• Eskander
    25
    Courtesy of the world economic forum :lol:

    Welcome to the year 2030. 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.

    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.

    First communication became digitized and free to everyone. Then, when clean energy became free, things started to move quickly. Transportation dropped dramatically in price. It made no sense for us to own cars anymore, because we could call a driverless vehicle or a flying car for longer journeys within minutes. We started transporting ourselves in a much more organized and coordinated way when public transport became easier, quicker and more convenient than the car. Now I can hardly believe that we accepted congestion and traffic jams, not to mention the air pollution from combustion engines. What were we thinking?

    Sometimes I use my bike when I go to see some of my friends. I enjoy the exercise and the ride. It kind of gets the soul to come along on the journey. Funny how some things seem never seem to lose their excitement: walking, biking, cooking, drawing and growing plants. It makes perfect sense and reminds us of how our culture emerged out of a close relationship with nature.

    In our city we don’t pay any rent, because someone else is using our free space whenever we do not need it. My living room is used for business meetings when I am not there.

    Once in a while, I will choose to cook for myself. It is easy – the necessary kitchen equipment is delivered at my door within minutes. Since transport became free, we stopped having all those things stuffed into our home. Why keep a pasta-maker and a crepe cooker crammed into our cupboards? We can just order them when we need them.

    This also made the breakthrough of the circular economy easier. When products are turned into services, no one has an interest in things with a short life span. Everything is designed for durability, repairability and recyclability. The materials are flowing more quickly in our economy and can be transformed to new products pretty easily. Environmental problems seem far away, since we only use clean energy and clean production methods. The air is clean, the water is clean and nobody would dare to touch the protected areas of nature because they constitute such value to our well-being. In the cities we have plenty of green space and plants and trees all over. I still do not understand why in the past we filled all free spots in the city with concrete.

    Shopping? I can’t really remember what that is. For most of us, it has been turned into choosing things to use. Sometimes I find this fun, and sometimes I just want the algorithm to do it for me. It knows my taste better than I do by now.

    When AI and robots took over so much of our work, we suddenly had time to eat well, sleep well and spend time with other people. The concept of rush hour makes no sense anymore, since the work that we do can be done at any time. I don’t really know if I would call it work anymore. It is more like thinking-time, creation-time and development-time.

    For a while, everything was turned into entertainment and people did not want to bother themselves with difficult issues. It was only at the last minute that we found out how to use all these new technologies for better purposes than just killing time


    Here comes the funny part

    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. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs. Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kind of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages.

    Once in a while I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. Nowhere I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.

    All in all, it is a good life. Much better than the path we were on, where it became so clear that we could not continue with the same model of growth. We had all these terrible things happening: lifestyle diseases, climate change, the refugee crisis, environmental degradation, completely congested cities, water pollution, air pollution, social unrest and unemployment. We lost way too many people before we realized that we could do things differently.

    By Ida Auken

    My response to this , borrowed from Wittgenstein

    "The hysterical fear of the atom bomb the public now has, or at least expresses, is almost a sign that here for once a really salutary discovery has been made. At least the fear gives the impression of being fear in the face of a really effective bitter medicine. I cannot rid myself of the thought: if there were not something good here, the philistines would not be making an outcry. But perhaps this too is a childish idea. For all I can mean really is that the bomb creates the prospect of the end, the destruction of a ghastly evil, of disgusting soapy water science and certainly that is not an unpleasant thought; but who is to say what would come after such a destruction? The people now making speeches against the production of the bomb are undoubtedly the dregs of the intelligentsia, but even that does not prove beyond question that what they abominate is to be welcomed " ( Culture and Value )

    Replace atom bomb with AI , surveillance system, stakeholder capitalism etc or keep it as it is and the paragraph remains true.... Will the fourth industrial revolution let humanity correct itself after destruction ( societal collapse )


    "It may be that science & industry, & their progress, are the most enduring thing in the world today. That any guess at a coming collapse of science & industry were for now, & for a long time to come, simply a dream, & that science & industry after some time with infinite misery will unite the world, I mean integrate it into a single empire, in which it's to be sure peace is the last thing that will then find a home. For science & industry do decide wars, or so it seems." (Culture and value )

    A great economic war will be waged in the long run against everyone but the elite in the future...... and actual wars too, for the great reset ?
  • NOS4A2
    8.3k


    Sounds like a terrible dystopia, but no doubt the vision of our technocrats. My guess is they’ll destroy everything in an effort to save everything. As usually the scheme is enforced downwards while the benefit accrues upwards.
  • Agent Smith
    9.5k
    My guess is they’ll destroy everything in an effort to save everything.NOS4A2

    :fire:

    Most interesting. — Ms. Marple

    Methinks it can be done! Should it be done? I'm not quite sure.

