We also pay for public transit with our taxes in many states/cities in the United States, but they still charge riders. Taxation is implicit in public transit, I'm not aware of a single viable public transit model that doesn't rely on taxpayer money.
Not really, depending on the thing. There (maybe) comes a point where the accounting of who owes what becomes more expensive than the thing you're tracking.
It can also go the opposite direction. Air is free right now, but then see the movies Total Recall and The Lorax (not joking).
Parts of it, for sure! (I find it hard to imagine you would read a text of any notable length and not agree with any of its ideas to some degree.)
Something that rings very true for me: Sharing is amazingly underutilized (unfortunately I feel it's a deeply cultural problem right now, but oh well, over time things change): I have absolutely no inherent need to own a car. I don't need to own a Hammer. I don't need to own a bicycle pump. Actually, it's intensely inefficient how many things I do have to own and store right now, to be able to only use 5 Minutes every other week or maybe even only half a year.
What I instead need is convenient access to these things. If you can show me a model where I can have that without the burden and cost of solo-owning it – something the author is implying will be a solved problem – I am all for that.
For the Hammer, Bicycle Pump, and other "Tool" type of things the "Tool Library" concept seems to work really well.
It's like a "Book Library", (eg centralised local place for storage and co-ordination) but for tools. There's one here in Melbourne (Australia) with about 400 members, and over 1000 tools:
Agreed, though I think last mile delivery is ignored in the essay. I'd be very happy if post offices evolved and became places where you could get things delivered and you could retrieve them without needing to wait or speak with anyone, but they also allowed you to retrieve other shared items (ok, maybe some requiring a reserve first) that I'm not going to need often. Tools are a good example. Some cooking appliances would also qualify. Some equipment for hiking, board games, bikes and other small vehicles, instruments, etc.
The lack of environmental problems and abundance of clean energy also sounds good, though it just appears magically in the essay, so we can't say much about it.
Lack of privacy is terrible, and we can make it much better. Flying cars are terrible. Not owning everything is terrible. I'm the complete opposite of a materialist person, but I can understand how it's very useful to own some things. I mean, besides your underwear. Some might have sentimental value, and others are used so much that it's more practical to own them and know they are always available at the place you left them.
My going rule of thumb is that any "good" fictive dystopia always starts off as being someone else's utopia, only it becomes compulsory. This in turn leads to any deficiencies or problems in the utopia needing to be papered over, ignored, and so forth because it is compulsory. This causes yet more distortions and away we go.
It's like all of those breathless journo articles about insect protein: they sound fine until the word "replace" comes in. Maybe some folks are jazzed about eating bugs, but I am not, and would prefer not to have my meat replaced by insect protein to keep someone else's utopia going, but someone is going to have the bright idea to make the choice for me.
I like the Brave New World approach to distopia. It's kind of hard to argue with the world as presented because the people in it are happy/content, it seems sustainable, safe, etc. Yet, as a present-day reader with a present-day moral lens, it seems horrific and unjust.
I'm starting to think that Brave New World is looking better than where we're actually headed. In BNW, the Alpha and Beta classes are chosen based on objectively desirable characteristics.
Where we're heading, our top castes will comprise mostly of people who are manipulative, short-term thinkers, vengeful, insecure, arrogant and psychopathic. Not great for society.
It really does make you think about their world at the end. And its not really evil oppressive world like 1984. Its just purely mechanical construction that to us look like dystopia.
I agree we are and are heading is technological aristocracy where tech is used to keep people in line. Divided over crazy theories, societal issues and squabbling over leftovers.
Just give them youtube and they come up with the 'hidden truths' and then they fight with secret kabals and 'morons' who don't see the signs.
Meanwhile amazons googles and other industries are literally squeezing all small business out of existence.
Do you think an Amazon Town could be created where all you shopping has to be done via amazon but you get 20 or 50% off. How far are we from that reality?
What I would disagree with is that the people who push this system forward are far from short-term thinkers, vengeful, insecure. They schemed this system up long time ago and look for every angle to push it ahead.
How quickly 9/11 from tragedy was turned into patriot act opportunity?
Meritocracy set out from birth, no? Are not all people in that book test tube children with specific selected genomes? I fail to see how creating a class of genetic garbage men, relegated to working with trash for their entire lives is "meritocratic," since advocates of the meritocracy concept generally rely on the system's alleged mobility.
From what I recall from reading it, the meritocracy part actually worked incredibly well, yielding tremendous technological advances. It was the secondary effects of pushing meritocracy to extremes that were the problem.
Well of course - his underlying thesis was weak and failed to show how it would be worse off than the status quo. No wonder it caught on when what was mocked is a better idea than the current system! The downsides again failed to be worse than a fixed caste system and relied upon bad extrapolations.
But it would be a great idea if it were real. The problem isn't in the theoretical idea of a meritocracy. It's that the real world isn't nearly as meritocratic as assumed and a lot of people in high places got there by connections, being from wealthy families, and so on and not due to their own merits.
In Brave New World, it's only a meritocracy because they've engineered human embryos to produce the different castes. In the novel, they deliberately induce fetal alcohol syndrome to stunt the intelligence of the lower classes.
The modern reformulation would be genetic engineering or at least genetic screening. I'm sure we're not that far away from the wealthy classes testing their embryos and only implanting the ones that have the highest intelligence, least propensity for disease, etc.
> In Brave New World, it's only a meritocracy because they've engineered human embryos to produce the different castes. In the novel, they deliberately induce fetal alcohol syndrome to stunt the intelligence of the lower classes.
They also forgoed a lot of automation and engineered society to make use of the stunted lower classes. I recall a scene where they had elevator operators, even though automatic elevators had been invented when the book was written.
> The modern reformulation would be genetic engineering or at least genetic screening. I'm sure we're not that far away from the wealthy classes testing their embryos and only implanting the ones that have the highest intelligence, least propensity for disease, etc.
That's literally the backstory of the movie Gattica. Though I think the genetic engineering in that movie controlled recombination, so engineered children got all the best genes of their parents. IIRC, people who weren't engineered (like us) lived in slums and were only given menial jobs regardless of talent.
That might be because you are used to the common trope of the future that seems too good to be true and turns out to have sinister underpinnings. It's used in a lot of dystopian fiction.
Of course it's a scam. "You will own nothing and be happy". That is BS of the highest order. There will always be someone who owns and controls everything. It's just not going to be you.
You will own nothing, you will be worthless. You won't even be able to have a girlfriend/boyfriend or friends for that matter; real human relationships are reserved for the elites. You will get as many VR friends as you want though.
Already it's kind of happening. Look at how many friends rich people have; a lot. Look at how many friends poor people have; very few.
Of course, they're not real friends, but still more real than light projected into your eyeballs.
I can't believe that people are downvoting this without making any arguments to refute it; they're thinking emotionally, looking at things through rose-colored lenses. Sometimes it seems like everyone is on drugs. People's brains are turning into swiss cheese.
Trying to censor information is just not going to work. Controlling the media is not going to help beyond a certain point. People know what's going on and they'll be taking the real conversations offline. When everyone collectively realizes what's been happening, the backlash is going to be terrifying and unforgiving. The more you suppress the truth, the worse it will be when it all comes out.
The current elites don't have the ability to suppress billions of people who were raised on freedom as the central principle of their existence.
>The current elites don't have the ability to suppress billions of people who were raised on freedom as the central principle of their existence.
I hope I'm not too cynical, but I think "freedom" is more of a meme than something that most people value. Whenever there are news stories about governments spying on their own citizens or restricting free speech, most people seem to just shrug and move on with their lives.
I don't know about others but I certainly value my own freedom so I'm not going to live in any country which doesn't have it. I'm glad I visited the US last year because I have a feeling I'm never going back there. Same reason why I wouldn't go visit North Korea.
BTW why am I hearing this 'freedom is not important' stuff from so many people on HN? Is that what your leaders are preaching? I'd be suspicious of your leaders if that were me.
Yes, you will be allowed to choose any artificial sexbot you want and as many as you like... So long as the sexbot is supplied by the official Facebook-approved provider and Facebook employees can watch and record your every interaction with the sexbots. It's for your own safety and to improve the service of course.
> Do people read this and think that is the sort of life they would want in the future?
Mostly, yes.
Most items people own seem like clutter to me. I would much rather own the absolute minimum and then get anything else as I need it, rather than have to own a lot of stuff.
> Do people read this and think that is the sort of life they would want in the future?
I think the author purposefully avoided saying anyone that.
But the part of the story that stood out to me viscerally was the neglect of maintenance crews and the design work, etc and how that plays into a status hierarchy. It is the same frustrating arrogance I sometimes see in city dwellers who just don't understand how many people are physically labouring to to maintain the artificial environment of a large city.
A handwave and "robots will do all that stuff by 2030" is too fantastic to stomach.
I've read Brave New World the other day that sort of envisions this kind of utopia (although there's serious eugenics going on as well), where people "work" for a couple hours a day and spend most their time er, frolicking. I don't recall it being portrayed as a bad thing, other than a disdain of 'older' media like books and the like.
