Whether big or small. We all have that one thing from Scifi we wished were real. I’d love to see a cool underground city with like a SkyDome or a space hotel for instance.
UBI. Not only is it viable but it works in improving everyone’s lives, not just the people receiving it.
Sure, but have you considered that this would loosen the hold capitalism has on the wage slaves? Won’t someone think of the shareholders‽
At best it would prop up capitalism until we can replace it with something better.
It’s literally just giving people more money to shove into the capitalist system. You don’t change a system by feeding it.
I won’t say it’s a bad thing… but it’s not a solution. It’s a stop gap.
Exactly, what are those useless sociopaths supposed to be doing now? Actual labor? Come on…!
Why not just distribute the resources themselves, rather than tokens to exchange for resources? If we have post scarcity, we won’t need money
Because distributing resources equally is a bad idea since people are individuals. You’re giving 1 chicken to the guy that loves chicken and the same amount to the vegetarian. If instead you give h both the money for 1 chicken they can decide whether they want the chicken or something else.
Yes, but if you do it in the form of currency without changing the system in which the currency is used, it’s just feeding that system. Are capitalists suddenly going to be less greedy, and more likely to care about their compatriots instead of eager to exploit them because we give them more power and more money?
No. They won’t. They’ll just find better ways to exploit this sudden surge of basically free money.
Sure, other stuff needs to change as well, but using currency for an UBI is the easiest and fastest way to implement it.
I mean… yeah… that’s what UBI is.
I was criticizing UBI as a concept, not how it’s implemented.
I find it funny who ubi proponents say we need UBI because capitalism failed to have wages match cost of living and simultaneously say UBI will fix it with capitalism.
Housing is expensive because there isn’t enough. If capitalism could fix it, then housing would have at a minimum matched inflation and should have decreased in price because of technology improvements. So giving people more money absolutely cannot fix the housing crisis. UBI would be a handout for landlords.
When demand is the problem in a supply/demand economy, you can’t fix it with more demand (cash).
Capitalism means that they stop building before the price dips below wildly profitable, because capital is risk adverse. Capitalism won’t, not can’t, fix these problems.
A large institution may be risk averse. But a smaller firm trying to gain ground in the market would likely be more than happy to take on the risk and slimmer margins. After all, if capitalism wasn’t okay with slim margins, then restaurants and grocery stores wouldn’t exist.
Yes, and then that smaller firm fails because they take too many risks that have little chance of success. They end up being bought up by the larger firms, and all their assets put towards those higher value investments.
Given that capitalism is a system, not an individual with intention, “won’t” is the wrong word.
Along with UBI, there also needs to be UBH, and other basic needs.
Capitalism fails to meet housing demand because it is constrained by regulations about things like single family zoning, setbacks, parking minimums, or minimum floor areas; and because the perverse incentives of current taxation schemes regarding the inelastic supply of land don’t incentivize land owners to put their land to its highest and best use.
Housing is a bad example of capitalism failing because the problems developers face are extremely well known and understood. Remove the frivolous regulations, adopt a georgist tax policy, and build good public infrastructure, and you’ll get far more housing than you currently have far faster than you are currently building it. Could government do better? Maybe… but I have yet to see that evidence.
Capitalism fails to meet housing demand because it is constrained by regulations about things like single family zoning,
That’s not true because when given an opportunity to build housing, developers always choose to build higher margin premium housing. Capitalism incentivizes profit and there’s no profit in cheap housing.
There is plenty of profit to be made in cheap housing, just like there is plenty of profit to be made in cheap food. You can go to the grocery store right now and buy a tomato for not very much money, and the store that sold it, and trucker who transported it, and the farmer that grew it will all make money - despite food’s famously slim margins.
The situation with housing is more like this: the government has dictated that only 5 acres of land in the country can be used to grow tomatos. And each tomato plant can only grow a maximum of 10 tomatos. If you are a tomato farmer, what do you do? Well, since you can’t grow as many tomatos as you want, you start looking for ways to increase your margin on each tomato you sell - selling the most appealing, perfect, organic tomatos you can.
