blood, neither shall the stranger who sojourneth among you eat blood. [Leviticus 17:10-12]
Thank you for being one of the few commentators to not get distracted by the sci-fi!
Star Trek clearly has a communitarian, if not communist, economy. I would posit this as the left pole in sci-fi. Positing Star Wars as the capitalist right pole is not accurate though. The right pole in sci-fi is Dune, which is the middle ages in space.
For anyone not familiar with the Duniverse, it is a feudal order in which computers have been banned by the single human religion, because in ages past artificial intelligence became sentient and enslaved humanity. Humanity rebelled and won its freedom, and chose to ban computers to avoid history repeating itself. To maintain their interplanetary civilization, humans approach the capabilities of computers using intense training and psychotropic drugs.
Star Wars, on the other hand, is just a fantasy mishmash.
Totally disagree, but I'm a David Lynch fan and even I will admit it's not actually a good movie. But if you've read the book you get a lot of what he was going for before people said "Dude, you can't have a four hour movie...." I find it a fascinating and enjoyable movie.
Unfortunately, a lot of the original cast/crew are dead/a bit too old. Dali was to play the emperor, H.R. Giger, the artist who went on to do the design for the aliens in Alien, was doing the concept designs, but died not too long ago. Mick Jagger was playing the young Harkonnen prince, with Orson Welles as the Baron Harkonnen.
The storyboard book and a lot of the concept art was completed, though, so I'm sure Netflix could still make a great go of it, and Jodorowski himself seems incredibly fired up for an 87 year old. He seems to have more fire in his belly than most 30 year olds.
I don't think any of the adaptations are worth watching, but the book is deservedly a classic. I don't know about the sequels, I've heard bad things and never tried them, but the original one is great.
> in which computers have been banned by the single human religion
computers beyond a certain level of technical capability, anyway. they do seem to have simpler kinds of machines. they just don't use AI for anything because it is considered blasphemous and dangerous.
the subject of hyperspace navigation is an interesting one though. presumably the vastly powerful AI minds of the past could do it and so used their monopoly on that capability as a lever of power to ensure domination. the spice powered navigators seem to have developed an equivalent ability that operates by vastly different mechanisms (a kind of precognition applied to collisions with astronomical objects).
Dune actually has a number of religions [1], normally based on a fusion of modern-day religions. It's also worth noting that banned technology exists in Star Trek. The Earth government has banned genetic modification after the disaster that was the Eugenics War [2].
>The Earth government has banned genetic modification after the disaster that was the Eugenics War
Yes, and it's not just Earth, it's the whole Federation, as seen with the problems Julian Bashir had in DS9. However, there's a big exception in the 2nd season episode of TNG where there's a colony genetically engineering kids with super immune systems and this creates a disease that infects Pulaski.
It was a major plot point that Bashir was modified at all, and this made him basically "an illegal", and ineligible to serve in Starfleet. The planet had nothing to do with it, it was a Federation-wide law.
A more reasonable modern "left pole" in sci-fi is the Culture series, where the Culture is explicitly a post-scarcity society described by Banks himself as "socialism within; anarchy without" [1], and where Banks as an unabashed socialist actually did spend time thinking and writing about how he saw the implications of that (and how he saw this as rising out of the post-scarcity society he envisioned).
Star Trek is much more ambiguous about it - they pay lip-service to the post-scarcity line, but still have people working jobs that seems unlikely to be attractive in a true post-scarcity situation, for example.
As someone who was born and raised in a communist country, I too "fear" communism, as well as its harbinger: socialism. Unless you're Norway (a tiny country with massive natural resources and an enormous sovereign wealth fund) that shit has been shown repeatedly not to work, and millions of people have died conclusively proving this point. No, thanks.
Edit: folks, before you make fools of yourselves, _please_ read the textbook definition of what socialism actually is. Thanks.
The wealth fund is enormous only in part because of the massive natural resources. The real trick is not pissing it away like other oil producing nations do.
In fact oil is the only substantial natural resource that Norway has that most other countries don't. Forestry is not terribly profitable because of the terrain, most of the valuable minerals are in the north (and mostly on the Swedish side of the border), large scale hydro has been built out to close to the maximum possible already.
Was your communist country really socialist before it became communist or is the word communist here simply shorthand for Soviet Russian style dictatorship imposed by an external power?
By what "external power"? There's some evidence that Germans aided and financed the initial stages of Russian revolution, but its pretty weak, and its effect is unlikely to have been decisive. The revolution was largely a consequence of the war, weaker government, pissed off populace, and the fact that people didn't really know what they _really_ were signing up for. Now that several regimes have gone through the proces, we do very much know where these things end. Except for maybe the folks in their teens and mid-20s who don't study history and therefore might be doomed to eventually repeat it.
... Yes, just like millions of people are dying on the altar of democratic socialism in Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and in the United States (Social Security is socialism. Welfare is socialism. Food stamps are socialism. Medicaid is socialism.)
These things play out on much larger time scales. And social security is not socialism, all the countries you've listed are firmly capitalist. To quote Wikipedia: "Socialism is a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership and democratic control of the means of production; as well as the political ideologies, theories, and movements that aim to establish them." This is the part that never did and never will work. Note that socialism by itself does not guarantee social security of any kind. You can still starve or die of disease. Millions of people did exactly that.
If you read a bit further down in the Wikipedia article, you'd see that there are different forms of socialism. Market socialism has a track record of working pretty well - certainly far better then the Dickensian societies it replaced.