> Author's note: Some people have read this blog as my utopia or dream of the future. It is not. It is a scenario showing where we could be heading - for better and for worse. I wrote this piece to start a discussion about some of the pros and cons of the current technological development. When we are dealing with the future, it is not enough to work with reports. We should start discussions in many new ways. This is the intention with this piece.
>Across the country, Tekin found that "[m]edian home prices have increased at four times the rate of household incomes since 1960," meaning homeownership is increasingly out of reach for many Americans. Rents, meanwhile, have grown roughly twice as fast as adjusted wages between 1960 and 2017.
Mortgage rates move inversely with house prices (because many buyers, especially marginal buyers) are buying houses based on the monthly payments more than on the HUD-1 statement price.
By that admittedly too-simple analysis, houses peaked in unaffordability in 1980 and have been only modestly less affordable since 2000. (Much of this is likely explained by the median house in 2000 being much larger than the median house in 1960, having nearly doubled in size between 1973 and 2016.)
I have a job and I get paid much better than average person here. However I still don't feel very wealthy, and there's lots of wealth imbalance in this country. The younger people are even more fucked. I'll probably be fine considering I earn more than average, but I'm seriously concerned with the trend however.
Sure we can own trivial things like laptops and what not, but that's not really something to secure your future with. Younger generations will be forever slaves and work to the grave, unless you happen to be born in fortunate family or get incredibly lucky.
Don't let the ridiculous prices of an urban center deter you. I assume you live in a very large country. Especially don't let the ridiculous prices of an urban center drive you to change the pricing and ownership system of said rest of the country.
Growing wealth is a simple formula: [amount spent] < [amount earned]. Rinse and repeat for a given length of time, and you will have more wealth than you started with.
What nonsense. Maybe home ownership is out of reach for many young people, but they all seem to have a laptop, mobile phone and huge pair of headphones. Young people have always been the poorest section of society, but that makes complete sense as they haven't has the time to accumulate any wealth. Eventually they become old people.
And in the evening people can rent it to party. Maybe that is too much. Why not start small and offer your toilet to the public for a dollar per session?
The author ignores the difference between personal property and private property. It is true that you do not use either your living room nor your lawnmower 24/7, but your living room is a highly personal space that you customise to fit your own needs and desires, whereas most people are not as emotionally attached to their lawnmowers.
I am unclear as to the author's intent. I expect most people here would find such ideas offensive.
And yet so many things seem on the right track. It's the polar opposite of the outrageously inefficient model where everything you use, you own, and for 99.9% of the time, the thing just sits there depreciating or taking up space. Regarding cars, as a city liver who needs a car (but has no driveway or garage), I certainly yearn for a better way.
Obviously some things are going to be bothersome, such as the idea of people holding business meetings in your living room when you are away. But I do like the idea of more sharing, and letting go -- at least a bit -- of the urge to own so much stuff.
The very cynical counter argument is rarely spoken:
Owning my things provides value even when I’m not using them, because I benefit from excluding other people (my competition) from using them.
Example: The sports car locked in my garage helps keep sports cars away from other people, which maintains their benefit of conferring status. It provides utility even if I basically never drive it.
This side of human nature is forgotten at our peril.
It’s not even just exclusion. Can you imagine the scheduling nightmare this would induce? Your personal life would be run minute to minute by your calendar. Any time you wanted to do anything it would either have to be booked in advance or you’d have to wait for delivery.
This article seems to be written from the perspective of someone who likes spending their time in coffee shops and riding their bike around in circles. Might as well be a hamster in a cage. It’s like the millennial version of brave new world, no sex, boring drugs, and the pervasive feeling that no one knows what they’re doing.
>Any time you wanted to do anything it would either have to be booked in advance or you’d have to wait for delivery.
oh my special personality defects will probably mean I won't ever be able to go anywhere, do anything, and will eventually starve to death under this system.
I do not like the future described in the article... but the scheduling nightmare is not currently the reality with by-the-minute cars, bikes, scooters, meals, groceries, apartments, personal tech, server infra, or home services. What makes you think it would be for other classes of product?
If anything it's done away with some of my previous scheduling constraints. No more oil changes or tire rotations! No more grocery trips! Etc etc.
Personally I don't like it because in a renter world, the owners have an extraordinary amount of power.
I can’t imagine being able to schedule whether I want to play guitar, exercise, read, or start on a new woodworking project. I pick up my guitar few times a day to practice, not at set times. I exercise either in the morning or the evening depending on my mood and my plans. I’m usually working my way through a few books at a time so I may choose any of them to read. I work on projects when I can squeeze an hour or two in or when I wind up with a free afternoon. None of that would ever happen if I had to block out time for it or wait for the necessities to be delivered. Hell, half the time I don’t even know what I want to build until I rummage through the various fasteners and bits of scrap wood laying around and something strikes my fancy. The same goes for cooking, some of the best meals I’ve made were whipped up from the ingredients I had on hand. A perfectly planned life would be devoid of happy accidents.
This is critical. As long as we operate in a highly competitive climate, private ownership and rights associated with it become a necessity. Ownership not only legally guarantees your rights but denies others rights (your competition).
Even with a well optimized sharing economy inside a highly competitive environment, you'll look for ways to break the optimization process favorable to yourself. If everything schedules at my whim I'll be sure and use the most scarce and difficult to obtain resources to lock them down and trade that time to others for something else I want. Short of living in a post scarcity economy, it would never be feasible.
I feel that "post scarcity" requires some definition. In the west very few people go hungry and the vast majority of people have a mobile phone - something that was an expensive status item just a couple of decades ago. It feels like if we made everything "post scarcity" by today's standard, we would have a load more things that people would be striving to acquire. On the other hand maybe post scarcity is what some buddhist monks who give up everything are closer to achieving than anyone in the west.
it seems possible that food, water, shelter, and even healthcare could be provided to everyone in the near future, but positional goods will always exist. it will never be possible for everyone to live in a manhattan penthouse, be treated by the best doctors, etc., and people will still compete for access to these things.
In Europe, particularly in the richer countries such as Scandanavia those are generally not a problem. A few years ago a friend from Denmark said that the whole country had 16 homeless people. Obviously there are people who have problems but I think those run deeper than just not being able to afford the basics.
Additionally, as food, water, shelter become readily available, people raise the bar even on those goods.
The social safety net here in Sweden won't let me starve. But to impress my friends, I have to buy much more than calories. The food I serve must be climate compensated, organic, small batch, good for animals and people. Buying food becomes an exercise in personal branding.
> Author's note: Some people have read this blog as my utopia or dream of the future. It is not. It is a scenario showing where we could be heading - for better and for worse. I wrote this piece to start a discussion about some of the pros and cons of the current technological development. When we are dealing with the future, it is not enough to work with reports. We should start discussions in many new ways. This is the intention with this piece.
That disclaimer is completely disingenuous though. The piece is written in language that implies positivity and acceptance. You could take the same objective conditions and write a doomsday narrative - 'I am unable to ever truly relax, because at a moment's notice my living room might be commandeered for a business meeting. Technically I could take it off the market, but then I would have no way to make up for prime time real estate usage and would have to leave the city'.
> My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology
This is straight out of every sci fi dystopia where those at the privileged productive core are taught to fear and pity the outsiders. Complete with the straw men that the others chose to reject technology, rather than merely rejecting the invisible authoritarianism they're swimming in. Though usually the story is about waking up, rather than how good the dream is.
I don't think this piece helps the discussion at all, but is rather just more fuel for the populist-neoreactionary backlash. If this is the future "the elites" are grooming us to accept, then I can understand the desire to burn it all down.
The sustainable path forward involves making technology work for us as individuals, rather than abdicating our individual autonomy to opaque systems that are undoubtedly controlled by powerful overlords.
>It's the polar opposite of the outrageously inefficient model where everything you use, you own, and for 99.9% of the time, the thing just sits there depreciating or taking up space.
Truly amazing how it's apparently inefficient for ordinary working people to own things that we actually use and enjoy sometimes, but it's perfectly efficient for the investor class to own the fruit of our labors.
Honestly, a complete reversal of any real notion of efficiency.
The only reason I'm not hopping on board the don't-own-stuff train is because the cynic in me believes this is all a ruse by the elite class to further own all productive capital and to render the lower classes even more subservient and dependent on their good graces.
If the "1%", so to speak, gave up all their yachts and patents, and ownership of ride-hailing services and farming were fully socialized, then maybe I'd get on board.
Until then, I'll believe that this is the wealthy trying to milk even more freedom from us.
What's wrong with something sitting there and not being used? It's not causing any extra consumption. It's using space, but I don't wish for a future where I don't even have enough space to keep a personal car.
As for sharing everything, it's a good theory but would never work in practice. Have you ever lived with people outside of your family or bubble? Some people are filthy and don't even take care of things they own, let alone things they don't. Are you expecting to be able to select who you are happy to share with?
> It's using space, but I don't wish for a future where I don't even have enough space to keep a personal car.
I'm already living that present. It's really nice. Walkable neighbourhoods full of interesting things to see and do, because that space isn't being wasted on car storage.