    In a country which I will not name here, I saw a mother spank her toddler son to keep him from falling into a ditch! I wondered back then as I still do now, wouldn't the beating have been as equally painful as the fall? :chin:

    Some say life's simple. I think not!
  • Agent Smith
    9.5k
    Fool me once, shame on you! Fool me twice, shame on me! — George W. Bush

    We can't afford to make the same mistake again and again, but it looks like that's exactly what we're really good at. It doesn't look deliberate, so we should pat ourselves on the back for that. We're not that stupid! :grin: That's not gonna be of much help though for we seem idiotic enough to just cause our own extinction in spectacular fashion.

    Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. — George Santayana

    True we've manged to record what we've learned with the aid of language; also true that our intention is to pass down our knowledge to the next generation so that they can learn from our mistakes. However, it turns out this is an illusion - our children goof up in the same ways as we did before them and as our forebears did before us. Progress is an illusion - we're still hurting/killing each other, only the way we do it has changed (swords/bows/spears/catapults/strychnine guns/missiles/bombs/novichok). We've not made an inch of progress as regards human nature!
  • javi2541997
    4.9k
    We can't afford to make the same mistake again and again, but it looks like that's exactly what we're really good at.Agent Smith

    Exactly, it looks like we do not know how to learn of bad experiences.

    George W. BushAgent Smith

    We should not expect nothing from a politician :down:
  • Agent Smith
    9.5k
    Exactly, it looks like we do not know how to learn of bad experiences.javi2541997

    Hope?
  • Cuthbert
    1.1k
    Why keep a pasta-maker and a crepe cooker crammed into our cupboards?Eskander

    So that we can pretend we are one day going to make the stuff they are showing on the TV cookery programmes, of course. That's why we've always had them.
  • Streetlight
    9.1k
    It's kind of a weird thought experiment because it says nothing about the only thing that really matters when thinking about this kind of thing: relations of power. It imagines that 'everything is a service'. Well, services are provided. By who? And what is the relation between these service providers and those who utilize them? It speaks of Robots and AI taking over work, algorithms making decisions, and free deliveries being made efficiently. Who designed and programmed all this, and who is making these deliveries? Who maintains them? Who controls access to them? These are the only things that matter.

    Ironically, the story reads to me like the end point of capitalism: the deprivation of ownership recalls the platformization of everything: our phones, movies, music, exercise machines, and so on. More and more we don't own any of this stuff, we 'subscribe' to them, or else have no effective say, rights over repair or modification (any Apple product, some cars). Privacy, well, we know who is destroying the barriers of privacy brick by brick.

    So yeah, the whole thing is weird. A kind of techno-utopian dream that sets aside power and social relations. It's a liberal-captialist fantasy.
  • Hillary
    1.9k
    A culture based on science and technological progress is doomed, by the very laws of nature it so eagerly wants to discover, to collapse. Which would be fine, were it not that it drags nature along in the free fall into the abyss.
  • Hillary
    1.9k
    So yeah, the whole thing is weird. A kind of techno-utopian dream that sets aside power and social relations. It's a liberal-captialist fantasy.Streetlight

    :up:
  • javi2541997
    4.9k


    laws of nature

    How do you define laws of nature according to your personal beliefs ?
  • universeness
    6.3k
    Fool me once, shame on you! Fool me twice, shame on me! — George W. Bush

    Actually, I think the accurate description would be:

    George W. Bush: Fool me once (awkward pause, Bush trying to think)... shame on you!... (bush feels mentally relieved) (more pause) ..... Fool me twice (his brain forgets who he is and why he is and what he is doing there) (very long awkward pause when his brain plays a somewhat familiar old tune he remembered from when he was young and he and his friends used to laugh at the poor people he used to see on the sidewalk from the window of his limousine, after a few awkward body shuffles)...........(his brain eventually invokes the words)...You cant get fooled again (as he uncomfortably extends a hand towards the listeners as a plea for leniency towards his dotage style performance)
  • Hillary
    1.9k


    The natural laws are the rules according to which matter moves and interacts. Matter doesn't behave in random ways.
  • javi2541997
    4.9k


    You do not know about nothing but you have the right to speak whatsoever topic. I hate democracy
  • Hillary
    1.9k
    You do not know about nothing but you have the right to speak whatsoever topic. I hate democracyjavi2541997

    :lol:

    Well, ignorance can be a bless, actually! Let it have it's words...
  • universeness
    6.3k
    Matter doesn't behave in random ways.Hillary

    Tegmark would support you in this but only because he posits that all possible outcome happen in the multiverse! So for random happenstance not to exist in physics you need a multiverse of copies of each of us to deal with every possible outcome. A part of this I don't get is would that not require the number of possible outcomes to be exactly the same every time? or does the number of multiverses change depending on the number of possible outcomes or is it more like:
    If I toss a coin I need at least 4 universes. Heads, tails, lands on it's edge or partially against an object so that there is no disernable outcome and one or more Universes within which the event never happened.
    I suppose, if there can be any number of universes where the event never happened then that would take care of 'a different number of possible outcomes.' A copy of me could therefore exist or not exist
    in such universes.

