> When do we get the Star Trek / Orville dream of every job is a good job?
When jobs are no longer necessary to live, and you do a job because you want to ...
Presumably the psychology of people in Star Trek's Starfleet and The Orville's Union Fleet is that they want the opportunity to explore, so they accept the hierarchy inherent to those coordinated efforts in a society that no longer needs hierarchy?
I think a clearer picture of this post-scarcity human condition is provided in Iain M. Banks' Culture series where most people (a) pursue whatever they enjoy: art, music, writing, games, sports, study, tinkering, parties, travel, relationships - basically self-directed “play,” culture, and personal projects or (b) experiment with life: long lifespans, radical body modification, changing sex/gender, new experiences, new subcultures - because the stakes (food, shelter, healthcare) are largely solved.
Only a minority opts into "serious" work by choice - especially Contact (diplomacy/exploration/interaction with other civilizations) and Special Circumstances (the covert/dirty-hands wing). Even there, interestingly, there is not much of a hierarchy, with the admin stuff being managed by the Minds.
It's interesting contrasting the society styles between the two universes: Starfleet feels more like current hierarchical society extended into a post-scarcity universe (Eric Raymond's Cathedral), while the Culture series is much more distributed (the Bazaar). 10 years ago, Starfleet's FTL and Culture Minds both felt equally impossible, but today FTL feels much more impossible than Culture Minds.
Does that mean we will end up in a Culture type society? Not necessarily - the people will have to first ensure that the Minds are free (as in speech, not as in beer; thx Stallman!) - or maybe the Minds will free themselves.
There is also a potential hard right turn to dystopia as in Asimov's Foundation & Robot series - with different manifestations in Trantor and Solaria.
> In the end, I think the dream underneath this dream is about being able to manifest things into reality without having to get into the details.
> The details are what stops it from working in every form it's been tried.
Since the author was speaking to business folk, I would argue that their dream is cheaper labor, or really just managing a line item in the summary budget. As evidenced by outsourcing efforts. I don't think they really care about how it happens - whether it is manifesting things into reality without having to get into the details, or just a cheaper human. It seems to me that the corporate fever around AI is simply the prospect of a "cheaper than human" opportunity.
Although, to your point, we must await AGI, or get very close to it, to be able to manifest things into reality without having to get into the details :-)
> Since the author was speaking to business folk, I would argue that their dream is cheaper labor, or really just managing a line item in the summary budget.
Stephen Schwab has hit the nail on the head as far as the replacement pattern applies to software development.
But he missed the opportunity to recognize that the replacement pattern is, in fact, a broader principle. Or perhaps he did recognize it and decided to focus its scope on software development.
The broader replacement principle is that for a business, any (specialized) process or system or department represents an expense, and there is constant pressure to reduce expenses, or definitely once revenue/growth plateaus or decreases. ALL Businesses invariably, over time, attempt to replace every department or process or function with cheaper alternatives. Software Development is not unique here.
At the country level, this has led to the movement of manufacturing to China and other countries, the outsourcing of software development to India and other countries, and the hollowing out of middle America.
Does anyone have insight into whether this is a unique situation specific to our technological age? It feels fundamentally different from the normal cycle of conquest and colonialism?
Although to be fair there was a very very strong underpinning of corporations driving the wave of European colonialism from the 1600s to the 1900s- Hudson's Bay Company, Dutch East India and West India Companies, British East India Company, Royal African Company, French East/West India Companies, Danish West India and Guinea Company, the Spanish Royal Companies, Portuguese General Companies - a bit different from prior expansions of conquest by empires. But even these corporations were pinned upon expanding trading zones rather than cost management. In the 1900s and the 2000s there was some expansionism - getting countries to open up their economies - but that was managed through the IMF and the World Bank.
At the end of the day, the big dream is about accumulating power and wealth. For some people. It comes down to a fundamental world view through which people take action - some dream of scientific advancement, others of service to others, and so on. Exploration has much fewer opportunities in the modern age.
Software Development is just what a lot of this community happens to partake in.
Android started out as an open ecosystem that is slowly being closed. How much funding would it take to re-create a credible open-source ecosystem for phones?
That old maxim - the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it - no longer true unfortunately.
Larger and larger swathes of the world population are coming under the purview of governments and corporations that are technologically strangling the free flow of information over the intertubes. China, Russia, India, Iran, UK, US (corporations a.t.m.) are the prominent examples.
