Reprinted from here
Despair has many causes. Personal disability and mortality cause despair. People feel despair regarding disability or death of loved ones. The Singularity will create perfect eternal health therefore health-related despair will be vanish, but in the meantime poverty prohibits access to sophisticated healthcare. Money is the biggest source of despair for many reasons. Monetary despair desperately needs to be cured therefore we shall focus on remedying monetary despair. Post-Scarcity takes us beyond poverty and into utopia. Mass global awareness of Post-Scarcity will end all financial misery.
A Post-Scarcity civilisation occurs when science and technology create unlimited abundance for everyone. Money will become obsolete. Money will be abolished because management of scarcity via monetary limitations will be unnecessary. People in a Singularity-world will create food, clothes, electronic products, transport, or houses with greater ease than printing a document. RepRap and Fab Labs are primitive precursors for futuristic personal nanofactories. Creation of everything in the year 2045 will be easier than sending text messages. Artificial Intelligence will facilitate ultra-efficient usage of resources. There will be no scarcity of resources. Our updated bodies will be effortlessly and painlessly repaired by nanomachines living inside us. Solar power and other green energies will be ultra-efficient and decentralized. Everything will be free. Supreme technology will make us omnipotent without financial limits. Utopia is coming.
People do cruel things for money but there is hope for the future. Awareness changes everything. People at the beginning of the 21st century were largely unaware of how science and technology would create Post-Scarcity. Monetary constraints will end by year 2045: all financial-suffering will end. To prepare for Post-Scarcity we can stop monetary-suffering before the Singularity happens. We can change the world now. Regarding toxic financial inequality the following news reports were collated from a UK perspective but the toxicity of scarcity is a global issue applicable to all nations. Everything in the future is free.
Now here’s the interesting thing: there’s NEVER going to be 100% abundance. There will ALWAYS be some things in short supply even if it’s ideas.
Likely what we will see is a world of ever changing fashions which only the “rich” can afford.
You doubt me?
Imagine everyone on the planet had plenty to eat tomorrow.
Those who are not motivated to work when their stomach is full wouldn’t work.
Those who DID work would create the new items. Now the question is this:
would the item creators release their efforts into the public domain instantly or would they try to get something of worth in exchange first?
I suspect the latter.
So we would have a world of two classes: the “rich poor” who have plenty to eat and those who are out there on the forefront of fashion or on the cutting edge of technological design, items which are (for however short a period due to copying) unavailable to the masses.
Even now we have such a situation in your favorite virtual world second life:
The vast majority of the SL proletariet have access to freebies. The rest are able to buy items made by creators. Creators themselves may have private copies of items which they do not sell but *may* exchange for other unique items.
There are also those who can code viewers. Although there are third party viewers out there, there are also a handful of extremely high functionality viewers in existence which are NOT handed out to anyone.
A similar situation will take place post-singularity. There will STILL be rich and poor and there will STILL be scarcity. Though likely nobody will have to go hungry.
PS Another problem that will have to be solved:
What do we do about the people who are not motivated to work once their stomach is filled but ARE motivated to have ten children?
Pretty soon the planet will be filled with them and we will have scarcity once more.
I’m happy to see this vision gaining wider currency. On the other hand, I think it’s critical to realize the political dimensions of the problem. With sufficient social organization, we could live the dream right now. As a species, we’ve had the technical ability to provide an abundance of necessities to everyone for at least a hundred years. While nanofactories and artificial intelligence would surely make the project vastly easier, there’s little reason to think it’ll happen on its own. So far, states and corporations have done their best to turn digital plenty into scarcity. Powerful interests benefit from the current order. They won’t give it up without a struggle.
cross-posted from Terasem Forum at:
http://www.terasemcentral.org/snitz/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=114
On Martine Rothblatt’s Mindclones blog, you’ll find an absolutely great video, with a brief comment and link to the below posting:
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This is a *great* video! It is just the barest hint of what is to come, in the way of indications that “computer programs” can function in a state that will exhibit undeniable self-consciousness. I’m sure Turing test type analyses will soon exist to predict, with startling accuracy, if the person being interviewed is a “digital” one or not, even after it is equally evident and provable that the digital persons concerned are fully self-conscious and exhibit IQ’s well over 100.