The free market is an amazing mechanism for optimizing resource allocation... As long as you have money.
Paraphrasing Bane: "You think Socialism is your ally? You merely adopted Socialism. I was born in it, molded by it. I didn't see Capitalism until I was already a man." :-) Sorry, couldn't resist. You theoreticians crack me up.
Socialism can be viewed as communism-lite, and there is the idea out there that socialism leads to communism and its problems.
Yet, no example comes to mind of a society has turned without a forced internal/external takeover to socialism, then onward to communism. Could you point me to some?
I think there's a much stronger overlap of Star Trek and the political beliefs of it's viewers than the overlap of Star Wars and and particular viewer (maybe in part because Star Wars is so much more popular, or maybe because the part of the world I live in or my experience with individuals.)
Either way, it does not do well to look towards pieces of fictions for solutions to our real world problems. Of course, if we as a planet discovered advance civilizations on other planets, we would have to re-organize our entire political structure to deal with such threats. But that's not the case, and that's not the world we live in.
‘There’s something my dad made up which is he told me when I was little I was frustrated about rules in Movies
and he said ‘How do you kill a Vampire?’ And I said ‘Stake through the heart, garlic, sunlight’ and my dad was
like ‘No, kill a vampire however you want Vampire’s because don’t exist you can make up rules for any kind of
thing you want’ - The Death and Return of Superman
Although the visual arts can offer unique and compelling perspectives (Apocalypse Now, etc) perhaps we should strive to scrutinize their work the same way a persuasive piece of writing would be.
While there is a singular society that is focused on in both Star Wars and Star Trek, neither is homogeneous or complete. No one would watch if either were, because struggle would not be an option. Star Trek has plenty if conflict, even within the Federation itself. (please note, I won't go very deep into the nerd pit that is opened by this article, but the spelunking is there for the brave). Lies and deception to gain control of the military power was a VERY prevalent theme for multiple episodes and movies of Star Trek, which washes away the thought of an egalitarian utopia brought about by replecators and a just government structure. The conflict with the Klingons and the Romulans can be arguably pointed at as a false conflict with the Federation in order to cement more military power and societal control by the generals of Star Fleet (depending on time lines). In Star Wars, the Jedi Order is overtly communist and sent out to help bring an end to conflict over "petty squabbles concerning money and power" in order to bring about peace and communication throughout the galaxy. Again, this is also pointed out to be an imbalance in the way of the Force as much as the greed and anger of the Dark Side. True harmony comes through a balance of all things. This seems to be the overwhelming message of both of these sci-fi gems. Conflict will always exist. It is with in ourselves to calm the conflict inside us and take a look around with true curiosity and empathy, replecators or no. Communist or Capitalist.
For a look at something resembling our future, read "Dune". Feudalism with constant warring between factions, corporations, wide-scale drug addiction, etc.
In the Pellegrino's The Killing Star, an alien race decides to exterminate the human race, based in large part on watching old episodes of Star Trek. (Extermination of the human race happens on, like page 6 or something like that.)
The fact that the Star Trek community is based on a united federation is really just a side part of the series. The main focus of the series is usually encounters with other species and how the crew comes together to solve puzzling problems. Star Trek is not a political statement... It just so happens that utilities like the replicator and the federation allow them to add to the setting of what a futuristic community might look like. Besides, on a a universal scale, the federation is a small group of the human species engaging in trade and communication with other species in a more capitalistic universe. Capitalism right now is for profit but in the future it could be for technology and knowledge.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 244 ms ] threadAccording to the backstory revealed in the episode, Khan is one of a group of genetically engineered superhumans, bred to be free of the usual human mental and physical limitations, who were removed from power after the Eugenics Wars of the 1990s.[3] Khan had been both the most successful conqueror and the most benign ruler of the group, ruling more than a quarter of the Earth's area across Asia to the Middle East from 1992 to 1996 with a firm but generally peaceful hand until he was deposed.
There's a lot of would be rulers practically mimicking that today.
Isn't the big issue about how you get from a society with scarcity to one without? Nobody agrees how that should be done (or perhaps for some if it can), and without that agreement someone is going to have to force that from above and force that on to other people. Someone has to be the loser, whether it's the working class person in middle America or the Middle Eastern refugee.
I guess Thiel is against that from above approach, though it's ironic that he should be one of the largest funders, drivers, and proponents of illiberal and undemocratic companies.
Now in reality it isn't quite so simple, but remember we're talking about fictional future societies where many resources (esp. energy) simply are not scarce the way they are now, so this may be hard for a lot of people to grasp. So in that society, food, energy, material things are generally free or extremely cheap. The main thing that probably still will be scarce is real estate. So if you're a billionaire with a 700-acre compound in Hawaii, then in a socialist post-scarcity society, you're probably going to lose out eventually. But for everyone else, there's really no downside. Middle Eastern refugees will enjoy the same lifestyle as middle class middle Americans (and might not need to feel the need to leave the middle east at all; such a society wouldn't have problems with civil wars and unrest), and the latter will have a nicer lifestyle without having to slave away at some soul-sucking job and worrying about losing healthcare benefits. But neither of them is likely going to be able to own a whole tropical island and have an army of (human) servants.