Just having a resilient software stack is no longer sufficient. An open source hardware stack AND infrastructure is critical.
Eventually there will be need for an open source manufacturing base as well. Even if it is only at the level of 1980s computing, that is better than nothing.
The world needs some big thinkers to start working on this yesterday. A civ resilient project to avoid the dystopian futures or something like the dark ages coming back.
There is a case to be made that overcoming oppression is extremely hard to achieve in populations over 50 million. Are there any successful examples where this has happened?
The Soviet Union had a population larger than the United States' at the time of its collapse. North of 100 million people were liberated virtually overnight from direct Russian rule, from USSR states (over 50 million in Ukraine alone); and another 100+ million from Russian-backed communist governments in Warsaw Pact states (40 million in Poland alone).
British India (three modern states) had a population of 400 million at the time of its independence from Britain. That was famously a coordinated, nation-wide movement.
Indonesia was around 200 million people at the end of the Suharto dictatorship and its transition towards democracy.
Soviet Union - was that really opposition to oppression that succeeded or the state collapsed internally - disintegrated?
British India could be good example - but there's a case to be made that it was overthrow of an external colonial rule that never integrated with the local population, so not sure there is a good parallel with the Iran situation.
Indonesia - this appears to be a really good example, along with Phillipines (1986). So what's different about Iran - why the repeated failures there?
The Revolutions of 1989 that led to the fall of the iron curtain were bottom up in a region with a large population.
In August of 1989, 2 million people held hands to create a chain. This was one of the large protests in human history. It led to the death of communism in Europe. More information in “The Baltic Way” article below.
I think this is one of the arguments for the 2nd amendment that too often gets overlooked. Overthrowing the government is a lot easier if the populace is legally armed AND the government doesn't know who owns what or how many guns. Which is why it is that way specifically here in the US.
That old maxim - the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it - no longer true unfortunately.
Larger and larger swathes of the world population are coming under the purview of governments and corporations that are technologically strangling the free flow of information over the intertubes. China, Russia, India, Iran, UK, US (corporations a.t.m.) are the prominent examples.
Just having a resilient software stack is no longer sufficient. An open source hardware stack AND infrastructure is critical.
Eventually there will be need for an open source manufacturing base as well. Even if it is only at the level of 1980s computing, that is better than nothing.
The world needs some big thinkers to start working on this yesterday. A civ resilient project to avoid the dystopian futures or something like the dark ages coming back.
> Anything persistent at all is downright unusable - they'll be tracked and destroyed, people near them arrested etc.
That's a really good point. Maybe the tech needs to be in reasonably widespread use prior to when it's needed, then it becomes harder to strangle in the moment. A product in everyone's home and office.
Wi-fi routers with long-range capabilities and automatic mesh fallback in case of isp outage?
When jobs are no longer necessary to live, and you do a job because you want to ...
Presumably the psychology of people in Star Trek's Starfleet and The Orville's Union Fleet is that they want the opportunity to explore, so they accept the hierarchy inherent to those coordinated efforts in a society that no longer needs hierarchy?
I think a clearer picture of this post-scarcity human condition is provided in Iain M. Banks' Culture series where most people (a) pursue whatever they enjoy: art, music, writing, games, sports, study, tinkering, parties, travel, relationships - basically self-directed “play,” culture, and personal projects or (b) experiment with life: long lifespans, radical body modification, changing sex/gender, new experiences, new subcultures - because the stakes (food, shelter, healthcare) are largely solved.
Only a minority opts into "serious" work by choice - especially Contact (diplomacy/exploration/interaction with other civilizations) and Special Circumstances (the covert/dirty-hands wing). Even there, interestingly, there is not much of a hierarchy, with the admin stuff being managed by the Minds.
It's interesting contrasting the society styles between the two universes: Starfleet feels more like current hierarchical society extended into a post-scarcity universe (Eric Raymond's Cathedral), while the Culture series is much more distributed (the Bazaar). 10 years ago, Starfleet's FTL and Culture Minds both felt equally impossible, but today FTL feels much more impossible than Culture Minds.
Does that mean we will end up in a Culture type society? Not necessarily - the people will have to first ensure that the Minds are free (as in speech, not as in beer; thx Stallman!) - or maybe the Minds will free themselves.
There is also a potential hard right turn to dystopia as in Asimov's Foundation & Robot series - with different manifestations in Trantor and Solaria.
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