So it is with housing. When the government finally approves the development of some denser housing in a desireable part of town, the developer wants to build the highest margin housing that they can, since they won’t be able to build 50 more apartment buildings. So they build luxury apartments. However, if the government said “you can build as much and as densly as you like on any plot of land here”, then developers would probably start with more luxury housing, but would likely run out of luxury renters quite quickly. But then they would simply seek out more profit with the slimmer margins available in affordable housing development.
You don’t need currency for that. You just need a request system. And ideally some form of moral rejection mechanism that refuses to distribute sentient beings as resources. I didn’t say it had to be distributed equally just because there’s no money.
Chicken and vegetarian was just an example, also the chicken was implicitly dead in my example so it was no longer sentient, also also there might be non moral reasons, which paint color do we give people for their walls? How often? Etc etc etc.
In the request system you propose there needs to be some sort of pointing or valuation, requesting a car should not be equivalent to requesting an apple. Whatever form of valuation you use for that, there’s your currency. Not to mention that for the requesting system to be able to work the government would need to own all products so it can redistribute them according to requests, and what would it do if 100 people requested something that only 50 were made? It’s a nice idea but it becomes very complicated very fast, whereas using currency takes away all of that complication and gives you something tangible that could be implemented tomorrow instead of in 20 years being very generous.
Just because something is easier to implement doesn’t mean it will work better.
Honestly, that’s the biggest hurdle our current economic systems are facing. People go for the easy option that seems like it should work instead of the longer term plan that has more flexibility and chance for success.
The problem with your suggestion is that it still hinges on the capitalist system to provide for people. And thus is far easier to exploit.
Yeah sure, but you have got to be realistic, you’re talking about a 20/50 year plan even if you get everyone to agree with it. Yes, Capitalism is bad, yes there are problems with UBI, but the thing you’re proposing is impossible, whereas UBI is something that could be implemented tomorrow, and would set a good foundation to move things in the right direction. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good.
Oh, is that all
There’s a few reasons. Firstly greed is a motivator, and people work hard if they believe they’ll receive more for more effort. This gets people to go out and generate the resources that need to be distributed. Second, fungible tokens allow people to trade on the open market instead of having to find a particular person who is willing to trade say, a worm gear for a bale or two of cotton. The token is the middle man that allows someone trying to sell something sell to someone who doesn’t have what the seller plans to finally trade for. That’s why money started to exist in the first place.
Even in a communist system, there needs to be a way to transfer the results of labor into the things a person needs. Money is that way. Even if it means everyone gets the same amount of money to buy what they need. Everyone’s resource needs are different. You can’t just say everyone gets the exact same everything.
Finally, we’re not post-scarcity. Not really. Until resource manufacture is so automated that it doesn’t require people to do labor to acquire it, we either pay people to do the labor or we force them to via slavery. For that reason alone, we need money.
As I said to the other person, there can be a donation and request system to make sure everyone gets what they need, without tying money into it and having this weird limit of the amount of stuff people can get, and tying the idea of value to it all.
What if you make a request and no one wants to donate what you need? Would you not then want a way to incentivize someone to make the donation, or incentivize someone else to make more of what you need?
Socialized healthcare. A living minimum wage. UBI.
A permanent base on the moon. We should have had that 40 years ago, minimum.
Madness!!
THAT’S COMMUNISM
Socialism technically, but I get your sarcasm. I hope it is sarcasm.
Well they did say Sci-Fi and we all know how likely that stuff is. So I think we’re “safe” with Late Stage Capitalism.
The technology has never been what is holding us back.
we’re commies on the moon, we carry a…
The moon base (and/or moon orbit base) isn’t just cool, it would facilitate building ships in space that don’t have to escape the gravity well. That and asteroid mining (to get materials for ship building) would be such a huge step to having a real presence off-planet.