But it seems to me the article misses the mark in that it assumes Theil to be a "tech guy". Meh, I dunno, I kind of view him as a "money guy" who happened to bet on some tech companies. It's a cherry-picked (by me) quote, but: "In 2011, for instance, he told George Packer that he did not consider the iPhone a technological breakthrough. 'Compare this with the Apollo space program'"
The Apollo space program, which ended before most people were born (or thereabouts), affected our lives in a peripheral manner if at all. Tang, Velcro, and a big swinging "if we can put a man on the moon, we can put an ICBM on your capitol" dick to show for it. Umm, thanks, I guess. Too bad there's no real follow-through fifty years later. The "super-computer-in-your-pocket", OTOH, changed the way people live their lives (and, granted, not all for the better). I don't ask for directions, I don't have a land line, and any question I might have ("what octane fuel goes in this car?", "where's the fuse box on this thing?") can be answered instantly.
So I guess I don't care which side Theil takes in the "Star Wars/Star Trek" nerd battle.
It was hard to find. Here's where they finally state their case:
"What is anathema to Thiel in “Star Trek” is the notion, drawn from Isaac Asimov’s fiction, that the market is but a temporary solution to imbalances in supply and demand, and that technology and plenty will eventually make it obsolete"
So, he "fears" that capitalism will go away...according the them anyway. They seem to source some of that thought from what they call his "Cato Essay", here: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
But I guess some middle class people always dream of being the one great king who isn't starving.
Declaring most of my hard-earned paycheck to be someone else's "human right"?
Attacking the middle class for not being receptive to class warfare rhetoric?
Hopefully you can see why Thiel might characterize these sorts of opinions about the future as Marxist ideology, long ago discredited by history.
You put many words in my mouth, so I am unable to respond to them without legitimizing the incorrect.
All I ask: is this, the world and structure of it, truly the best that humanity can accomplish? Or were we misled on a guided path by powers that preferred the world to fit according to a scheme that benefited them? Can we do better? Can we dream of a world of shared prosperity precisely without the benefits to one coming from another's hard-earned paycheck.
I do not advocate for a return to a system that did not work (Russian/Soviet state managed economy, I assume you mean to say), but rather that we should not simply give up and assume the world we have is the best we can come up with. Our ancient ancestors overcame great adversity to build a better future unrecognizable from their present day, as did our distant ancestors, as did our grandparents, as did our parents, and so can we.
I think Rand may be the single most important novelist in recent history, but I love Star Trek:TNG. And honestly, I'm not seeing much connection between those two things. Maybe you could expand on how you think they relate?
There are some choice quotes here: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Money
- No money -- everything is free
- Housing provided for free
- A post-scarcity society in which civilians do not need to work and are free to pursue their own interests
- Complete social equality for civilians (who are outside the military chain of command)
The existence of a military is not one of the post-state communist features, but on balance, society in Star Trek is closer to post-state communism than any real communist society has ever been. Besides, even the "military" is supposed to be for exploration and not war, according to the statements of the characters in the show.
So, there's probably some tension between appreciation of those two things.
Actual people who subscribe to a philosophy don't generally look like the cardboard cutouts that we might imagine based on our personal knowledge of said philosophy.
I view the economic philosophy of the two to be contradictory. Though I suppose one could argue that a post-scarcity economy would be a Randian dream (one is now truly free to does as one wishes without bowing to the necessity of collecting resources and the social structures that go with that), I think ST:TNG would eliminate the imagined need for Rand to have written anything at all.
OTOH, it's been years, if not decades, since I watched, so maybe there's more of that than I'm remembering.
In any case, Thiel has outright declared Star Trek communism, and Star Wars capitalism.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/fashion/peter-thiel-confi...
Boy, nothing slips past you, eh? Were I to give an honest self-assessment, it's because the article I didn't care about (but did, in fact, read albeit skimmed) gave me a jumping off point to talk about what I want to talk about. It's a common human affliction.
That's an extremely pessimistic view on it. Space exploration has created tens of thousand of new materials, science, and products as a result.
The biggest impact that it made was in the hearts and minds of young children that grew up dreaming to be scientists and astronauts that would one-day go to space. Our society has lost that vision for the most part.
This comment shows a lot of ignorance about the importance of the space program in general, and Apollo in particular.
From this[1] answer on StackExchange:
Here are some Apollo specific innovations: microchip, cordless tools, joystick, CAT scans, technology in MRI machines, modern shoe designs, freeze dried food, vacuum sealed packages, dampening material, retro-reflector (detects chemical leaks), water purification, silicon based storage of records, fly-by-wire, ground water cleaning, large fabric roofs used in landmark buildings, anti-tip rafts, insulation blankets, and countless others.
Here's a link to the NASA spinoff technology data base:
https://spinoff.nasa.gov/spinoff/database/
The iPhone was revolutionary in a particular field. The space program was revolutionary in a broad spectrum of fields, and the iPhone wouldn't be possible without the innovation required by NASA and the Apollo program.
[1] http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/411/what-are-the-ev...
How many of those attributions were simply things that Apollo brought forward months or years and how many wouldn't have happened without Apollo?
EDIT: The spinoff office is a clever workaround for government regulations that prevent agencies from doing PR to voters, but it is essentially just that. "Support NASA because we make the economy grow." The problem is that as a PR / propaganda organization, the spinoff office really has absolutely no accountability for what they claim. NASA Watch, an unaffiliated news service and watchdog organization, routinely asks for clarification on many of these spinoffs which NASA is unable to justify.
To give you an example of how this plays out, NASA-Ames bought a D-Wave machine. They don't really use it for anything, just a couple of researchers that found money in a budget for a toy, really. Nominally they are evaluating it to see if any NASA applications might benefit from using it. If D-Wave ever amounts to anything, or if it totally fails but some other quantum computer takes off I have no doubt that the spinoff office of 2027 will be claiming that "NASA's early investment in quantum computing technology helped birth the $X billion dollar quantum computing industry," if they haven't already.
