Toxn

It has been argued that parts of the first world are post-scarcity lite. That said, some first world issues (stagnant economies, declining birth rate) are exactly what you'd expect in a world where food/space is not infinite and people respond rationally to their lack by delaying or avoiding breeding.

I think the crux of the concept (which I consider a useful one, just to lay my cards on the table) is that we started to have a consistent, global impact. At this point, humanity is one of the driving forces on the planet in terms of land usage, CO2 production, erosion, water usage and so on. As such, it might be a good idea to be cognisant of our impact and thus begin to direct and control it, rather than flailing ignorantly against the walls of our suddenly-small house.

I think modern offices/government departments are pretty compelling proof that people can invent as much busy-work as necessary. That said, the risk of the worst possible system taking root (ie: a massive surplus of goods can now be produced, but people are still stuck working long hours and living in poverty) is pretty high given humanity's collective track record so far.

Dear readers, It has come to my attention that a shameful incident occurred in South Africa recently. Accordingly, and on behalf of my entire country, I wish to apologise unreservedly for this dishonourable display by my fellow countrymen. I cannot rectify this wrong, but I can promise this: that the next time one of our citizens is boneheaded enough to mug someone on national television, he shall at least be armed to the teeth. We cannot see from the footage whether these reprobates were packing heat of some sort, but barring evidence to the contrary we are forced to conclude that they carried out an otherwise unremarkable crime without posing an immanent threat of bloody, screaming death to the citizens they robbed. This will not stand. As a South African citizen, I can assure you that these men - who convey the impression of being lazy simpletons rather than properly murderous hell-spawn - are not in any way representative of the dark tide of mind-searing criminal horror that daily washes across our beautiful landscape. Given the way in which these disgraceful felons have besmirched our national character, I can promise everyone in the international community that we shall do all that is within our power to reform them. At the very least we will ensure that, the next time they engage in antisocial behaviour, they shall be capable of brutally murdering the presenter and camera crew. I close by humbly begging your apology, and beseeching you to forget this terrible incident. I ask that you continue to think of us in the way that you always have: as a dystopian nightmare of war-torn city blocks; ravaged by unhinged, violent lunatics and isolated amidst a sea of tragically fragile natural beauty. Finally, if you feel as I do then please support us in this time of national shame. You can do this by donating weapons and remedial training materials to the underprivileged youth who are most in danger of growing into morons who mug people with their fists on camera. Remember that every starving, uneducated child has the potential to commit a violent, untraceable murder spree if given the proper instruction and an AKM. You, too, can make a difference. Thank you, Toxn

Poaching, because you're a dirty foreigner trying to steal our jobs.

I know what you mean. I was just pointing out that that dude was a goner in any case. I'm still plugging for a reduced backblast system which ejects a whole bunch of confetti or something out the back. Or else a bunch of 'this burning tank brought to you by...' stickers.

Getting an ear full of high velocity plastic or water would have been less lethal?

Sadly this isn't even nearly the dumbest thing tourists have gotten up to here.

Little did they know that the lions were South African and simply wanted to hijack the car.

Attack of the murderous poor? Or just murderously poor shots?

God that plane is pretty.

Here I also have to point out some hard limits to the resources we can generate in our hypothetical future: Food There is only so much sunlight, so much soil and so much land with the right climate conditions. Barring massive energy production (and extensive production of underground farms or something) we will have hard limits on the amount of food we can produce. Space There is no real solution for this, so long as people prefer to live in private dwellings under an open sky. Energy This one is somewhat elastic, but even in a world where LockMart isn't talking shit and gives everyone a 100MW fusion reactor by 2020 there will still be some bottlenecks in terms of available energy. Matter There will always be some limiting factor which your machine/whatever cannot do without. With current electronics, it seems as if one of those factors is rare earth metals. Thus, the guy holding/selling rare earth metals (or its equivalent) will be the guy with power. A concept from ecology which may be useful here is the idea of a limiting factor (see: Liebig's law). Essentially, a 'post scarcity' economy will really revolve around whatever it is that is still scarce. Guessing the form of the future, then, revolves around guessing which things are not amenable to improvement by technology and which of them will become the low stave in Liebig's barrel.