Mine materials on asteroids, send them to the moon refinery and manufacturing facility, send parts up to lunar orbital ship building facility, send ships to Europa, Ganymede, etc.
Post scarcity society
As long as shareholder value is the number one thing it just cant happen.
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We could be solarpunk. Like, right now. With everything using clean energy and plants everywhere.
That would be so nice.
Arcologies.
Dense housing with good soundproofing, atop commercial space, in a walkable neighborhood.
Wouldn’t need rent control if there was more houses.
This. This is the solar punk dream.
Add a rooftop patio or gardening setup and I might cream my jeans
Except the arcologies part, that’s not even sci-fi, it exists across east asia.
Telemetry free consumer products would be nice
I’m on board with ethical and opt-in telemetry. Knowing how your users interact with your app is very useful, but not many companies can show restraint when money is involved.
If my data was used to refine and improve the products and services I interact with I’d be fine with it but as it stands it’s just used to help make my life hell and exploit my existence for cash.
100% this. Telemetry and market research are fine. Hell Some opt in, totally 100% disableable targeted ads are fine as long as they’re not excessive and in the way. Flagrant selling of info however, does not spark joy.
Fair point. Ethical opt-in seems alright
Free food.
Fusion energy. Man, we are so close!
Yeah, you know what they say: only thirty more years.
With adequate funding. That’s the part that always gets omitted. We haven’t been funding the research to make it happen.
Hemp as a replacement for plastics and synthetic materials. Food packaging shouldn’t have a longer shelf life than it’s contents.
Sunchips was using PLA, which is a step in the right direction.
Terraforming.
The formerly-water deserts can be terraformed by just digging holes at specific angles so the shadow protects plants from drying up.
It’s sci-fi not like a “future robot” thing but more of a “hey we know the math we can do this reliably well” type of thing.
Also those expensive EEG headbands that track your brain during sleep and give you stats can be modified to change TV channel at specific brainwave values.
I’ve got good news for you! We’ve been terraforming the planet to be more like Arrakis for a couple decades already!
I don’t know why I haven’t thought about terraforming earth until I read it in a sci Fi book and it seemed like the simplest and best thing to do, over terraforming mars or Venus. We have the tech for bioengineering, cloud seeding (I think), chemicals to help stimulate growth of natural plants (at least for the ocean).
Socialism
The viewscreen from Star Trek. It’s actually real but nobody really wants to use it.
Phones, tablets, and laptops have had video chat for years. Apple brought it to actual TV a couple years ago. The idea is you use the Apple TV set-top box, and you get a squared-S-shaped clip that mounts an iPhone to the top of a TV so the rear camera array can point out into the room. You pair the two, and your whole TV turns into a viewscreen, just like on the starship Enterprise.
I’ve explained this to a few people and the reaction is usually “okay why TF would I wanna do that?” So imagine a Thanksgiving or Christmas, or other “big family holiday” thing where you have that one person who won’t participate because it’s their partner’s family’s turn to see the kids or whatever… so, the Apple TV is like $100. And somebody is gonna have an iPhone. And these days, everyone has a TV, at least in the west, and they’re 55" or bigger. So you get the TV in the corner of the room and you set it up so you’re broadcasting the whole living room and maybe part of the kitchen or dining room, and you connect it to another family/part of the family who is doing the same. And your TV is now a window into that other living room, and people can go up to the screen and interact, or wave from across the room. Now if it’s like Thanksgiving and it’s based around eating, you could even run the end of the table up to the TV (so the TV is basically sat at one end of the table with no one in between) on both sides so when you look down the table, you’re looking into that other room.
I feel like the end result here would be saying hi like a normal phone call, and then kind of awkwardly ignoring and avoiding the tv for the rest of the night. All the problems with video conferencing, but multiplied.
I’ve thought the same thing, Trying to hold a video call between families using a phone or even a laptop is such an awkward experience, especially if you want to just hang out virtually for an extended time like you said.