    If the multiverse is true then perhaps we don't need to worry about:

    Welcome to the year 2030. 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.Eskander

    As dystopia, utopia, mytopia, yourtopia, alltopia's may all have to exist by a law of Physics!
  • universeness
    6.3k
    You do not know about nothing but you have the right to speak whatsoever topic. I hate democracyjavi2541997

    Danger Danger! Who will then decide who has the right to speak?
  • Hillary
    1.9k
    Tegmark would support you in this but only because he posits that all possible outcome happen in the multiverse!universeness

    I really don't give a luck what Tegmark thinks. It's a nice easygoing guy, but completely delusional and lost. His many worlds and real objective existence of math are signs of an upcoming psychosis, if he's not already in one! (like the inventor of the MWI, Everett, who believed to be immortal and drank, ate, and smoked himself to death, his daughter following him by suicide, so she would meet him in a parallel universe where he would still be alive...). What I meant was that matter doesn't show different behavior every time we examine it. One time going down, another time going up, and another time circle around (if it falls in a vacuum).
  • Hillary
    1.9k
    If I toss a coin I need at least 4 universes.universeness

    Are you serious...?
  • Hillary
    1.9k
    If the multiverse is true then perhaps we don't need to worry about:universeness

    Don't believe anything they tell you. The belief in many world is exactly the same as belief in gods.
  • Hillary
    1.9k
    Danger Danger! Who will then decide who has the right to speak?universeness

    Obviously, @javi2541997! Scarry... :death:
  • Agent Smith
    9.5k
    everything is a service — Streetlight

    Everything you considered a product, has now become a service. — Eskander

    What a powerful idea, mon ami! What a powerful idea! I could employ a spouse, a sibling, parents, children for as long as they cook my goose so to speak. When things go sideways, I can fire 'em at my discretion!

    Magnifique, I tell you!

    Don't worry, I'll pay 'em well! Everyone will be happy, that's what matters in the end, oui monsieur/mademoiselle?

    Professional Mourning :rofl: Why would you want anyone to burst into tears upon your demise? I'd prefer people to dance on my grave! :rofl:



    https://youtu.be/JTKopeQhiDo

    :chin:
  • Agent Smith
    9.5k
    Don't believe anything they tell you.Hillary

    :snicker:
  • Hillary
    1.9k


    Most laymen, like you or @universeness, take what is told by "the expert" or the "the pro", for fact. "They know, they know, they studied it". Not realizing the so-called experts are inly human after all. And their scholarly and objective knowledge turns out to be no more than an opinion.
  • Hillary
    1.9k


    :cry: :groan: :grin: :cry: :rofl:
  • universeness
    6.3k
    If I toss a coin I need at least 4 universes.
    — universeness

    Are you serious...?
    Hillary

    In the case of a Multiverse and the posit that probability does not really exist, of course I am serious
  • universeness
    6.3k
    What I meant was that matter doesn't show different behavior every time we examine it. One time going down, another time going up, and another time circle around (if it falls in a vacuum).Hillary

    If all particles are in truth, merely field disturbances then you never observe the exact same particle twice, as each time you do an experiment you will be involving the field disturbances at that instant in time.
  • Agent Smith
    9.5k
    Most laymen, like you or universeness, take what is told by "the expert" or the "the pro", for fact. "They know, they know, they studied it". Not realizing the so-called experts are inly human after all. And their scholarly and objective knowledge turns out to be no more than an opinion.Hillary

    In my experience, an expert is (usually) immediately recognizable. Don't ask me how!
  • Agent Smith
    9.5k
    : :groan: :grin: :cry: :rofl:Hillary

    :smile:
  • universeness
    6.3k
    Don't believe anything they tell you. The belief in many world is exactly the same as belief in godsHillary

    Belief is a term I try to use carefully. I consider posits. Many worlds is a posit I personally consider to have a higher credence to the 0.1% credence I assign to the god posit.
  • Hillary
    1.9k
    In the case of a Multiverseuniverseness

    You are serious? Even with caoital M: Multiverse...What's the evidence of a multiverse? There are simpler explanations for QM. Occam's shaving gel tells us to shave of the superfluous fantasies.
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