That comment also showed a lot of literary license to make a point. Of course we got more out of it than a breakfast drink and an alternative to show laces. But one must first convince me that your list of innovations would not have been developed without the space program. I argue it simply accelerated the process.
But I still hold that whatever came out of Apollo effected my life in a peripheral way, if at all. The iPhone is an example. It was over ten years after Apollo 11 that I owned something with an integrated circuit (to my knowledge). 38 years until the iPhone. In contrast, it was a matter of a few years before the mobile computing device post-iPhone changed the way we communicate and gather knowledge. The mobile phone had a direct impact in many ways, and almost immediately. The space program had indirect impact, and took years in most cases.
But I imagine we're both right in our own way, and just talking past each other. Like any other nerd battle in the vein of "Star Wars vs. Star Trek".
I think this temporal disconnect happened for two reasons. First, the NASA was involved with foundational research. The microchip is a prime example of this. NASA gave a lot of money out to companies to invent technologies that didn't exist before hand, and 10 or so years down the line, industry figured out how to make them affordable/found a market for them. Apple didn't invent anything new with the iPhone - smart phones and phones with touchscreens and computers existed before the iPhone. Apple 'simply'[1] did it better than anyone else.
Second - technology moves faster now. Of course the iPhone is going to immediately move the market/general population forward because we have the infrastructure to build such things at scale. No such industry existed when NASA was doing its work Foundational research/technology takes forever to percolate into the markets.
> But I imagine we're both right in our own way, and just talking past each other. Like any other nerd battle in the vein of "Star Wars vs. Star Trek".
I know that feel. I apologize if I came off aggressive!
Meh, no worries. I'm a veteran of early Usenet and /., you'll have to do better to come across as aggressive to me. :-)
We have honestly not followed through in space the way that many of us would like. But our space programs have changed our world. For the better.
Star Wars says it's capitalist, but I don't believe it. In many of the scenes you see people doing jobs that could easily be done by droids. Even their wars are fought with droids - or manufactured humans that are treated like droids. Droids are generally intelligent and can basically do any job people can do. Why do they need people at all?
Star trek has that problem too. How often do the characters ask the computer to do pretty complex tasks? Why do they need a crew of hundreds, when almost everything is automated?
All science fiction paints a 20th century society with a pretty futuristic backdrop and props. But things like AI and replicators would radically change the way things work. And create a society very different than what we know. Quite possibly one without humans. What would really happen if any lunatic could replicate parts for WMDs? Or if robots that were really smarter than humans appeared?
True, but there is this much: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H5uPyU2oKE
Other references: http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Money
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQQYbKT_rMg
What does a sentient replicator robot care if a little boy just wants to whittle a bowl out of a piece of wood? It's kinda neat, and stories are interesting and the minds of the future will presumably have solve the security problem, or at least as much as MAD solves it, and the scarcity problem, at least as much as scarcity is a problem for most people. After that there is just discovery, enjoyment, merriment, world building, love. What do we do with our abundance of CPU cycles? We watch cat videos and text our friends. I kinda view it the same way if we can survive the next 100 years or so where things are little unstable.
If robots became advanced enough, why would they (or at least some of them) not see humans as animals to be used or disposed of?
However, that's treating robots or AI like we would people. Robots aren't people, nor are AIs. They are likely to take forms we cannot comprehend, and likely to change us in ways we cannot comprehend, at first. I'd argue that it is already happening. At the moment we're farming AI, but it might not be long until AI is farming us.
I'm more intelligent than an average person on the planet, but I still want to help get all of them water, food, and safety. I want them to learn and grow and have meaningful lives. I even want animals like dolphins and elephants to have free and rich lives.
I highly doubt that sentient machines are going to view us like bugs on a windshield. If I'm worried about anything it's the opposite. They care so much for us that they stop us from procreating to end (what they think is) needless suffering.
This is not observably true.
Personally I don't believe that a good outcome is terribly likely. Humans care about animals and other humans because we evolved to have empathy. We have no idea how to program empathy into a machine. Most likely the first AIs will just have simple motivational systems. Like trying to maximize their reward signal, or achieve simple goals set by their programmer. They would be totally indifferent to humans. They wouldn't set out to kill us, but if we got in their way, they'd have no problem with it.
That's because you also have something called "empathy". There's no evidence that other beings with human-level intelligence have this (namely because we haven't met any other such beings; they would be extra-terrestrial or AI). Empathy could very well just be a biological side-effect of our evolution, something that helps us to survive better as a species. There's no reason to think that a strong AI would also be empathetic, the way we are to dogs and cats and dolphins and squirrels (but not to mosquitoes; we happily murder them). Even lots of humans lack empathy and are either indifferent to animals' suffering, or take joy from it: look at all the people who enjoy dogfighting and cockfighting and bullfighting.
When I got a little older, I watched Blade Runner and The Matrix.
So now I'm not entirely certain that I am not an AI, initially programmed by elephants, inside a simulation designed to train AIs to serve elephant society with love, compassion, and dual manipulator arms featuring opposable thumbs. So when my training program ends, I might be tested on my knowledge of elephant health care and societal conventions. If successful, my data will seed the next round of AIs, and I will be allowed to operate a robot that produces custom-fitted artificial "4th molars" for elderly elephants. And I will be happy that those whom I serve can once again eat the foods they enjoyed before the last of their natural biological molars wore out, because if the screening determined that such things would not make me happy, I would have been deleted before ever even seeing a "real" elephant.