Dreher got into the idea of the post-scarcity, post-work world in his own gormless fashion, so I figure we can do it too. I've thought about this one a lot and have written some hard and soft fiction on the topic (which I am threatening to unleash on this thread as a punitive measure), but have no real answers beyond "how it will play out will seem completely deterministic and intuitive after the fact". Before I let you all hash the concept out, though, I thought I'd post one of the comments from the above article that hits pretty close to the mark by my standards:

I had a good run.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-5-worst-kinds-album-every-music-fan-has-bought/

From our side, at least we've got Neill Blomkamp showing us how South Africa is a dystopian shithole who's main products are graffiti, townships, violent aliens, gangsters and crazy weapons. A bit lacking in glorious nature scenes, though.

Eh, good enough as ten percent given that I put no thought into the stats at all. People often forget that having children is a perfectly rational decision in terms of resource projection. The reason why so few folks are breeding in Japan etc is that it is simply too expensive to do so when you're in your 20s and 30s. Of course, by the time you can afford to rent a city apartment with more than 1 bedroom it's too late to have kids.

My take is a bit different: 1. A provisional no. Partly because of the whole '10% chance that your kids will have only one parent' thing, but also because I still have decades of good health ahead of me , barring accidents. Ten or twenty years should be enough time to sort out distribution and risk factors for pill mortality. It may even be enough time to lower mortality overall by developing a better pill. 2. Yes, but I would worry about short-term vs, long-term consequences. Short-term, I think overpopulation might be an issue. In the long term, however, I think people will just keep delaying having kids to the point that population decline becomes an issue. Short-term, I would make sure that the pill is available to everyone, as a gerontocracy is a terrible way to run the world. Long term, your society is pretty fucked. People are going to get slow, easily confused and rigidly stuck in certain patterns of thought as their brains get cluttered up with memories and burned-in ideas. Your society will get to be like an exaggerated version of the first world, with lots of ennui and suicide and not much change or development. Job mobility will end, economies will stagnate and culture will become locked into a single place. Eventually, the few people who refuse to take the pill will outbreed the rest and overthrow the whole tottering ediface. At which point you either end up with a butlerian jihad situation or periodic reversals to gerontocracy and stagnation. 3. No set point. 4. The pill I really want is something which allows me to live my span of years (or a bit more, if I'm feeling greedy) in perfect health, then gives me some warning before I die instantly. I have no desire to live forever, at least as I am now.

So I put this one to my wife, and here are her answers: 1. No, for the simple reason that if both of us took it there would be a 10% chance of one of us dying. This is a bit too high when you're contemplating raising children alone. Worse, the chances get a lot higher if you include friends and family - you essentially end up with a guarantee that someone you know will die. 2. It should be freely available, but limited to people over the age of majority who have undergone some sort of evaluation and counselling. There should also be provisions to stop overpopulation (a mandatory birth control shot per year perhaps?), as well as the legalisation of euthanasia for people who want to opt out. 3. A very small number.

Documentation fades. Anyway, I think it's more a case of future people doing things that are completely, obviously stupid to modern folk out of ignorance and the fact that a lot of knowledge was so obvious that it never got written down. To see a simulation of this, invite some completely unexposed people over for paintball, then wince as they do every bad gun handling thing at once.

Those didn't quite make it all the way to true badness though.

A fact which, fittingly enough, nobody expects.

SA! SA! SA!

I think part of the problem is that the African colonies were never integrated beyond the extractive stage. This is also the reason why things collapsed as swiftly as they did: there was no entrenched infrastructure, no large minorities that were also culturally assimilated into the homeland and no local training systems for the ruling/administrative class. The African colonies, with a few exceptions, were set up to be almost completely hollow, with no built-in functions beyond the production and shipping of primary resources to the core area. This also explains why so many post-colonial African countries had/have so many issues. When all your infrastructure (physical and social) was being brought in on a boat and set to simply haul off as much of your stuff as possible, then it is no wonder that you don't want to simply switch over to another servile relationship with the same set of masters and don't have the means to do anything else. That all of this somehow gets turned around and blamed on Africans is one of the constant infuriations of my life. Finally, I should note that nations have a strange magic: even the most broken, chopped-up, frankensteinian countries very rapidly develop an identity and an urge to preserve and expand it. African countries, even saddled as they are with fucked up colonial borders, seem not at all interested in returning to the pre-colonial status quo.

I'LL SEE YOUR 'INQUISITION' AND RAISE YOU A 'KNIGHTS HAD TO BE HOISTED INTO THE SADDLE'.