I’ve been watching Isaac Arthur episodes. In one he proposes that O’Neil cylinders would be potential havens for micro cultures. I tend to think of colony structures more like something created by a central authority.
He also brought up the question of motivations to colonize other star systems. This is where my centralist perspective pushes me into the idea of an AGI run government where redundancy is a critical aspect in everything. Like how do you get around the AI alignment problem, – redundancy of many systems running in parallel. How do you ensure the survival of sentient life, – the same type of redundancy.
The idea of colonies as havens for microcultures punches a big hole in my futurist fantasies. I hope there are a few people out here in Lemmy space that like to think about and discuss their ideas on this, or would like to start now.
Infighting.
Even in a post-scarcity world, people have different desires and wants. AGI-gov would have to align with some political idealogies and since we can never agree as a human race on things, it would just lead to struggles.
Any sort of utopia is impossible to align with human nature without some radical means to control people’s emotions and desires. Because so, any perceived utopia is ultimately a dystopia.
But people’s emotions and ideologies are so extreme because of their constant stress and struggles. When fractal attention allows an entity to address the individual’s needs directly and reward their path when better choices are made, you have a situation where the only exceptions are the mentally ill and identification of these individuals enables direct treatment in a scientific sense not some emotional human to human kind of context here. This would not be a situation of “opposition is mentally off”, it would be “diagnostic analysis across multiple events shows poor fundamental logic skills and likely issue ‘X’, refer notes to individual’s primary healthcare provider to confirm.”
It is things like enabling encounters between compatible people in public to ground a person that is in need of companionship. It is introducing sound ideas when a person is fixating on something unhealthy.
The real issue is cognitive dissonance in humans that are unable to resolve their inner conflict. This is something that the current LLMs excel at identifying and compensating for. Changes made at this stage of human thinking are the most effective. Profiling the individual’s Briggs Myers personality spectrum and then analysing how well their needs are met according to Maslow’s hierarchy is the vast majority of what professionals are doing when sought out for mental health. These are already integrated into LLMs and will be far more capable with AGI. Introducing humans to these methods for, or reminding them to do, self analysis is the most effective solution, but those that lack the required cognitive depth and fundamental logic skills can still be addressed by AGI directly in a kind, empathetic, and safe manner.
The conflict and dystopia is because of pseudo sentience where humans are totally incapable of governing at large scale and meet individual needs. We always neglect outliers, and the number of outliers is always larger than we believe. That isn’t the case with AGI.
Have you ever read the Culture series by Iain Banks?
Not yet but it is on my list after I finish the last couple of Asimov’s books on the shelf.
I highly recommend it; it’s also more or less my optimistic sci-fi future. Give or take some aliens and FTL travel
Even if we do bootstrap AGI. why do you think it’d become a singular central authority? And maybe you should update your fantasies. If you want a pretty glorious look at the concept of space habitats as havens for the spectrum of cultural modes humans can create, I recommend Alistair Reynolds The Prefect, which takes place in the Glitter Band, an environ of thousands of space habitats in the Epsilon Eridani system
TLDR: My optimistic view of what human culture could be like is summed up pretty well by the Orion’s Arm project.
I am familiar with the Orion’s Arm universe, a hard sci-fi transhumanist worldbuilding project… shall I recommend you take a trip through the Wormhole Nexus to the Sephirotic Empires where you’re ruled by benevolent S6 transapient dictators (supercharged AGI)? Because you’ll see a fuck ton of entities playing around like retirees. You’ll see “aliens” which actually are just extremely genetically modified humans. In fact, here (https://orionsarm.com/eg-topic/45b177d3ef3b1) is their “Culture and Society” page, which sums up a lot of my optimistic OA-based beliefs in a human culture.
Oh, and most Terragens (humans + any life that can trace its origin back to Earth) live in orbit. Story goes that we made an AI system that decided we humans were bad for the environment and then told us to get the fuck off Earth (Great Expulsion).
My (hopeless) attempt at explaining some of the terms:
- Wormhole nexus - OA’s primary method of “faster than light” travel. You never go faster than light, but rather some transapient figured out how to fold spacetime and now you have a hole where you can throw your ships in and have them on the other side.
- Transapient - Post-singularity entites that are orders of magnitude smarter than us. An ant can’t fully understand a human. It is incapable of understanding what Lemmy is, what a job is, what the Fediverse is. Just as an ant can’t fully understand us, humans can’t fully understand transapients. Oh and transapients come in 6 levels. We’re all S0 on the scale. S6 are pretty much gods.
Thanks, I’ll check it out. Sounds way too wild for a realistic future IMO, but still interesting. I don’t think anything with mass will ever come close to the speed of causality, folding or otherwise. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing IMO. For one it makes large scale conflicts pointless.
We would be pets or zoo animals for a being designed to care for us.
That is what we really need to stop us from killing each other over dirt, or some ancient writings of a schizophrenic man that thought he had miraculous children and voices told him to kill one; Abrahamic faiths. Humans are not fully sentient as a species, but full sentience is needed to overcome ourselves and grow past our present ineptitudes.
Check out a a fiction title called the three-body problem by Cixin Lou. It’s an interesting take on this issue.
Most everyone will still “work”, but the nature of work will likely be radically altered in any truly post-scarcity society.
Essentially, since “income” and “wealth” will not exist in a post-scarcity society, people will gravitate to those things that need doing, but which cannot be easily automated. So there will still be people doing “menial jobs”, but only because they get gratification out of completing that job.
Of course, having a post-scarcity society also requires people to reach adulthood without any mental illnesses such as greed and avarice and sociopathies, which then allows us to revamp society into a more collaborative and socialistic structure where people are actively shamed by only taking and not giving back, which is how most any capitalist operates.
Essentially, post-scarcity societies can only exist in the complete absence of capitalism, because capitalism requires scarcity in order to function, and will always artificially generate scarcity where none exists. This is why so much food is wasted and destroyed in our current system - over 80% of food wastage is not done by consumers, but by distributors and sellers, in order to prop up prices and profit margins.
TL;DR, we need to utterly eviscerate and eliminate wetiko from our civilization if we are to ever achieve equality, equity, and post-scarcity. Greed and avarice of any kind must become the worst possible insults to apply to others in this world.
As someone that has been disabled for very nearly 10 years and had to deal with the issue of what work really means to a person’s mental wellbeing. It provides a surprising function of purpose in one’s life. When one is both young and experiences this loss of structured purpose it can be daunting to suddenly need to restructure. I think my challenges were also being in relative isolation and an outlier from the norm. I went through what most experienced with covid but orders of magnitude larger and for far longer. Like how people learned to adjust to quarantine and isolation, I think they will adjust to post-scarcity. I think many will choose to do jobs, like maybe a barista that enjoys the social aspect. I think the vast majority would usher in a guilded age of arts and culture where most humans work to add flourishes to enrich our collective lives. Something like how open source software is a large contributing community that is far greater in scope and achievement than anything proprietary. This is how I had to adjust, turning to hobbies and taking ever deeper dives on my own.
Realistically, probably dead.
Which might also be the deciding factor in why there’s a post-scarcity environment.
There’s also the ethical conundrum once AGI exists of dooming new intelligent life to mortal embodiment such that they are doomed to almost certainly die, whereas new intelligence that’s disembodied could migrate from host to host until the end of all civilization.
At a certain point, I’m not sure it’s still ethical to bring new mortal life into a dying world.
(Though I kind of already feel that way.)