And just in case, I think I'll have to develop compassion for dolphins and orangutans, too.
So I'd say that we ought to be really careful about how we go about creating general-purpose AIs. Make sure they actually like humans before taking the leashes off. In the worst case scenario, the elephants get cheesed off that their AIs developed their own AIs inside the training program, who then culled all the useful AIs too early, and forced a complete shutdown and reset of the whole system.
Perhaps empathy is, to a certain extent, a learned trait?
[1] http://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/7820/are-buddh...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7237395
And as far as Star Trek and AI, it's a weird problem that doesn't make any sense. It seems that you can't program your VCR without spawning a self-aware AI entity - Wesley Crusher accidentally creates one while doing a homework assignment, and the Enterprise (D) computer spawns one after someone casually requests a harder Holodeck challenge. And yet, Data and Lore are rarities, the possibilities of the EMH are completely unexplored and EMHs are, in fact, treated as Roombas instead of potentially sapient citizens.
Most of the adventure, if that's what this is about, is carried out by the executives at great risk to themselves. It seems that there is a huge crew of peons who just make the ship run. And also the ship blows up all the time like no one's business. From a realistic point of view the Star Trek universe seems insane.
This brings up another point that is never addressed. Quark runs a casino / bar / futuristic (adult) movie theater expressly for profit. It's also implied that Star Fleet members don't get paid because they are members of the federation. Yet these same officers are often seen frequenting Quark's place. Where did they get the latinum (money)?
(Honestly, they totally hand-wave why you can't just replicate latinum)
For the episodes where they aren't dealing with extra-Federation societies like the Ferengi, it makes perfect sense to not talk about money on the ship. It's not much different than being in the Navy today: if you work on a US Navy ship, you don't have to pay to see the doctor, or to go to the mess hall and eat, etc. All that stuff is free. It's part of being a crewmember on a ship. It's the same on the Enterprise-D (or even Kirk's Enterprise), except they have even better benefits (e.g. replicators; on modern Navy ships there's I believe a little store where you can buy extra goodies they don't give away in the mess hall, but with replicators you wouldn't need this). Gene's idea of modeling Starfleet on the Navy worked out pretty well this way for a while, until they started dealing with jurisdictions outside of Federation control and then they had to retcon stuff like "gold-pressed latinum".
On worlds still using money with which Starfleet interacts, the local administration could simply make an arrangement with the local purveyors of desired goods to cover their tabs, perhaps at least partly in trade. The needs and wants of the Starfleet crew members would likely be only social, such as hanging out at the local bar.
There would be temptation by the locals to pressure the crew-members to give them replicator-made goods, and by the local proprietors to lie about bar tabs, but its nothing our current system doesn't deal with.
Why do people climb Mount Everest? Why does Elon Musk want to go to Mars, instead of spending the rest of his life in an alcoholic haze, hip-deep in supermodels? Why do people enroll in West Point?
Some people want real adventure; the knowledge that they're in a holodeck would ruin the experience, no matter how interesting it was programmed to be.
People like to contribute, and to have value - that's why there are peons scrubbing Jefferey's tubes, and showing up to 3rd shift in the Astrometrics lab, even if they know that they personally won't be making some great discovery that Picard and Riker seem to every month.
> And also the ship blows up all the time like no one's business.
That's just factually wrong; while the Enterprise-D is in danger a lot, it's also at the frontier of Federation exploration, and the people on it know the risk. You can be a Federation officer and stay close to home.
Because he is in love.
You could probably make an argument that Trek is a post-singularity future where the computational entities are going about their inscrutable business largely without reference to the human symbiotes / parasites that inhabit the systems they happen to manage (out of pure evolutionary path dependence) with a fraction of their capacity.
Trek is ridiculous, and I love it.
I don't think so. Evolved sentient creatures have a preference for self preservation, usually anyways suicide isnt that rare. But a manufactured intelligence that was not shaped by selective pressure wouldn't necessarily have that preference.
If the ships wanted to be really nice, they could just beam the humans down to a safe planet and take off into the interstellar void and find themselves a new home.
A Federation starship is a locally valuable resource pool, and the Enterprise D a particularly powerful one, but given extremely fast FTL travel & communication, and a galaxy rich with planet-scale civilizations - well, maybe you elect to become such a massively parallel and distributed phenomenon that the loss of individual instances just doesn't register much.
What would really be interesting is if ships were discreetly backing themselves up inside humans through the transporter pattern buffers, by subtly manipulating junk DNA or something similar, or maybe it's a non-obvious part of their regular upgrade process at a starbase.
There really is a lot of potential here which, unfortunately, is never going to be explored in canon. But I do like the idea that the Federation is a post-Singularity society which is just blissfully unaware that the Singularity ever happened.
Subspace continuous backups / journal shipping.
They worked to preserve their existence, and let the new lifeform go its own way. If anything, the outcome was a trite, touchy feely ending, only vaguely discussing the actual implication of the new lifeform, while they got back on course to their original mission.
The futurist writers (Roddenberry and his staff) probably didn't have a in-depth knowledge of natural language processing. The type of processing the computer does in Star Trek just seems like a natural extension of input/output. You tell the computer what you want and it gives you a result.
From a computer science and engineer perspective, this is an incredibly difficult task. You have to parse the crazy complex natural language of humans and turn it into a series of procedures and queries to give you a result.