> As for sharing everything, it's a good theory but would never work in practice. Have you ever lived with people outside of your family or bubble? Some people are filthy and don't even take care of things they own, let alone things they don't.
That seems like a problem that can be solved technologically. Certainly e.g. Zipcars have always been clean when I got in them, somehow.
I definitely agree with getting cars out of neighbourhoods. I would happily park my car out of town and use my bicycle to go and get it. However, it would only work if everyone was bound by the same rules and I was treated like a first-class road user on my bike.
Maybe only affluent people currently use Zipcars. I really don't want to share a car with certain people and neither do you. The more I think about it seems like it would do more to divide people than anything.
Opportunity cost is still a cost and many still decay even unused - it does cause extra consumption by proxy. A renting/sharing everything model would have issues and it is better to have a choice in the matter essentially. Imagine the outrage if some snobby place decided to ban cars with leases or rentals on them from their parking lots or from any renting in a city.
>Obviously some things are going to be bothersome, such as the idea of people holding business meetings in your living room when you are away.
and also stupid, since the needs of a business meeting are rather different than the needs of a living room, and living rooms must service all sorts of people and families.
And finally families own stuff because kids need and want stuff, you're not going to have your kids favorite doll delivered when they want to play with it.
> Author's note: Some people have read this blog as my utopia or dream of the future. It is not. It is a scenario showing where we could be heading - for better and for worse. I wrote this piece to start a discussion about some of the pros and cons of the current technological development. When we are dealing with the future, it is not enough to work with reports. We should start discussions in many new ways. This is the intention with this piece.
Products or services are only free either because
- you are the product or
- temporarily to kill any other competitors, become a monopole and start charging a lot
> Products or services are only free either because - you are the product or - temporarily to kill any other competitors, become a monopole and start charging a lot
I try to be careful with this phrasing. Because I do believe it's true for most things.
But then look at open source software, which powers SO MUCH of our society. Much of the most essential software in the world was written for absolutely free. These days there's lots of open source that is written for corporate PR, but that wasn't always the case.
So, just be careful. Products and services really might be labors of love. We need to leave a tiny gap in our cynicism to allow for some goodness to come in. :)
I don't understand this. As said in other comments, I believe most people wouldn't want most of the things the author describes.
If I want to cook at home and have to order everything, I assume it won't just be there in 5 minutes. And then what? If everything is shared does someone come pick it up when someone else needs it? Do I take it somewhere?
Also, are people delivering these things? Or robots? And how can this be free?
He also mentions that most work can be done at anytime. Well, if the premisse is order everything I need, even for cooking, that has to be done right away, no?
I might be totally off, but this doesn't make any sense to me.
The article is definitely not the "best" version of this vision of the future I've read...
Not that I'm advocating for this future in any way, but I assume that a more realistic version of this (especially for as near as 2030) is that many people still have jobs that have an actual schedule. Maybe we can be optimistic and dream that people get to work less than 40 hours a week to have a reasonable quality of life.
But the idea of "I own nothing" cannot conceivable extend to personal items like clothing. That doesn't make any sense. In a future of "no ownership", you'd still own your shirt and toothbrush. Probably you'd still own your playstation (but do you actually own your video games today??? Can you play them offline? Does your console have ads?) as well. You wouldn't own a car, or your home (you'd have rights while you occupy your home, but not after you move), maybe you wouldn't own tools that are too expensive/specialized to be almost-free.
So for your example, I imagine that immediate delivery services might still exist, but that would be kind of a "high class" service and might be expensive. More than likely, you'd have Amazon dropping off your weekly grocery list on your designated day (e.g., "Wednesdays are trash day and grocery day in my neighborhood").
I highly doubt that we'll have that much more robot workforce by 2030. The only industry where that's possible is brick-and-mortar shopping having no more cashiers, which I do see as somewhat likely.
I'm not even taking into consideration de 2030 part.
But yeah, I generally agree with you. Especially in this:
> But the idea of "I own nothing" cannot conceivable extend to personal items like clothing. That doesn't make any sense ... maybe you wouldn't own tools that are too expensive/specialized to be almost-free.
Wake up.
Clothes have been delivered overnight.
Put them on, wear for the day.
At the end of the day, put them in a box outside wherever you're staying the night.
That seems like a feasible thing to build today, if you ignored all the current consequences of fast-fashion.
And in the sense of formal wear, it has for decades. Other than James Bond, I don't think most people have any need to own a tuxedo and rent one in the handful of times in their life when they need it.
There will be an "app" for that. You select the meal you want to cook and it sends you the ingredients and whatever appliances you need to cook that meal. Then show you step by step how to prepare the meal and you do it.
You do this once or twice a year. The rest of the time you just order regular, good old delivery to your home.
It seems to be based on the assumption that the only cost involved is electricity and ignores the cost of materials. Even if everything is recycled you end up paying for entropy somewhere. This society would end up in a death spiral.
I think that the part that should be mentioned about this scenario (whether you see it as utopia or distopia), is that the word "privacy" here also stands in for "liberty", "power", etc. The remarkable thing about the scenario depicted is not the wonders of the sharing economy, it's the fact that there is somehow a stable distribution of power that prevents all these own-nothings from being cattle. Not impossible, but that's the challenge.
The story sounds more like they are cattle. Someone or something is setting the rules, designating protected nature reserves, excluding the people who didn’t come along from participating in their economy, scheduling the business meetings in your living room.
I actually don't mind the idea of renting a large number of products that are only used occasionally. A drone dropping off a mixmaster or hair straightener only when you need it actually makes sense in an economy where energy is cheap and space is at a premium.
I can't see why this necessitates me not owning clothes, or allowing random strangers to use my living room while I'm out, though. I don't even really see the economic utility in either of those cases.
> It might seem odd to you, but it makes perfect sense for us in this city. Everything you considered a product, has now become a service. We have access to transportation, accommodation, food and all the things we need in our daily lives. One by one all these things became free, so it ended up not making sense for us to own much.
All that becoming "free" (here meaning "at no cost") will never happen in a capitalistic society such as many of ours. So from that point on it is pure fiction.
What do you mean? That paragraph is already close to reality in some places in Europe, where public transport is ticket-less and free and the government provides housing and food at no cost to those who need it.
Expand on that and you're at what the author is describing.
I personally wouldn't bet money on "this will never happen", would you?
I am in Europe and I do not see anything close to what the author is describing.
Nothing is really at no cost. It is paid for with tax money or directly. The author is not specifying "for those who could not otherwise afford it", but describing it as at no cost for everyone. Most universities cost money to enrole and attend. Does your baker give out buns at no cost? Is the grocery store giving away all the food at no cost? Has it all become a service at no cost?
Nope, none of that has happened and it will not happen, as long as everything needs to be a good business in a capitalistic sense. The single person business or small business or any business cannot escape the reality in this system.
Show me that country or even that city please. Show me the social experiment, that tries to get people to work without pay, as long as they have access to "all the things we need in our daily lives". As far as I know, it has never been done. What if you have any extra wish? How will it be supplied, without tracking your every move in such a society? How would different needs be satisfied, everyone having slightly different needs?
So that's why I call it pure fiction. You are welcome to show me that model city, which self-sufficiently makes it happen. I might move there.
> Nothing is really at no cost. It is paid for with tax money or directly.
> The author is not specifying "for those who could not otherwise afford it", but describing it as at no cost for everyone.
The author never specified whether or how things are paid for, but for me personally I am assuming tax money. He also leaves open whether luxury goods/foods are still paid for.
> Show me that country or even that city please. Show me the social experiment, that tries to get people to work without pay, as long as they have access to "all the things we need in our daily lives". As far as I know, it has never been done.
Why are you asking me to show you something I never claimed existed?
I claimed there's places with social security (housing, food) and free public transport (Luxembourg for instance).
> So that's why I call it pure fiction.
Anything that doesn't exist yet is fiction.
It seems that you both misunderstood the article and my comment, then tried to maneuver me into a position where I would defend something nobody ever claimed.
To be fair, the author leaves a lot of things unexplained, so one's imagination is going to fill in the gaps.
Personally I imagined a city where basic necessities are provided for free, but where you have to pay for anything that is a cut above. Greatly expanded social security essentially.
Try to find the BBC documentary Inside the Bruderhof (it was on youtube, but seems to have gone). It's a religious commune and it's the best example I have seen of a form of communism that works. Not my idea of how to live my life though. I'll take the evils of free market capitalism over that.
> What do you mean? That paragraph is already close to reality in some places in Europe, where public transport is ticket-less and free and the government provides housing and food at no cost to those who need it.
Who needs free housing?
Who gets to decide who needs free housing? Need I remind you that this often comes down to "the poorest" and "some of the richest"? Here in Sweden the latter category in the guise of representatives for labour unions, the leadership of public organisations like the police and similarly positioned people as well as a number of politicians (Margot Wallström being a good example here) have been implicated many times in real estate deals where they get to live for free or close to free in high-value city-central property owned and paid by the unions or the state.
Also, who decides who gets to live where? Who gets to live in those fine old houses facing the park, who gets to live in the dilapidated tenement blocks? What is the deciding factor? Why?
