“What if we could create a world where we don’t have to take that million dollars from somewhere else?”. Because I’m pretty sure that if someone cast Greater Wish and made everyone in a large rich country (e.g. USA) work together on this, it would happen.
I have the opposite perception. For the near and medium term, resources are finite and that means we have to make allocation trade-offs. When we’re talking about safety and health resources, those decisions are going to have consequences for who lives and who doesn’t.
I can imagine a society without resource shortages. But I can’t imagine building it even with universal agreement and cooperation. You don’t get a technological singularity just by wanting it.
Ah, I may have been overly abstract or generalized.
I agree with your assessment of the situation. What I would like to see is novel approaches at making it so that resource shortages that can be eliminated are eliminated. Cliché example: We are mere years away, barring opposition from invested parties and given continued funding and enthusiasm, from a fully automated transport and logistics infrastructure. AKA self-driven cars & trucks. (please leave argumentation of those two premises for another discussion—a Greater Wish or the circumstances I discussed in the grandparent would make those premises true for the purposes of this discussion)
Current wisdom is that these things should be left alone and “let the free market sort these things out”—which means, essentially, that we are to let shortages keep happening, because the margins of the free market will keep producing availability issues and shortages even on things where we can match supply to demand with positive net value after taking into account resources diverted from elsewhere (raw materials and human work time are the only relevant ones here once you trim the fat and all humans are fed, I believe).
So to come back to the virtual example of the million dollars, what I’d like to see is less people asking “How do we decide who to heal, cure and provide treatment for?” and more people asking “How do we dramatically increase the abstract availability and supply of medical resources and is there some way to do this without draining human resources from other industries?”
To craft a silly image, imagine an automated cold & flu treatment machine that looks like an ATM, is placed strategically to cover as many people as possible, does some basic automated symptom assessments to make sure it’s cold & flu, and provides a printout and some dosage of medication.
Once the setup is done, all that’s left is raw materials and human work to maintain the system, the human work is of a non-expert kind so not currently in any kind of shortage, and not planned to be given advances in automation, and the raw materials would be in the same ballpark as that already being consumed. An overall net gain, and the supply becomes directly tied to demand and only capped by raw materials, which in this example I’m led to believe are far more ample than what is needed to meet demand. An ideal scenario, disregarding the ridiculous feasibility issues with this scheme.
All this to say: There’s too much Utopia/Reality dualistic thinking, where there are either No Resource Shortages or Limited Resources Which Require Free Markets, and nothing in between. Sure, eventually when you trim enough fat everything comes down to a few key raw resources, which could be abstracted into “money” if you tried really really hard, but those are, in most practical cases I’ve thought of, not the bottleneck.
I have the opposite perception. For the near and medium term, resources are finite and that means we have to make allocation trade-offs. When we’re talking about safety and health resources, those decisions are going to have consequences for who lives and who doesn’t.
I can imagine a society without resource shortages. But I can’t imagine building it even with universal agreement and cooperation. You don’t get a technological singularity just by wanting it.
Ah, I may have been overly abstract or generalized.
I agree with your assessment of the situation. What I would like to see is novel approaches at making it so that resource shortages that can be eliminated are eliminated. Cliché example: We are mere years away, barring opposition from invested parties and given continued funding and enthusiasm, from a fully automated transport and logistics infrastructure. AKA self-driven cars & trucks. (please leave argumentation of those two premises for another discussion—a Greater Wish or the circumstances I discussed in the grandparent would make those premises true for the purposes of this discussion)
Current wisdom is that these things should be left alone and “let the free market sort these things out”—which means, essentially, that we are to let shortages keep happening, because the margins of the free market will keep producing availability issues and shortages even on things where we can match supply to demand with positive net value after taking into account resources diverted from elsewhere (raw materials and human work time are the only relevant ones here once you trim the fat and all humans are fed, I believe).
So to come back to the virtual example of the million dollars, what I’d like to see is less people asking “How do we decide who to heal, cure and provide treatment for?” and more people asking “How do we dramatically increase the abstract availability and supply of medical resources and is there some way to do this without draining human resources from other industries?”
To craft a silly image, imagine an automated cold & flu treatment machine that looks like an ATM, is placed strategically to cover as many people as possible, does some basic automated symptom assessments to make sure it’s cold & flu, and provides a printout and some dosage of medication.
Once the setup is done, all that’s left is raw materials and human work to maintain the system, the human work is of a non-expert kind so not currently in any kind of shortage, and not planned to be given advances in automation, and the raw materials would be in the same ballpark as that already being consumed. An overall net gain, and the supply becomes directly tied to demand and only capped by raw materials, which in this example I’m led to believe are far more ample than what is needed to meet demand. An ideal scenario, disregarding the ridiculous feasibility issues with this scheme.
All this to say: There’s too much Utopia/Reality dualistic thinking, where there are either No Resource Shortages or Limited Resources Which Require Free Markets, and nothing in between. Sure, eventually when you trim enough fat everything comes down to a few key raw resources, which could be abstracted into “money” if you tried really really hard, but those are, in most practical cases I’ve thought of, not the bottleneck.