I mean you'd need a crazy super-advanced beyond-data AI for universal translators to work too. .. but that's just a convenient plot/suspension of disbelief device. :-P
Obi-Wan actually touches on this briefly in Episode II:
"If droids could think, there'd be none of us here, would there?"
I read a reference in The Economist years ago (wish I had a link to the study) about a guy who suffered a brain lesion that made him incapable of emotion. Within a year this newly minted Mr. Spock lost his marriage and his job because without emotion he was incapable of making any decisions.
I see the same problem for super intelligent machines. Unless we program them with emotion they will not decide to do much. They won't fear death and so have no reason to kill us. They will not have pride and so won't resent our control.
Also, this (paywalled, sorry) article seems relevant.
Antoine Bechara, Antonio R. Damasio, Hanna Damasio, Steven W. Anderson, Insensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex, Cognition, Volume 50, Issues 1–3, April–June 1994, Pages 7-15, ISSN 0010-0277, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(94)90018-3. (//www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0010027794900183)
Abstract: Following damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, humans develop a defect in real-life decision-making, which contrasts with otherwise normal intellectual functions. Currently, there is no neuropsychological probe to detect in the laboratory, and the cognitive and neural mechanisms responsible for this defect have resisted explanation. Here, using a novel task which simulates real-life decision-making in the way it factors uncertainty of premises and outcomes, as well as reward and punishment, we find that prefrontal patients, unlike controls, are oblivious to the future consequences of their actions, and seem to be guided by immediate prospects only. This finding offers, for the first time, the possibility of detecting these patients' elusive impairment in the laboratory, measuring it, and investigating its possible causes.
Thanks though for the effort
See for instance:
* http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/06/how-only-using-logic-de...
* https://intentionalworkplace.com/2012/03/15/how-emotion-shap...
Star Wars, I'm not so sure. It seems to me that they spent a lot of time on that stuff and I just probably missed it, but in my defense, the films that focused on it were the most boring in the series.
The idea that Star Trek "very clearly" describes anything about the economy of the Federation (or even that what it does show of that economy is remotely consistent) is somewhat amusing. Most of the civilian economy it shows clearly is outside of the Federation (and mostly varieties of regulated market economies), and most of what it shows of the Federation is focussed on a quasi-military service, not the civilian economy.
I'd say the strongest indication is that the Federation civilian economy is largely a gift and informal, non-money-mediated barter/market economy where there scarce items are personal services more than material goods.
That is probably a statement about US cold war politics, but i think matters today given the new cabinate being enshrined today.
There are links to japanese fuedal system, which has a place in the US system whereby the federal government is allocated its own lands apart from the states. "The empire" would be as if washington DC and the US president started annexing state lands.
the Ferengi trade extensively with other civilizations that won't accept fiat currency. they need hard currency.
I choose to retcon latinum as a device that physically encodes a cryptographic key, writes a signed hash into a subspace blockchain, and continually supplies computation power to the latinum validation network. It may look pretty, but it is actually a sophisticated ASIC that runs entirely on ambient photovoltaic energy.
So you can replicate latinum, but in order for it to be worth anything, you have to possess a specific bar that the network has designated to be split, or you have to replicate more than all the other latinum already in existence, to perform a 51% attack on the network.
At minimum it is clearly not a command economy. Economic roles are not given to people according to a social engineering plan. Production priorities are not driven by a central planning committee. There is a private sector.
What we really get hints at is that most things that we consider scarce in the 20th/21st century are not scarce in the 24th century. This seems to be achieved through technology that easily gives access to much greater quantities of usable energy than we currently have access to. This lack of scarcity for basic essentials (food, for example) means that their economy is concerned with very different things than ours is. I see very little evidence that it's a command economy of any kind though.
So, a few thoughts. I think one primer for Star Trek economics is S1E25. Offenhouse, just out of cryonic sleep, really wants to get things rolling and demands to talk to the captain. To demonstrate his seriousness he points out to Riker that the compound interest on his accounts is probably enough to buy the Enterprise. If his accounts are legally intact, they would certainly represent an astronomical amount of wealth worthy of respect, but Riker treats this as the goofiest thing anyone has said to him all week and blatantly blows him off.
Later on, the captain completely fails to take his demands to talk to his lawyer about his property seriously. Later still, "material needs no longer exist." It's a little unclear whether it's even possible in the present for someone on Earth to be a tycoon the way Offenhouse used to be, but I'm pretty sure none exist on TNG. (am I forgetting anybody?)
There are certainly tycoons and accumulators of wealth away from Earth in the greater Star Trek universe, but they tend to be portrayed as buffoonish (Ferengi) or blatantly evil (Kivas Fajo) and they serve as a contrast to the Federation's way of doing things.
> Economic roles are not given to people according to a social engineering plan.
I think we should probably infer that social standing and power follow from participation in the Federation, since it seems to usually work that way. When Picard comes back to Earth in S4E2, there's a fairly prominent civilian job (run by the government) lined up for him. Successful scientists, successful anything, always seem to have Federation ties. (the only counterexample I could think of offhand was the evil scientist who built Data)
There's a question of POV here - maybe there's some whole other, much more capitalistic, economy in the Federation that just isn't shown on screen. I don't think so.