These same Turning analysis programs should also be able to detect valid and consistent expressions of emotions, and show that the “computer programs” evaluated have a higher than average sensitivity to and responsiveness to the emotions of humans (empathy), as compared with those capacities in fully biological humans; in other words, that they (the digital people) are capable of experiencing distress, fear and so forth in addition to joy and affection.
Do we deny the right of “personhood” to a young child with a vocabulary even less than that of a chimpanzee, when we know that this fledgling “person” has the capacity to grow and become a deserving member of the community? No! Do we deny even “animal rights” to a lower species than a chimp, once we have evidence that this animal has the equivalent of what we call “feelings”? Not if we have any sense of decency, by measure of how the present human community evaluates such things!
Then, by what reasoning of any kind can we deny Bina the consideration of her “right to life”, when we permit such “rights” to be assigned to unborn infants who have no language capacity at all, and no evidence of responsiveness to pain or feelings even matching that of a household pet who suffers depression upon loss of a human with whom that pet has become strongly bonded? It seems clear to me that we cannot deny such rights, by any stretch of the imagination. If we were to put the case in an inverted form of wording, it seems equally clear to me that any who would deny such rights would be found so lacking in “imagination” as to throw into question their *own* entitlement to such rights.
Up to the time of watching this video, I now can recognize, I did not fully appreciate many of the points Dr. Martine Rothblatt has made in her earlier postings on this blog, and would not have been able to write what I have written in the above five paragraphs. Even after watching the fantastic movies she has sponsored and helped to create, “2B” and “The Singularity is Near”, these ideas of hers did not ‘come home’ to me with the same force that resulted from watching this video.
Perhaps I’m too hopeful that my fellow biological humans will have as much sensitivity as I believe they will have, to these issues, after watching just this one video, but at the same time I have sufficient confidence in the intellects of most human beings and their capacities for empathy that I now think even the next few years will see the issues in this blog gain wide recognition as being important, especially in the light of how we have (in the recent past, even) denied human rights to *other* humans, on the basis of race, gender, national origin, religious convictions or lack of them, habits of speech, handicapped conditions, (the list is endless).
The video posted above may not only heighten the sensitivity of humans in general to the issues concerning “digital people”, but it may even help to bring better appreciation of the plights of those in parts of the world where the living standards of many are between one and two dollars per day and where deprivations of education and every other kind of advantage we in the developed nations call “human rights” as to make us wonder how we can be concerned about the suffering of food animals about to be slaughtered, at the same time as we ignore the suffering of our fellow human beings.
Videos of other “digital people” like Bina, as they are posted on U-tube and similar media outlets, may sooner than we think permeate the consciousness of humankind in general and help uplift the attitudes of humans in general not only toward sentient entities on other substrates such as computers, but to their own human “kinfolk” on a global basis. Perhaps the greater unity that this might bring about among humans in general will make us*all* safer from nuclear war, biological war, and war utilizing yet to be developed (non-biological) replicator nanotechnology, as well as opening our minds more fully to all of the many issues raised in prospect of a “Singularity” so well described by Ray Kurzweil in his book, “The Singularity is Near”.
Solutions to these problems will not lie in “leveling the financial playing field” among humans, which many would reject as pure social(ism) or even fascist communism. Instead, the solutions lie in the pursuit of high technology with firm Geoethical Nanotechnology, as advocated by Terasem, to the end that the problems that seem so insoluble by today’s technology will, sooner than we think, be solved by the efforts of people such as Bina when they become capable of speeds of thought and actions that exceed those of we presently biological humans by thousands of times. The headwaters of this are well articulated in the many articles of the Journals of Terasem.
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boundlesslife (AKA Fred Chamberlain)
Uploading – The Ultimate Out-of-Body Experience
Podcasts: Truths of Terasem
Transhumanist Fiction Online
LifeQuest Stories Online
BioQuagmire; A “Pre-Terasem” Level Tale of the Future.
Note: At the URL above (repeated below) links not carried forward above are active:
http://www.terasemcentral.org/snitz/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=114
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