But it wouldn’t even have to involve a separate box or docked phone. Everyone’s got a smart TV that can run apps, so all it should take is a USB webcam with a decent far-field mic.
But yeah, in general I’m surprised this isn’t more of a common use case.
In theory that should work if the app can access a USB port on the TV and use the webcam. I haven’t heard of it being done though. The Apple solution works and it’s intended to be used like that.
But really, a lot of smart TVs run Android and Android has a surprising amount of supported devices (I suppose due to it basically being Linux). I bet you could hook a DVD burner up to an Android phone, and I’m sure a third party file manager could read files off a disc. Burning though? Should be possible but you’d need an app to talk to the DVD writer. And that, I’ve never heard of. You’d think a webcam would be easier but I think the software stack in an Android phone would only use its internal cameras without an app. The camera app for example is only going to look at the installed ones. It doesn’t know to look at the USB interface for more. But a third party camera app might.
I have a USB C hub and I do have an old Android phone (Galaxy S10, 2019). I do not have a webcam or DVD writer though.
That said, now that I think about it, if you hook a Samsung phone — not sure about others — up to a TV with USB C to HDMI, it kinda becomes a little desktop computer with the TV as monitor. I wonder, if you initiated a video chat, if you could do it with just a Samsung phone. Or really any phone that will display mirror to a TV.
I have a TV from 2014 that has Skype support with a USB webcam. Just saying.
The problem it that sound is limited in physical space, so you can move around a room, talking to one person and then another.
Your proposal is like getting two groups of people to stand on opposite sides of a room and then communicate by shouting at each other.
Think of it like two groups of people in separate rooms with a large open window between them. Not everyone is trying to talk one on one to the other group all the time. And sometimes just feeling like you’re in the same physical space can be nice.
It’s not perfect, but in many circumstances it’s worlds better than having tiny portable windows that mostly facilitate one on one conversation.
A one on one conversation sounds far preferrable to what you are describing. There would be far too much crosstalk.
Here is something we don’t have that I think we could: Automated vegetable farming.
I’ve seen these watering gantries that are fixed at the center of a circular field and then rotate radially around that point to water the field. Could you use that as a rail with an effector arm on it that can plant, weed, tend, fertilize and harvest the field, such that in goes seeds and out comes vegetables? Without the liability of free roaming robotic tractors and combine harvesters. Surely the issue here would be software.
Those are called pivots, and what you are saying seems plausible: there are vision algorithms to recognize and selectively spray weeds (see Bilberry ), recent prototypes with light-pressure grabbers to gather fruits and soft vegetables.
Even for harvesters, there are projects to automate harvesting and swapping the grain trucks (see Outrun ). GPS-guided (or assisted) tractors are already a thing.
Agriculture has some interesting innovations, but it often gets bogged down in corporate acquisitions and monetization.
I’ve seen a project for adapting Reprap 3D printer technology to a raised bed garden, with a multi-function tool head that can individually plant seeds, it weeds by poking weeds deep into the soil, it waters individual plants according to that plant’s need…so I thought why not scale that up to multiple acres in size?
I’m into hydroponics as a hobby grower and there are certain techniques for veggie growing that are set and forget. You plant and harvest only, no weeding, no watering. As far as I understand, traditional techniques are still cheaper though
I’m into vegetable gardening as a hobby, my land is essentially beach sand, the only thing that grows in the local dirt is tetanus, so I grow in raised beds and import or make all of my soil. What kind of hardware and rigging does a hydroponic garden take?
Augmented reality overlaying historical photos and 3d models so you can literally see history as your walking.
Imagine being able to visit The White City that was built for the World’s Fair in Chicago. Or seeing New York before sky scrapers dominated the landscape.
While you’re admiring a building which was there in 1925, you get run over by a car which is there in 2025.
Or “blink twice to unlock a 2 hour view of this building for
59,9958,99! Limit time offer only.”
I think your idea is beautiful.
I think your idea is beautiful.