Who pays for those buses and trams?
Who pays for those houses?
In those places in Europe you mention (and where I live) the answer is that local and state taxes pay for those things, social services gets to decide who is eligible for free housing, the waiting lines for other rental properties are extensive (up to 25 years for some locations) while those eligible for free housing are required by law to be provided with such within a few months. This leads to social tension where people see their children being unable to get their own apartment because all available and affordable places are being handed out for free to "eligible" people, paid for by those same parents and children. The "free" public transport is anything but free, it still needs a large amount of funding which often comes out of local taxes, parking fees and permit fees, "congestion taxes" and more of such. Now imagine a situation where everybody decided from one day to the next to forego on their own mode of transport and starts using the "free" public transport and see what happens. What would happen is a severe drop in funding for the "free" public transport combined with a severe overloading of the buses and trams. The disappearance of car-related taxes would necessitate an increase in other taxes to be able to fund that "free" public transport. For this funding to be stable the taxes would need to be of the sort which can not be avoided, anything from property taxes (which would make owning a house more expensive and relegate this to the richer part of society), public utility taxes, something like the Poll Tax which was tried under the Thatcher government, etc. Since these tax raises would end up breaking the budget for "the poorest" there would be a need for another social servant who gets to decide which people are eligible for tax breaks, raising the taxes for the remaining tax payers.
I guess the picture is getting clear now, "free" services generally are anything but free, they just end up being paid in a different way.
Now turn the thing around and take some of its assumptions as being close to the truth. Nuclear energy, either in the form of fission or fusion, finally gets to live up to the promise of being close to free. There will still be transport costs - where I live I pay more for getting electricity to my home than for the electricity itself, this due to the network being a natural monopoly while I can shop around (on a rigged market, but still) for electricity sellers - but the price should go down markedly. Assuming that my purchasing power remains the same or goes up this means that I now have money left over. What do you think those "car" services will end up costing compared to owning an old but serviceable electric vehicle? Remember that one of the advantages of electric propulsion is its simplicity and with that its longevity (apart from the batteries, that is). If power were to be close to free I would g...
> No, this is not a vision of the future. It is the preface to yet another dystopic novel where the thing which was supposed to make everybody happy ended up in yet another brave new world.
It can be both.
I'm not sure what to do with your response if I'm being honest. It reads like a blog post with your thoughts on the original article, not on anything being discussed in this thread specifically.
You can read my response like you read the original article. In my post I state why the premise of the original article is false. What else do you read in my post?
"I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me." -- This gave me a feeling that I am unable to put into words.
This is why Neuralink frightens the hell out of me. I feel that no matter how they are planning to protect their brain-computer-interfaces, they will eventually fail at it (like it happens with any sufficiently complex technology). Once that happens, any dictator, autocrat or the 'ethically-challenged tech bro du jour' will use them to gain unfettered access to the minds of people and wreak havoc on what makes people themselves. And good luck working against this once they can read your thoughts.
Just like today's "don't spread personal data on the internet and avoid forms", the future of that will be "don't use a brain-computer device/software that is not entirely open-source".
We're warned. Now what we have to do is to work on reducing the power of malicious individuals who would want to read our thoughts by force. That's a political/societal thing more than technical. Or is it? what if it was financially not worth it for anyone to do such things...
Is that feeling an overwhelming sense of dread caused by the realization that we are already living in that world and most of us don't realize or care? The feeling of helplessness and doom?
After reading these lines in Sapiens, I don't think that day will be that far away.
"Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous."
As long as you have a pair of the correct lenses[1], life is all hugs and cupcakes.
> The lenses cause their wearers to see, not their squalid surroundings, but the Overworld, a vastly superior version of reality where a hut is a palace, gruel is a magnificent feast, etc. — "seeing the world through rose-colored glasses" on a grand scale.
The 2020 election appears a step in this direction.
I am speculating but perhaps parent means TV news and media is a lens (Eye of the Overworld) through which the wearer is shown a world layered over the real world. Media would then change the view to either squalor or majesty (perhaps depending on the elected president).
Personally, I think a future where AI can do most jobs is frightening.
It will be run by a group of relatively few elites that are involved in power struggles for control of the AI and the rest of us that do stuff like pick fruit (assuming it's cheaper than having an AI do it) and serve as cannon fodder in the AI armies.
I find people who believe that it will lead to some kind of Utopia horribly naive and they have no understanding of human nature.
We went through a comparable transition from most people working in agriculture and farming to that being automated away and people doing stuff that hadn't been much worried about before. Given human nature hasn't changed I imagine it will be similar.
Automation did not make all of humanity transition. Manual labour is still used nowadays, even for works which could be automated in some way.
Actually, there is a larger and larger gap between educated people with office jobs who earn a good salary to do "stuff that hadn't been worried about before"... and the rest of the barely educated people who barely earn anything and get to do all the manual work (taking care of the children, cleaning homes, offices, cooking food, delivering food, harvesting delicate fruit, etc.). The gap is bigger and bigger, despite or thanks to the progress of humanity.
In a world where less of the manual people are asked to do manual work for some reason, these uneducated people won't transition to other jobs. Best case scenario is they get a minimal universal income to stay calm at home and generate clicks on social media to feed AI some new data. Worst case scenario is they will want to work, and be angry at society for making them feel useless.
And then again during the industrial revolution and consequent automation, where the work previously done by 10 people is now done by 1.
It's cyclical, and while I will concede that people lose their jobs because of automation, zooming out to the overall jobs market (and figures, which probably don't tell the whole story) things haven't really changed much.
On an individual level though, people lose their jobs and livelihood, and have to settle for a lower paying, dumber job.
That said, a lot of jobs replaced by automation are already low-paying, dumb jobs. Why stand 8 hours / day doing a repetitive manual job if a thing can do it just as well? Why expose yourself to the worst the internet comes up with when you can train an AI to detect CP?
I don't believe we'll see jobs becoming largely obsolete in our lifetime, but I would like to fantasize about a future where work is a choice and everybody can live comfortably (quality housing, food and spending money) even without a job. Not going to happen as long as capitalism and the never ending pursuit of profit and profit increase are still a thing though. But, we're seeing some hopeful developments in that regard, with things like UBI and the like.
(Aside: I don't believe UBI will work in the end, if everyone has a baseline income, nobody does. UBI only works if it's coupled with assurances of housing and that it's enough to cover all basic needs, which right now depend largely on the area you live in. I couldn't get an affordable rental place on my own income some years ago, because first there was a 15+ year waiting list, and later I was earning too much so I was thrown out to the 'free market', and there's a pretty big gap between the most expensive social housing and the cheapest free market housing. That gap is filled up with 'student' houses, think houses split up into multiple units / rooms. But nobody should be forced to live like that if they're out of college and have a paid full-time job.
I think the counterargument is that if everyone suddenly has $1000/month more, the market will very quickly eat it all, as prices readjust to consume the extra disposable income.
I want UBI to work. But I haven't heard of a good strategy to mitigate what I just described.
a complementary argument is that we can always find things for people to do for money. we all have unfulfilled wishlists, at least 330M in the US alone. from eggshell coat clasps to urban greenspace to maneuverable model rocketry to DDR competitions to mobile surgical centers to childcare. the list is literally endless.
what we don't generally have is an optimal dispersion of capital (and power) to fulfill many of those wishes. concentration of capital and power also concentrates labor allocation and decision-making (something capitalism in ideal form opposes), so instead of drawing from the ingenuity of hundreds of millions, we're trending toward that of hundreds of thousands. it doesn't matter how clever those hundreds of thousands are, they'll never out-imagine hundreds of millions (or billions worldwide).
ubi is predicated on the idea that lots of people will have nothing to do soon, but that's only effectuated in a dystopian world where capital and power are extremely concentrated. rather than altruism, ubi is rather a critical step toward fascist corporatism, acting to stave off potential opposition by trickling down a tiny bone to the masses. the populace assuming mass joblessness are falling into the rhetorical trap of the subjugating corporatists, not accessing a benevolent key to economic and social freedom.
Though one plus side of that is that it reallocates resources from capturing the value the rich control towards capturing the value that's been distributed to the poor.
Right now few bright folks are interested in revolutionizing affordable housing, public education, or payday lending because the money's not in it. They make a lot more money advertising to the affluent class or owning a marketplace that gives them vacation rentals or cheap transportation.
If we had UBI, prices would eventually equilibrate to eat all the new disposable income, but the gold rush in the process might build a bunch more halfway-decent housing.
You can't use cash. Guaranteed housing, a universal food stamp program that doesn't suck — there are ways we can give everyone a fixed amount of additional value without injecting extra money into the economy and seeing inflation happen. After all, a grocery store can raise its prices on customers, but when it has to hand its food stamp receipts to the state for reimbursement, the state can ensure that prices don't rise for the consumer while subsidizing as needed.
As far as real cash payouts go, there's value to them, but not universally. In order to have the maximum impact they need to be limited to people with little to no other income.
It’s not just “low-paying, dumb jobs” that are at risk.
