[Ready Player One] - next Prophet generation speculation?

[Kinser79]

(07-27-2017, 11:43 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(07-26-2017, 07:14 PM)Kinser79 Wrote:

(07-26-2017, 04:54 PM)David Horn Wrote: My money is on a transformation of the economy, with the neo-Prophets working to tear down the capitalist system, but not quite up to setting its replacement in place.  That will be the work of the next Civics  ... and nothing any of us will get the opportunity to witness.

People have been plotting and planning for the overthrow of the capitalist system since at least 1848.  It hasn't happened yet, and is unlikely to unless a post scarcity economy develops, which is possible, it just requires an essentially free nearly limitless energy source(s) to pull off.

Needless to say I don't foresee that happening.

From my POV, I see both happening within the next several decades.  Autonomous machines are already a reality, and ones that create others will make production work a dead issue.  Energy is already moving toward the slightly-less-than-infinite paradigm, and fusion will complete the process, probably by the 2070s or so.  But long before we get to that point, there will already be a huge excess in idle human capital, as they call wage slaves in the capitalist world.  Unlike machines that never bitch, some serious blowback can be expected from the sidelined many.  It's already happening. 

I would love see those "interesting times", but I'm already 70.  Millies and Homies will still be around, as will a bunch of old fossilized Xers.  Feel free to live long enough to be one of them.  If I could, I certainly would.

1.  Let us assume that AI and self-replicating machines become a reality.  What is to stop these machines from eliminating humanity?  Absolutely nothing.  After all humans displace animals all the time.  Do we do so out of malice?  No.  We do so because they are in the way.  What is to stop these machines from displacing our entire civilization because we're in the way. 

2.  I'm not convinced that humans are capable of creating a machine smarter than themselves so I'm not concerned about the singularity happening.  But automation has been happening since the industrial revolution and there has always been work.  There will always be work.  In the absence of most people producing something be it tangible or intangible all economic systems here-to-devised break down rapidly.

3.  Muh Nuclear Fusion.  When I was in high school they were saying the 2050s.  Twenty years on, and the date has been moved 20 years.  I don't think this is a coincidence.

I don't think we can solve our energy problems unless you can address liquid fuels issues for transport.  Electric motors won't work for shipping or air transport and their application in personal conveyances is limited at best.  Even so, electricity generation isn't the issue, we have nearly limitless resources for that, we jut need to rapidly deploy thorium fission reactors.


In the presence of factors 1, 2, and 3 we see that the rosy picture painted never develops.  Rather, what I foresee is if we do not begin to rapidly develop and deploy alternative energy generation based on thorium fission, re-urbanization of the population, and an acceptance of some inefficiencies to maintain an economy is a "great leap backwards".  I imagine that the 2070s will have more in common with the 1670s than the 1970s.

I could be wrong about that, in fact I hope I am.  As for living to see it.  I probably will, if there is a god he seems like he would be the kind of bastard to force me to live an unnaturally long life.  My grandmother lived to be in her late 80s as did most of my great aunts and uncles on the maternal side of my family.  Paternal side is more iffy.  My paternal grandfather didn't have a natural death, and my paternal grandmother had juvenile diabetes so died fairly young.