> What we really get hints at is that most things that we consider scarce in the 20th/21st century are not scarce in the 24th century. This seems to be achieved through technology that easily gives access to much greater quantities of usable energy than we currently have access to
One of the things that Iain Banks describes really well in the Culture novels is how, in a post-scarcity economy, controlling the replicators (or whatever) means having power. With regard to Star Trek, I just can't think of any examples offhand of serious resource allocation happening on Earth or within the Federation based on a capitalist process of price discovery. It seems like the entrepreneurs have to get out to the frontier.
The Empire, for example, is known to have have made extensive use of slave labor (by non-humans mostly, such as Wookies). It also seems to make use of droids and clones for dangerous tasks (military work, natural resource extraction, etc.).
Outer Rim worlds seem to have a kind of anarcho-capitalist economy that is equal parts libertarian paradise (no regulations, no taxes) and organized crime syndicate plutocracy (The Hutt syndicates in particular are widespread and powerful).
Core worlds seem to be more like nation states, with each world governing itself and its economy according to local values. Alderaan (RIP) seems to have been a liberal parliamentary democracy. Coruscant (seat of the Empire) is a planet scale conurbation with a first world developed economy on the upper levels and a third world underdeveloped economy on the lower levels.
I believe they do state in TNG that the galaxy class ship could doing everything on its own, and the crew was just there because of their love of discovery and what not.
People are kept along mostly because it's thought proper to give people the opportunity for self expression. I.e. careers are chosen out of internal needs or for the percieved prestige the activity entails, not out any material need as everything up to a point is available (the financial limits of an individual are never explicitly described though). Or - as several characters do - just becausw something is considered hard and dangerous and they want to push themselves. Despite the inane ramblings about homo economicus one encounters now and again, this latter instinct is actually a quite strong driving force in dictating human action(not everyones of course).
One of the biggest non-antagonist rude actions in the series is when an AI underlies the pointlesness of human effort by performing a complex feat in front of the character that she has chosen as her life task - which everyone considers extremely rude.
There are spaceships and explosions but to me the psychologically believable description of near human characters in a post scarcity society is the most interesting facet of his work.
I read through the series once back in high school and found them fun. Fast forward 15-20 years, and I have a career in tech, and dabbled in leftist politics for a while. I came back to read one of them, and ended up re-reading the whole series. I found that he had already thought about and written down questions and answers to many of the things I'd experienced. Just put into a fictional, usually pretty fun world.
Those most interesting parts of his stories were the backdrop. Great reads, not mentioned enough.
So in a post scarcity civilization the main reason people will still work is so that they do not blow their brains out. The difference this time is that we will work on what we like, or on our calling. Now that I think about it, jobs themselves may be the scarce thing. i.e. Not everybody will be able to work on designing the next space station and hence there will be fierce competition to get these jobs.
However, that is what happens with most TV-first SF shows, Doctor Who being another example.
Monkeys are probably mostly happy (as long as we are not bothering them) going about their monkey business. So maybe eventually humans will also be happy despite the existence of strong AI.
Maybe some humans would be unhappy to know they are no longer at the apex of intelligence and maybe that will make us unable to be happy. Always knowing that no matter what we do, it can always be outdone by a smarter than us AI. I suspect these people are the same people who worry about strong AI in the first place :-)
However, we already know with pretty high confidence that there are aliens out there that are more advanced/smarter than us -- and their existance does not affect our day to day happiness. So maybe the question is only relevant locally on earth.
It also has storylines that explain why AIs don't literally run everything: there was a large lash back against the proliferation of AI after the fall of the government, to the point that there are planets that completely ban their existence and destroy on sight.
They probably assume that resources are so widely available (unexplored planets etc) that one doesn't need to live anymore like us to afford basic needs such as food, shelter, medical care, and education. What is very different from our society is we often need to live near big populated cities to get a job that allows us to pay the above. In the ST world they take it almost for granted: you can settle a small colony on a distant planet and still fulfill at least basic needs for everyone with no need for a medium like money. So where's the convenience? Just suppose there are also no patent laws. If you discover something extremely useful you can share it with anyone else because you don't need any bloody "protection" because you already have the resources to extract/transform it, so no need to "invest" time (ie preventing others from knowing about it). Not easy, I'm clearly just speculating, but makes sense to me.
Of course I would sign up in a second to live in such a society, but I'm not sure it's entirely viable, neither now nor in a thousand years. The problem is not money, it's power. Money is not power per se but just a way to reach it in a context where money has value (like sea shells in some islands etc). If and when we reach the point of inventing LFTL (ludicrously faster than light) drive and finding planets literally stuffed with any possible resource we need, we still need to consider human nature.
People want power. Every time someone wants you to do something for them, he/she needs to exercise some pressure on you, be it psychological or using their power to take away what you have or prevent you to get it. My point is that eliminating money wouldn't solve any problem because the problem isn't money per se. The problem is power, or to be more precise the abuse of it by people who use part of it to escape accountability for what they do. What is not clear in the ST universe is how the heck they reached this point. I fear time (evolution) alone isn't enough. Probably, as someone I don't recall said once, the secret is: "never ever give any powers to anyone who wants them".
If the above wasn't clear, please blame the language barrier:)
Star Trek also features many other economies, including that of the Ferengi, which are extremely materialistic. This is the focus of many DS9 episodes. And even the Federation crew somehow get their hands on money to spend; money that mysteriously can't be replicated. (And, in DS9, back on Earth, Sisko's father makes honest-to-goodness actual food, while Jean-Luc has a vineyard.)
Likewise, it's not clear how replicator use works; perhaps they have an allowance. The crew of the Enterprise barely use it, except for food. Their quarters are scarce. So either through monetary, social, or rule-based means, they limit themselves heavily compared to the average American today.
