🚀 go-pugleaf

On Fri, 12 Jan 96 10:36:13 PDT, Wissprod@pi.net wrote:
3000 is a _long_ way to look. These days a millennia is an awfully
long time. Even the next hundred years is likely to bring changes
compatible in importance to, say, the discovery of agriculture.

I'm fairly confident that nothing is going to prevent the development
of molecular scale engineering, probably in the form of
nanotechnology. By itself that will erase a number of important
dividing lines, most immediately that between manufactured systems and
living systems and more gradually between "virtual reality" and real
reality.

By 2100 I'd expect to see what I call the "dematerialised society". A
society where artifacts are manufactured when and where they are
needed, employed, and returned to a reservoir of raw materials when
their immediate purpose is done with. All the tools you used to keep
in your garage and about the house will be stored, instead, in your
computer.

This will mean an _enormous_ improvement in the efficiency with which
we use resources. We'll switch from using rare and toxic raw materials
to the common elements which life itself favours. Nanotechnology has
the potential to achieve conversion efficiencies better than plants:
Way above anything bulk technology can reach. The only resource which
is likely to remain effectively finite, at least to those who wish to
live on planets, is land. The question of how land distribution will
work out, both between individual humans and between humans and what
remains of the natural world, is probably my greatest concern.

This does have a major downside for the livestock species. Cattle,
pigs, sheep are likely to be reduced to a handful of zoo specimens.
That depresses me.

Another barrier which is due to fall is the gravity well. I'd guess by
the end of the next millennium only a minority of people will be
living on planets. Whether the whole galaxy opens up is a question of
physics. Is FTL travel possible? Suspended animation almost certainly
is but that's a slow way to explore. Self-replicating robots to
explore the galaxy is almost certainly a feasible notion but again,
unless Einstein can be defeated, it's a depressingly slow method.

Will AI's be running the show, keeping humans as pets? I don't think
so unless those that manufacture them are peculiarly stupid. Rational
intelligence is overvalued, especially when it comes to political
domination. We may see a merger between AI and natural brains. People
moving between cyberspace and the real world (at least there's no land
crisis in cyberspace).

I think paid work is definitely doomed as a social institution. Human
contributions to society will be on the creative rather than the
rational decision making level and you don't need to pay a creative
person to create any more than you need to pay him or her to excrete.

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I was born weird:  This terrible | Like Pavlov's dogs we are trained
compulsion to behave normally is | to salivate at the sound of the
the result of childhood trauma.  | liberty bell.
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Malcolm