AI can also help augment the work of “high-paying, smart jobs”.
Meaning that instead of hiring ten lawyers, you can hire one lawyer and a license to lawyer.ai which will empower the one lawyer to do the work of ten.
UBI won't bring magical satisfaction in America (even with promised "better housing") because everyone sees themself as a temporarily embarrassed millionaire (Steinbeck quote) entitled to more and more. It will simply never be enough.
I think we are already at the point of saturation. Lots of people are working in the business of convincing you to buy things you don't need. On the other hand, the agricultural and industrial revolutions did give time for people to adapt. They happened in brief times considering human history, but they were enough for people to learn and become productive.
If you have automated cars tomorrow on the streets, most of the truck and taxi drivers are not ready. Heck, most of the oil countries in the middle-east are not ready for a post-oil economy.
Industrial agriculture has had disastrous consequences in the form of overpopulation, we just haven't felt them yet. Global warming and every other problem caused by overpopulation are all a result of industrial nitrogen fixation and large scale farming producing enough food.
Blaming nitrogen fixing or industrial agriculture for global warming is objectively wrong. The Romans were causing significant rise in atmospheric carbon levels just through the sheer scale of many small fires and deforestation. About the only sources of fossil fuels released were methane ignorantly released from mining and maybe Greek fire if the theory that it really was surface deposits of crude petrochemicals is correct.
Population capacities and thus overpopulation aren't fixed things meaning overpopulation is relative to conditions. It would be absurd to call algae overpopulated if they thrive just fine at concentrations in one epoch with different population conditions just because it would cause red tide in another epoch.
That is one way to look at it. Another way to look at it would be the industrialization of western society led to 100 years of exploitation of non-industrial peoples and societies through colonialism and imperialism. With it came global power struggles between industrialized nations for control of resources and technology (WW1, WW2, Cold War, etc.) on a scale the world had never seen.
If you live in the USA and Europe, you are the recipient of generations of global technological dominance. It's hard to understand the possibility of being on the other side of that.
That forgets what happened before industrialization. What do you call the long history of peasantry, slavery, and conquest before industrialization if not exploitation? What do you call all of the wars for plunder if not wars for resources? Horrifyingly one hundred years of exploitation is /brief/ historically compared to thousands of years of it.
AI is all nice and rosy but how do we know it's "right"? How can a machine be indifferent to human influences? How do we know it's not biased? Does it discriminate? It's a not a human, it can't "think" like one, it's not capable of rational and fluid thought and argument. It's a dumb machine feeding off data, unless you give it all the data it's bound to be inaccurate at some point.
AI is given too much credit for a little bit of intelligence (if you can call it that, I think that's how we perceive it), however as society changes so the AI has to. Does AI understand brexit yet? Does it influence policy decisions? Can it understand how people will react? Can it help during a pandemic? Can it talk and negotiate?
"the rest of us that do stuff like pick fruit (assuming it's cheaper than having an AI do it) and serve as cannon fodder in the AI armies."
The lucky ones will be shining their shoes, giving them massages, tutoring their kids, cooking their meals, and giving them manicures.
Many will prefer the human touch for things like that, even if they could be done by machines, and having human servants has always been a status symbol.
This is what the non-wealthy among us have to look forward to.
(I'm using "you" not to mean "you personally", but both uto/dystopian AI futurists.)
You have used technology right?
You know it is all mostly shit that breaks down, crashes, and gets replaced and thrown out on an 18 month cycle?
What I think lots of people get wrong is forgetting just how crappy consumer tech is, and industrial/military isn't far behind. We may get AI working well in 5-25 years, but I doubt deployments will be any less buggy.
Repairing & provisioning the billions of bots will be most of the "tech" jobs. Think like the IT dept at your company that hands out new laptops, times a million.
"AI" is such a vague term we forget that it encompasses both horribly stupid industry/task specific systems as well as grand artificial minds that might one say dwarf all of human intelligence combined.
For the first, you are right - certainly in that timescale. For the later, I assume we will need to justify our continued existence.
It is extremely well defined. The best example I can point you to is from the 1990's by Russell & Norvig in their seminal work "Artificial Intelligence" which coalesces a half century of research. They spend the first 100 pages clearly defining the types of domains and vocabulary needed to define the space of AI: it is an exhaustive analysis with citations going back decades, covering early thinkers like Norbert Wiener and Von Neumann. Your claim indicates you haven't really studied the field. But everyone jumping into tensorflow on a raspberry pi has probably had zero exposure the to decades of research put into AI.
Your second claim about a giant mind that might dwarf all of humanity, is, well, grandiose sci-fi. Much like Dyson Spheres or Time Travel.
I would argue that an AI more intelligent than humanity is far more realistic than a Dyson Sphere or Time Travel - and something I would not be surprised to see within the next 100 years.
...simply because even a reasonably intelligent AI would have the ability to improve itself at a rate orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution.
>Why keep a pasta-maker and a crepe cooker crammed into our cupboards? We can just order them when we need them.
The main point of owning things is that you get to use them when you want to use them.
People keep those things in cupboards because when they decide on a whim to make pasta they do just that. The same goes for all the rest - having cars, houses and so on.
Unless there's some kind of Philip K Dick-style machine that near-instantly delivers good X to your apartment through a vacuum tube or something, that as-a-service bs won't fly. No one wants to wait hours (on the best case given our current logistics network) after deciding to make pasta to actually get the pasta machine.
For the most part, I agree. Some things really do work better in a "borrow" type system. For instance, I'm fixing up my old bike and the sheer number of tools necessary for basic tasks is astounding. I wish there were some local "bike maintenance tools" library where like-minded folks could go to fix up their bikes and use tools. You could probably serve an entire city with a handful of chain tools, and yet it's interesting to consider how many millions of them must be manufactured so that everyone has one for the one time a year they need to replace a bike chain.
I used to be a member at a community makerspace in Nashua, NH which had stuff like that. Lasercutters, woodworking area, auto bay, machine shop, 3d printing, etc. It was awesome, and sustainably non-profit!
Also you can take pride in things, keep them maintained and tuned to your preferences. Or the opposite. In the case of my car I don't need to take care of the cosmetics. I can load a muddy mountain bike into it and scratch it without needing to pay through the nose as I would wit a rental car.
In my case it would be cheaper to rent a car than own one as I use it relatively infrequently, but every time I rent I need to wait in the queue picking it up and dropping it off. It probably uses two or three hours of my life every time I rented.
I think this essay lost a lot of appeal with the China virus pandemic (especialy start of it in spring). This "own nothing, order everything" lifestyle is very fragile.
This is only ridiculous because we're in a society that values making money more than anything else. I wouldn't want to everything to be rent/subscription based because the other party will always be looking for how to get more money out of me. If everything were really truly free and I could order waffles that arrived in 3 minutes what incentive would anyone have to change that service in anyway?
And when you're done eating those waffles, you can have a free toothbrush delivered so you can freshen up before sending it on its way to the next lucky recipient.
Owning things has advantages beyond accumulating wealth.
>Welcome to my city - or should I say, "our city". I don't own anything. I don't own a car. I don't own a house. I don't own any appliances or any clothes.
>Sometimes I use my bike when I go to see some of my friends
The author can’t help but drag ownership back in al the time - “my bicycle’ “my living room”. Also the author ignores the tragedy of the commons - what if the last person broke the pasta maker or didn’t clean it. Where is the labor coming from to keep up all this stuff? How much supply is available? How much does it cost to get a pasta maker delivered? Does it come today or a month from now because I have to reserve one of my city’s 3 pasta makers and that was the soonest available? What if I don’t return it?
It’s 2020 and I don’t own a house or car, or even a bicycle. I rent all those things when I need them, and it really is great.
I also care about privacy. Yes, you have to hand over id to your landlord when you apply for a lease. But unless you can afford to buy your home with cash, you also have to do that to get a mortgage.
I hope my bike share program isn’t selling my trip data to other companies. I would like it if it worked more like public transport, where you can easily buy a ticket without id and use it anonymously.
There’s nothing inherent about renting that prevents privacy. You can buy cars that have gps trackers on them, which can be tracked by a company in the event of theft. Some cars, like the Nissan GT-R, use them to stop you driving too fast if you’re not at an approved race track.
I think regulation is the only way to protect privacy, regardless of whether people rent or own.
Communities sharing resources, rather than nuclear families is a good idea. Much of the world lives like this already. Not every house on your street needs a lawnmower (or a lawn).
Lack of privacy however, is a lack of personhood. It will be eroded, and some aspects of it should change, nudity for example should be less abhorrent to all. But this seems like a thought experiment for the sake of argument, and I fear that arguments are all it will generate.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 288 ms ] threadScience fiction, right there.
It can also go the opposite direction. Air is free right now, but then see the movies Total Recall and The Lorax (not joking).
And when it turns, turning it back is HARD / near impossible.
Do people read this and think that is the sort of life they would want in the future?
Something that rings very true for me: Sharing is amazingly underutilized (unfortunately I feel it's a deeply cultural problem right now, but oh well, over time things change): I have absolutely no inherent need to own a car. I don't need to own a Hammer. I don't need to own a bicycle pump. Actually, it's intensely inefficient how many things I do have to own and store right now, to be able to only use 5 Minutes every other week or maybe even only half a year.