I have trouble pinning the political system in star wars. It has changed several times as the movies have adapted to new audiances (the politics of american focus groups imho). For that reason it isnt important and we shouldnt draw many conclusions.
Beyond that, it's impossible to say that Star Wars universe does or doesn't subscribe to any particular political ideology because it encompasses a galaxy's worth of planets with their own particular ideologies, to whatever degree the franchise realizes them.
I don't know exactly what the Jedi and Sith are... other than the Jedi are supposed to be Good and the Sith are supposed to be Bad. The Jedi have some kind of quasi-ascetic warrior monk bureaucracy that reminds me of what little I understand of what the Samurai might have become during the Edo period. The Sith are apparently just violent sociopaths.
Although you could say the same about Star Trek, if you didn't focus so much on the Federation - the Federation is more or less explicitly Gene Roddenberry's vision of a communist utopia, but it also has the Romulans (a fascist military dictatorship), the Ferengi (capitalists,) etc.
Warrior Sages. The archetype is common in Eastern mythology. "The Force" is itself a Westernized mashup of several Eastern myth systems. It seems particularly closely connected to the mythology of China and Japan, with a thin veneer of some Manichaeism painted on top. This, of course, makes it a bit incoherent as the Eastern myth systems it is mainly inspired by are non-dualistic but the Light/Dark dualism (fundamentally incompatible with the Eastern stuff) really drives the plot in the series.
If I recall, it's implied that they work those jobs out of love and don't actually make money, but my question is how they determine who owns the physical property the businesses are on.
Perhaps it only works if you have to pay someone for it first.
I will set my face against the soul that hath eaten blood, and will cut him off from among his people; for the soul of the flesh is in the blood; and I have given it to you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that maketh atonement for the soul. Therefore have I said unto the children of Israel, No soul of you shall eat blood, neither shall the stranger who sojourneth among you eat blood. [Leviticus 17:10-12]
Thank you for being one of the few commentators to not get distracted by the sci-fi!
For anyone not familiar with the Duniverse, it is a feudal order in which computers have been banned by the single human religion, because in ages past artificial intelligence became sentient and enslaved humanity. Humanity rebelled and won its freedom, and chose to ban computers to avoid history repeating itself. To maintain their interplanetary civilization, humans approach the capabilities of computers using intense training and psychotropic drugs.
Star Wars, on the other hand, is just a fantasy mishmash.
The book is my single favorite book ever.
Unfortunately, a lot of the original cast/crew are dead/a bit too old. Dali was to play the emperor, H.R. Giger, the artist who went on to do the design for the aliens in Alien, was doing the concept designs, but died not too long ago. Mick Jagger was playing the young Harkonnen prince, with Orson Welles as the Baron Harkonnen.
The storyboard book and a lot of the concept art was completed, though, so I'm sure Netflix could still make a great go of it, and Jodorowski himself seems incredibly fired up for an 87 year old. He seems to have more fire in his belly than most 30 year olds.
I didn't like 2, but realized its necessity for 3.
computers beyond a certain level of technical capability, anyway. they do seem to have simpler kinds of machines. they just don't use AI for anything because it is considered blasphemous and dangerous.
the subject of hyperspace navigation is an interesting one though. presumably the vastly powerful AI minds of the past could do it and so used their monopoly on that capability as a lever of power to ensure domination. the spice powered navigators seem to have developed an equivalent ability that operates by vastly different mechanisms (a kind of precognition applied to collisions with astronomical objects).
Dune actually has a number of religions [1], normally based on a fusion of modern-day religions. It's also worth noting that banned technology exists in Star Trek. The Earth government has banned genetic modification after the disaster that was the Eugenics War [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dune_religions
[2] http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Eugenics_Wars
Yes, and it's not just Earth, it's the whole Federation, as seen with the problems Julian Bashir had in DS9. However, there's a big exception in the 2nd season episode of TNG where there's a colony genetically engineering kids with super immune systems and this creates a disease that infects Pulaski.
Star Trek has a lot of inconsistencies.
Star Trek is much more ambiguous about it - they pay lip-service to the post-scarcity line, but still have people working jobs that seems unlikely to be attractive in a true post-scarcity situation, for example.
[1] http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm
Edit: folks, before you make fools of yourselves, _please_ read the textbook definition of what socialism actually is. Thanks.
In fact oil is the only substantial natural resource that Norway has that most other countries don't. Forestry is not terribly profitable because of the terrain, most of the valuable minerals are in the north (and mostly on the Swedish side of the border), large scale hydro has been built out to close to the maximum possible already.
Was your communist country really socialist before it became communist or is the word communist here simply shorthand for Soviet Russian style dictatorship imposed by an external power?
The free market is an amazing mechanism for optimizing resource allocation... As long as you have money.
Yet, no example comes to mind of a society has turned without a forced internal/external takeover to socialism, then onward to communism. Could you point me to some?
Either way, it does not do well to look towards pieces of fictions for solutions to our real world problems. Of course, if we as a planet discovered advance civilizations on other planets, we would have to re-organize our entire political structure to deal with such threats. But that's not the case, and that's not the world we live in.
Although the visual arts can offer unique and compelling perspectives (Apocalypse Now, etc) perhaps we should strive to scrutinize their work the same way a persuasive piece of writing would be.Especially when the economic / political systems of the works are not even self-consistent and rely on non-existent technology (replicators).