What I instead need is convenient access to these things. If you can show me a model where I can have that without the burden and cost of solo-owning it – something the author is implying will be a solved problem – I am all for that.
It's like a "Book Library", (eg centralised local place for storage and co-ordination) but for tools. There's one here in Melbourne (Australia) with about 400 members, and over 1000 tools:
* https://www.brunswicktoollibrary.org
* https://brunswicktoollibrary.myturn.com/library/inventory/br...
They have power tools (~200), hand tools (~600), garden tools (~200), automotive stuff, electrical/soldering gear, etc.
And they have occasional um... workshops (or something similar) teaching people how to repair things. eg:
* Bike repair (Sep 2020) - https://www.facebook.com/events/728114278044351/
* General repair (Feb 2020) https://www.facebook.com/events/613979845834779/
Seems to work really well, at least in this case. :)
The lack of environmental problems and abundance of clean energy also sounds good, though it just appears magically in the essay, so we can't say much about it.
Lack of privacy is terrible, and we can make it much better. Flying cars are terrible. Not owning everything is terrible. I'm the complete opposite of a materialist person, but I can understand how it's very useful to own some things. I mean, besides your underwear. Some might have sentimental value, and others are used so much that it's more practical to own them and know they are always available at the place you left them.
It's like all of those breathless journo articles about insect protein: they sound fine until the word "replace" comes in. Maybe some folks are jazzed about eating bugs, but I am not, and would prefer not to have my meat replaced by insect protein to keep someone else's utopia going, but someone is going to have the bright idea to make the choice for me.
Where we're heading, our top castes will comprise mostly of people who are manipulative, short-term thinkers, vengeful, insecure, arrogant and psychopathic. Not great for society.
It really does make you think about their world at the end. And its not really evil oppressive world like 1984. Its just purely mechanical construction that to us look like dystopia.
I agree we are and are heading is technological aristocracy where tech is used to keep people in line. Divided over crazy theories, societal issues and squabbling over leftovers.
Just give them youtube and they come up with the 'hidden truths' and then they fight with secret kabals and 'morons' who don't see the signs.
Meanwhile amazons googles and other industries are literally squeezing all small business out of existence.
Do you think an Amazon Town could be created where all you shopping has to be done via amazon but you get 20 or 50% off. How far are we from that reality?
What I would disagree with is that the people who push this system forward are far from short-term thinkers, vengeful, insecure. They schemed this system up long time ago and look for every angle to push it ahead.
How quickly 9/11 from tragedy was turned into patriot act opportunity?
Unfortunately a bunch of folks read that and thought it was a great idea.
Every single person in that world IS selected for their role in society based on merit. There is no asterics attached there with +1 conditions.
I am not saying that it is a good system as a matter of fact I call it dystopian, only that everyone in it was rather content with their lives.
The modern reformulation would be genetic engineering or at least genetic screening. I'm sure we're not that far away from the wealthy classes testing their embryos and only implanting the ones that have the highest intelligence, least propensity for disease, etc.
Arrive on time, don't question authority, learn to follow what you are being told.
After that they are lead to believe living on dept and credit cards is the only way to be happy.
And they are stuck in shitty job that they cannot quit since they have interest to play. So they keep their heads down and just keep going.
They also forgoed a lot of automation and engineered society to make use of the stunted lower classes. I recall a scene where they had elevator operators, even though automatic elevators had been invented when the book was written.
> The modern reformulation would be genetic engineering or at least genetic screening. I'm sure we're not that far away from the wealthy classes testing their embryos and only implanting the ones that have the highest intelligence, least propensity for disease, etc.
That's literally the backstory of the movie Gattica. Though I think the genetic engineering in that movie controlled recombination, so engineered children got all the best genes of their parents. IIRC, people who weren't engineered (like us) lived in slums and were only given menial jobs regardless of talent.
You will own nothing, you will be worthless. You won't even be able to have a girlfriend/boyfriend or friends for that matter; real human relationships are reserved for the elites. You will get as many VR friends as you want though.
Already it's kind of happening. Look at how many friends rich people have; a lot. Look at how many friends poor people have; very few.
Of course, they're not real friends, but still more real than light projected into your eyeballs.
Trying to censor information is just not going to work. Controlling the media is not going to help beyond a certain point. People know what's going on and they'll be taking the real conversations offline. When everyone collectively realizes what's been happening, the backlash is going to be terrifying and unforgiving. The more you suppress the truth, the worse it will be when it all comes out.
The current elites don't have the ability to suppress billions of people who were raised on freedom as the central principle of their existence.
That sounds like a problem that could be solved through military automation. (!)
I hope I'm not too cynical, but I think "freedom" is more of a meme than something that most people value. Whenever there are news stories about governments spying on their own citizens or restricting free speech, most people seem to just shrug and move on with their lives.
BTW why am I hearing this 'freedom is not important' stuff from so many people on HN? Is that what your leaders are preaching? I'd be suspicious of your leaders if that were me.
Mostly, yes.
Most items people own seem like clutter to me. I would much rather own the absolute minimum and then get anything else as I need it, rather than have to own a lot of stuff.
More stuff = more problems.
I think the author purposefully avoided saying anyone that.
But the part of the story that stood out to me viscerally was the neglect of maintenance crews and the design work, etc and how that plays into a status hierarchy. It is the same frustrating arrogance I sometimes see in city dwellers who just don't understand how many people are physically labouring to to maintain the artificial environment of a large city.
A handwave and "robots will do all that stuff by 2030" is too fantastic to stomach.
https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/2019/07/25/gap-between-inc...
By that admittedly too-simple analysis, houses peaked in unaffordability in 1980 and have been only modestly less affordable since 2000. (Much of this is likely explained by the median house in 2000 being much larger than the median house in 1960, having nearly doubled in size between 1973 and 2016.)
[0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1z-A7AhhKNcVbvq_n8fPP...
[1] https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-us-homes-today-are-1000-s...
No future prospects, stuck in a rut, deadend boringness.
Proceeds to kill self. At least toast was nice.
Sure we can own trivial things like laptops and what not, but that's not really something to secure your future with. Younger generations will be forever slaves and work to the grave, unless you happen to be born in fortunate family or get incredibly lucky.
Growing wealth is a simple formula: [amount spent] < [amount earned]. Rinse and repeat for a given length of time, and you will have more wealth than you started with.
Kidding, but only sort of.
And yet so many things seem on the right track. It's the polar opposite of the outrageously inefficient model where everything you use, you own, and for 99.9% of the time, the thing just sits there depreciating or taking up space. Regarding cars, as a city liver who needs a car (but has no driveway or garage), I certainly yearn for a better way.
Obviously some things are going to be bothersome, such as the idea of people holding business meetings in your living room when you are away. But I do like the idea of more sharing, and letting go -- at least a bit -- of the urge to own so much stuff.
Owning my things provides value even when I’m not using them, because I benefit from excluding other people (my competition) from using them.
Example: The sports car locked in my garage helps keep sports cars away from other people, which maintains their benefit of conferring status. It provides utility even if I basically never drive it.
This side of human nature is forgotten at our peril.
This article seems to be written from the perspective of someone who likes spending their time in coffee shops and riding their bike around in circles. Might as well be a hamster in a cage. It’s like the millennial version of brave new world, no sex, boring drugs, and the pervasive feeling that no one knows what they’re doing.
oh my special personality defects will probably mean I won't ever be able to go anywhere, do anything, and will eventually starve to death under this system.
If anything it's done away with some of my previous scheduling constraints. No more oil changes or tire rotations! No more grocery trips! Etc etc.
Personally I don't like it because in a renter world, the owners have an extraordinary amount of power.
Even with a well optimized sharing economy inside a highly competitive environment, you'll look for ways to break the optimization process favorable to yourself. If everything schedules at my whim I'll be sure and use the most scarce and difficult to obtain resources to lock them down and trade that time to others for something else I want. Short of living in a post scarcity economy, it would never be feasible.
The social safety net here in Sweden won't let me starve. But to impress my friends, I have to buy much more than calories. The food I serve must be climate compensated, organic, small batch, good for animals and people. Buying food becomes an exercise in personal branding.
> Author's note: Some people have read this blog as my utopia or dream of the future. It is not. It is a scenario showing where we could be heading - for better and for worse. I wrote this piece to start a discussion about some of the pros and cons of the current technological development. When we are dealing with the future, it is not enough to work with reports. We should start discussions in many new ways. This is the intention with this piece.
> My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology
This is straight out of every sci fi dystopia where those at the privileged productive core are taught to fear and pity the outsiders. Complete with the straw men that the others chose to reject technology, rather than merely rejecting the invisible authoritarianism they're swimming in. Though usually the story is about waking up, rather than how good the dream is.
I don't think this piece helps the discussion at all, but is rather just more fuel for the populist-neoreactionary backlash. If this is the future "the elites" are grooming us to accept, then I can understand the desire to burn it all down.
The sustainable path forward involves making technology work for us as individuals, rather than abdicating our individual autonomy to opaque systems that are undoubtedly controlled by powerful overlords.
Truly amazing how it's apparently inefficient for ordinary working people to own things that we actually use and enjoy sometimes, but it's perfectly efficient for the investor class to own the fruit of our labors.
Honestly, a complete reversal of any real notion of efficiency.
If the "1%", so to speak, gave up all their yachts and patents, and ownership of ride-hailing services and farming were fully socialized, then maybe I'd get on board.
Until then, I'll believe that this is the wealthy trying to milk even more freedom from us.
As for sharing everything, it's a good theory but would never work in practice. Have you ever lived with people outside of your family or bubble? Some people are filthy and don't even take care of things they own, let alone things they don't. Are you expecting to be able to select who you are happy to share with?
I'm already living that present. It's really nice. Walkable neighbourhoods full of interesting things to see and do, because that space isn't being wasted on car storage.
> As for sharing everything, it's a good theory but would never work in practice. Have you ever lived with people outside of your family or bubble? Some people are filthy and don't even take care of things they own, let alone things they don't.
That seems like a problem that can be solved technologically. Certainly e.g. Zipcars have always been clean when I got in them, somehow.
Maybe only affluent people currently use Zipcars. I really don't want to share a car with certain people and neither do you. The more I think about it seems like it would do more to divide people than anything.
and also stupid, since the needs of a business meeting are rather different than the needs of a living room, and living rooms must service all sorts of people and families.
And finally families own stuff because kids need and want stuff, you're not going to have your kids favorite doll delivered when they want to play with it.
Products or services are only free either because - you are the product or - temporarily to kill any other competitors, become a monopole and start charging a lot
Because, you know... money has to get in...
I try to be careful with this phrasing. Because I do believe it's true for most things.
But then look at open source software, which powers SO MUCH of our society. Much of the most essential software in the world was written for absolutely free. These days there's lots of open source that is written for corporate PR, but that wasn't always the case.
So, just be careful. Products and services really might be labors of love. We need to leave a tiny gap in our cynicism to allow for some goodness to come in. :)
If I want to cook at home and have to order everything, I assume it won't just be there in 5 minutes. And then what? If everything is shared does someone come pick it up when someone else needs it? Do I take it somewhere?
Also, are people delivering these things? Or robots? And how can this be free? He also mentions that most work can be done at anytime. Well, if the premisse is order everything I need, even for cooking, that has to be done right away, no?
I might be totally off, but this doesn't make any sense to me.
Not that I'm advocating for this future in any way, but I assume that a more realistic version of this (especially for as near as 2030) is that many people still have jobs that have an actual schedule. Maybe we can be optimistic and dream that people get to work less than 40 hours a week to have a reasonable quality of life.
But the idea of "I own nothing" cannot conceivable extend to personal items like clothing. That doesn't make any sense. In a future of "no ownership", you'd still own your shirt and toothbrush. Probably you'd still own your playstation (but do you actually own your video games today??? Can you play them offline? Does your console have ads?) as well. You wouldn't own a car, or your home (you'd have rights while you occupy your home, but not after you move), maybe you wouldn't own tools that are too expensive/specialized to be almost-free.
So for your example, I imagine that immediate delivery services might still exist, but that would be kind of a "high class" service and might be expensive. More than likely, you'd have Amazon dropping off your weekly grocery list on your designated day (e.g., "Wednesdays are trash day and grocery day in my neighborhood").
I highly doubt that we'll have that much more robot workforce by 2030. The only industry where that's possible is brick-and-mortar shopping having no more cashiers, which I do see as somewhat likely.
But yeah, I generally agree with you. Especially in this:
> But the idea of "I own nothing" cannot conceivable extend to personal items like clothing. That doesn't make any sense ... maybe you wouldn't own tools that are too expensive/specialized to be almost-free.
Wake up. Clothes have been delivered overnight. Put them on, wear for the day. At the end of the day, put them in a box outside wherever you're staying the night.
That seems like a feasible thing to build today, if you ignored all the current consequences of fast-fashion.
https://www.express.com/exp/style-trial-how-it-works
We're not far off to rent that, with streaming. Which I can totally see myself doing one day actually.
You do this once or twice a year. The rest of the time you just order regular, good old delivery to your home.
I can't see why this necessitates me not owning clothes, or allowing random strangers to use my living room while I'm out, though. I don't even really see the economic utility in either of those cases.
All that becoming "free" (here meaning "at no cost") will never happen in a capitalistic society such as many of ours. So from that point on it is pure fiction.
Expand on that and you're at what the author is describing.
I personally wouldn't bet money on "this will never happen", would you?
Nothing is really at no cost. It is paid for with tax money or directly. The author is not specifying "for those who could not otherwise afford it", but describing it as at no cost for everyone. Most universities cost money to enrole and attend. Does your baker give out buns at no cost? Is the grocery store giving away all the food at no cost? Has it all become a service at no cost?
Nope, none of that has happened and it will not happen, as long as everything needs to be a good business in a capitalistic sense. The single person business or small business or any business cannot escape the reality in this system.
Show me that country or even that city please. Show me the social experiment, that tries to get people to work without pay, as long as they have access to "all the things we need in our daily lives". As far as I know, it has never been done. What if you have any extra wish? How will it be supplied, without tracking your every move in such a society? How would different needs be satisfied, everyone having slightly different needs?
So that's why I call it pure fiction. You are welcome to show me that model city, which self-sufficiently makes it happen. I might move there.
The author never specified whether or how things are paid for, but for me personally I am assuming tax money. He also leaves open whether luxury goods/foods are still paid for.
> Show me that country or even that city please. Show me the social experiment, that tries to get people to work without pay, as long as they have access to "all the things we need in our daily lives". As far as I know, it has never been done.
Why are you asking me to show you something I never claimed existed?
I claimed there's places with social security (housing, food) and free public transport (Luxembourg for instance).
> So that's why I call it pure fiction.
Anything that doesn't exist yet is fiction.
It seems that you both misunderstood the article and my comment, then tried to maneuver me into a position where I would defend something nobody ever claimed.
To be fair, the author leaves a lot of things unexplained, so one's imagination is going to fill in the gaps.
Personally I imagined a city where basic necessities are provided for free, but where you have to pay for anything that is a cut above. Greatly expanded social security essentially.
Who needs free housing?
Who gets to decide who needs free housing? Need I remind you that this often comes down to "the poorest" and "some of the richest"? Here in Sweden the latter category in the guise of representatives for labour unions, the leadership of public organisations like the police and similarly positioned people as well as a number of politicians (Margot Wallström being a good example here) have been implicated many times in real estate deals where they get to live for free or close to free in high-value city-central property owned and paid by the unions or the state.
Also, who decides who gets to live where? Who gets to live in those fine old houses facing the park, who gets to live in the dilapidated tenement blocks? What is the deciding factor? Why?
Who pays for those buses and trams?
Who pays for those houses?
In those places in Europe you mention (and where I live) the answer is that local and state taxes pay for those things, social services gets to decide who is eligible for free housing, the waiting lines for other rental properties are extensive (up to 25 years for some locations) while those eligible for free housing are required by law to be provided with such within a few months. This leads to social tension where people see their children being unable to get their own apartment because all available and affordable places are being handed out for free to "eligible" people, paid for by those same parents and children. The "free" public transport is anything but free, it still needs a large amount of funding which often comes out of local taxes, parking fees and permit fees, "congestion taxes" and more of such. Now imagine a situation where everybody decided from one day to the next to forego on their own mode of transport and starts using the "free" public transport and see what happens. What would happen is a severe drop in funding for the "free" public transport combined with a severe overloading of the buses and trams. The disappearance of car-related taxes would necessitate an increase in other taxes to be able to fund that "free" public transport. For this funding to be stable the taxes would need to be of the sort which can not be avoided, anything from property taxes (which would make owning a house more expensive and relegate this to the richer part of society), public utility taxes, something like the Poll Tax which was tried under the Thatcher government, etc. Since these tax raises would end up breaking the budget for "the poorest" there would be a need for another social servant who gets to decide which people are eligible for tax breaks, raising the taxes for the remaining tax payers.
I guess the picture is getting clear now, "free" services generally are anything but free, they just end up being paid in a different way.
Now turn the thing around and take some of its assumptions as being close to the truth. Nuclear energy, either in the form of fission or fusion, finally gets to live up to the promise of being close to free. There will still be transport costs - where I live I pay more for getting electricity to my home than for the electricity itself, this due to the network being a natural monopoly while I can shop around (on a rigged market, but still) for electricity sellers - but the price should go down markedly. Assuming that my purchasing power remains the same or goes up this means that I now have money left over. What do you think those "car" services will end up costing compared to owning an old but serviceable electric vehicle? Remember that one of the advantages of electric propulsion is its simplicity and with that its longevity (apart from the batteries, that is). If power were to be close to free I would g...
It can be both.
I'm not sure what to do with your response if I'm being honest. It reads like a blog post with your thoughts on the original article, not on anything being discussed in this thread specifically.
We're warned. Now what we have to do is to work on reducing the power of malicious individuals who would want to read our thoughts by force. That's a political/societal thing more than technical. Or is it? what if it was financially not worth it for anyone to do such things...
No? Just me? Never mind...
> The lenses cause their wearers to see, not their squalid surroundings, but the Overworld, a vastly superior version of reality where a hut is a palace, gruel is a magnificent feast, etc. — "seeing the world through rose-colored glasses" on a grand scale.
The 2020 election appears a step in this direction.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eyes_of_the_Overworld
Care to elaborate?
It will be run by a group of relatively few elites that are involved in power struggles for control of the AI and the rest of us that do stuff like pick fruit (assuming it's cheaper than having an AI do it) and serve as cannon fodder in the AI armies.
I find people who believe that it will lead to some kind of Utopia horribly naive and they have no understanding of human nature.
Actually, there is a larger and larger gap between educated people with office jobs who earn a good salary to do "stuff that hadn't been worried about before"... and the rest of the barely educated people who barely earn anything and get to do all the manual work (taking care of the children, cleaning homes, offices, cooking food, delivering food, harvesting delicate fruit, etc.). The gap is bigger and bigger, despite or thanks to the progress of humanity.
In a world where less of the manual people are asked to do manual work for some reason, these uneducated people won't transition to other jobs. Best case scenario is they get a minimal universal income to stay calm at home and generate clicks on social media to feed AI some new data. Worst case scenario is they will want to work, and be angry at society for making them feel useless.
It's cyclical, and while I will concede that people lose their jobs because of automation, zooming out to the overall jobs market (and figures, which probably don't tell the whole story) things haven't really changed much.
On an individual level though, people lose their jobs and livelihood, and have to settle for a lower paying, dumber job.
That said, a lot of jobs replaced by automation are already low-paying, dumb jobs. Why stand 8 hours / day doing a repetitive manual job if a thing can do it just as well? Why expose yourself to the worst the internet comes up with when you can train an AI to detect CP?
I don't believe we'll see jobs becoming largely obsolete in our lifetime, but I would like to fantasize about a future where work is a choice and everybody can live comfortably (quality housing, food and spending money) even without a job. Not going to happen as long as capitalism and the never ending pursuit of profit and profit increase are still a thing though. But, we're seeing some hopeful developments in that regard, with things like UBI and the like.
(Aside: I don't believe UBI will work in the end, if everyone has a baseline income, nobody does. UBI only works if it's coupled with assurances of housing and that it's enough to cover all basic needs, which right now depend largely on the area you live in. I couldn't get an affordable rental place on my own income some years ago, because first there was a 15+ year waiting list, and later I was earning too much so I was thrown out to the 'free market', and there's a pretty big gap between the most expensive social housing and the cheapest free market housing. That gap is filled up with 'student' houses, think houses split up into multiple units / rooms. But nobody should be forced to live like that if they're out of college and have a paid full-time job.
I think you are assuming an auction like situation for stuff like limited housing but it doesn't have to be like that. You can build more.
I believe the argument for UBI is based on economic utility: $1000 a month is worth more to a poor person than a rich person.
I want UBI to work. But I haven't heard of a good strategy to mitigate what I just described.
what we don't generally have is an optimal dispersion of capital (and power) to fulfill many of those wishes. concentration of capital and power also concentrates labor allocation and decision-making (something capitalism in ideal form opposes), so instead of drawing from the ingenuity of hundreds of millions, we're trending toward that of hundreds of thousands. it doesn't matter how clever those hundreds of thousands are, they'll never out-imagine hundreds of millions (or billions worldwide).
ubi is predicated on the idea that lots of people will have nothing to do soon, but that's only effectuated in a dystopian world where capital and power are extremely concentrated. rather than altruism, ubi is rather a critical step toward fascist corporatism, acting to stave off potential opposition by trickling down a tiny bone to the masses. the populace assuming mass joblessness are falling into the rhetorical trap of the subjugating corporatists, not accessing a benevolent key to economic and social freedom.
Right now few bright folks are interested in revolutionizing affordable housing, public education, or payday lending because the money's not in it. They make a lot more money advertising to the affluent class or owning a marketplace that gives them vacation rentals or cheap transportation.
If we had UBI, prices would eventually equilibrate to eat all the new disposable income, but the gold rush in the process might build a bunch more halfway-decent housing.
As far as real cash payouts go, there's value to them, but not universally. In order to have the maximum impact they need to be limited to people with little to no other income.
AI can also help augment the work of “high-paying, smart jobs”.
Meaning that instead of hiring ten lawyers, you can hire one lawyer and a license to lawyer.ai which will empower the one lawyer to do the work of ten.
If you have automated cars tomorrow on the streets, most of the truck and taxi drivers are not ready. Heck, most of the oil countries in the middle-east are not ready for a post-oil economy.
Population capacities and thus overpopulation aren't fixed things meaning overpopulation is relative to conditions. It would be absurd to call algae overpopulated if they thrive just fine at concentrations in one epoch with different population conditions just because it would cause red tide in another epoch.
If you live in the USA and Europe, you are the recipient of generations of global technological dominance. It's hard to understand the possibility of being on the other side of that.
AI is all nice and rosy but how do we know it's "right"? How can a machine be indifferent to human influences? How do we know it's not biased? Does it discriminate? It's a not a human, it can't "think" like one, it's not capable of rational and fluid thought and argument. It's a dumb machine feeding off data, unless you give it all the data it's bound to be inaccurate at some point.
AI is given too much credit for a little bit of intelligence (if you can call it that, I think that's how we perceive it), however as society changes so the AI has to. Does AI understand brexit yet? Does it influence policy decisions? Can it understand how people will react? Can it help during a pandemic? Can it talk and negotiate?
Brexit was dumb and so is the UK.
Also:
> it's not capable of rational and fluid thought and argument
applies to most humans, and
> unless you give it all the data it's bound to be inaccurate at some point
applies to all humans.
The lucky ones will be shining their shoes, giving them massages, tutoring their kids, cooking their meals, and giving them manicures.
Many will prefer the human touch for things like that, even if they could be done by machines, and having human servants has always been a status symbol.
This is what the non-wealthy among us have to look forward to.
You have used technology right?
You know it is all mostly shit that breaks down, crashes, and gets replaced and thrown out on an 18 month cycle?
What I think lots of people get wrong is forgetting just how crappy consumer tech is, and industrial/military isn't far behind. We may get AI working well in 5-25 years, but I doubt deployments will be any less buggy.
Repairing & provisioning the billions of bots will be most of the "tech" jobs. Think like the IT dept at your company that hands out new laptops, times a million.
For the first, you are right - certainly in that timescale. For the later, I assume we will need to justify our continued existence.
It is extremely well defined. The best example I can point you to is from the 1990's by Russell & Norvig in their seminal work "Artificial Intelligence" which coalesces a half century of research. They spend the first 100 pages clearly defining the types of domains and vocabulary needed to define the space of AI: it is an exhaustive analysis with citations going back decades, covering early thinkers like Norbert Wiener and Von Neumann. Your claim indicates you haven't really studied the field. But everyone jumping into tensorflow on a raspberry pi has probably had zero exposure the to decades of research put into AI.
Your second claim about a giant mind that might dwarf all of humanity, is, well, grandiose sci-fi. Much like Dyson Spheres or Time Travel.
...simply because even a reasonably intelligent AI would have the ability to improve itself at a rate orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution.
The main point of owning things is that you get to use them when you want to use them.
People keep those things in cupboards because when they decide on a whim to make pasta they do just that. The same goes for all the rest - having cars, houses and so on.
Unless there's some kind of Philip K Dick-style machine that near-instantly delivers good X to your apartment through a vacuum tube or something, that as-a-service bs won't fly. No one wants to wait hours (on the best case given our current logistics network) after deciding to make pasta to actually get the pasta machine.
http://www.makeitlabs.com/
In my case it would be cheaper to rent a car than own one as I use it relatively infrequently, but every time I rent I need to wait in the queue picking it up and dropping it off. It probably uses two or three hours of my life every time I rented.
Owning things has advantages beyond accumulating wealth.
>Sometimes I use my bike when I go to see some of my friends
Whose bike, again?
When you start off with this, the rest is understandable. That's the hard part.
I also care about privacy. Yes, you have to hand over id to your landlord when you apply for a lease. But unless you can afford to buy your home with cash, you also have to do that to get a mortgage.
I hope my bike share program isn’t selling my trip data to other companies. I would like it if it worked more like public transport, where you can easily buy a ticket without id and use it anonymously.
There’s nothing inherent about renting that prevents privacy. You can buy cars that have gps trackers on them, which can be tracked by a company in the event of theft. Some cars, like the Nissan GT-R, use them to stop you driving too fast if you’re not at an approved race track.
I think regulation is the only way to protect privacy, regardless of whether people rent or own.
Lack of privacy however, is a lack of personhood. It will be eroded, and some aspects of it should change, nudity for example should be less abhorrent to all. But this seems like a thought experiment for the sake of argument, and I fear that arguments are all it will generate.